Category Archives for Airlines.
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
American Airlines is running all of its Europe and deep South America flights from New York JFK with Boeing 777s. That’s too much capacity even for a joint venture partner’s hub like Madrid (Iberia). They really ought to be basing some smaller aircraft, like Boeing 787s, out of New York and serving more destinations profitably.
During peak summer months and during fall and winter holidays there’s often fare compression, business class tickets go down in price (especially for restricted fares that leisure flyers can buy) while coach gets more expensive. We’re certainly seeing that on American’s New York JFK – Madrid route, where they’re discounting business class. For about the same money you can also fly their partner Iberia’s business class non-stop as well.
A little over a month ago we learned that Korean Air would be dropping first class from many of its routes.
While Korean Air’s first class lags in quality behind many other Asian carriers, I’ve especially liked that I could fly to Asia in first class and connect onward in first class as well because much of their intra-Asia route network offered a first class cabin.
The viral video of an American Airlines employee yelling at one of their mechanics turns out to be from back in November.
This not safe for work video is a snippet of a supervisor yelling at a mechanic over writing up items on an aircraft and then not fixing them, because the mechanic’s shift was apparently over. I didn’t cover the video when it was making the rounds at the beginning of the week because there just wasn’t enough context around it. Now we know the story.
On Monday I wrote about an incident of American Airlines serving 16 month old food on a Dallas Fort-Worth – London flight. That’s, apparently, within the industry norm. United says they’ll serve food up to 6 months after it’s been frozen. Delta says they don’t usually have food sitting this long but it can be up to 12 months.
A simple set of recommendations, all within reach and none unprecedented, could make American Airlines not just the largest in the U.S. but also the best: improve the operation, improve the domestic premium product, offer reasonable award availability to sustain the driver of the airline’s profitability and compete in the most important markets.
Last year American Airlines CEO Doug Parker explained in detail why his airline would never provide the flexibility that Southwest does. He called Southwest “the cattle car” and said Southwest doesn’t “have a lot of business customers on their airplanes.”
That certainly hasn’t been my experience.
At this morning’s American Airlines shareholders meeting CEO Doug Parker claimed “there’s no doubt our customers have noticed the improvement that’s been made to the inflight product.”
American Airlines is reportedly spending $1 billion on their new corporate campus and that’s apparently up from a previously-reported $350 million. It’s possible that’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. American has been tight-lipped about the project’s costs. However it fairly clearly represents a project that’s grown substantially more expensive.
Just keep that number in mind for a moment as we walk through the economics of American’s decision not to offer seat back entertainment for domestic passengers, instead streaming content to passenger phones.
In the movie Up in the Air Sam Elliott plays the chief pilot at American Airlines. He appears in their advertising, and meets customers on board when they hit ten million frequent flyer miles. My own lifetime counter at AAdvantage is only rounding towards 4 million, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t really happen in real life. One way to see the chief pilot, though, is to retire after a career flying for American.
On May 26, Captain Fred Swaffer flew his last flight for American after 33 years with the airline.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
