Category Archives for Airlines.
Last week American’s Vice President Planning Vasu Raja told an employee forum, “We chose our way out of Tel Aviv. Arguably we did it too prematurely. We’re not going to be out of Tel Aviv forever.”
American Airlines is planning to make three changes that involve listening to customers, revisiting past decisions, and fixing pain points. That’s great news.
The plan is to make changes to their new domestic first class seat to offer greater comfort and more underseat storage. They’re going to improve their international wifi, moving towards the quality improvements they’ve made domestically. And they’re going to install working dividers between center seats in business class to provide passenger privacy.
Airlines are going to new great lengths to avoid involuntarily denying boarding to passengers — selling more tickets than there are seats and then not having enough volunteers to take a later flight for compensation when more passengers than expected show up. Some airlines are overbooking less. Others are paying out more compensation to get more passengers to volunteer to give up their seats.
We’ve seen stories about Delta giving a passenger $4000 in travel vouchers for agreeing to take a later flight and United giving out $10,000. American’s Day of Departure Desk will also authorize substantially more compensation than before.
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. That’s being scaled back.
Over the summer I reported a rumor that Etihad was in talks to join Star Alliance. That rumor heated up substantially in February.
Etihad is now joining Air Canada’s Aeroplan as an earning member
Earlier today British Airways declared that they are planning to devalue their partner award chart effective May 30 but declared that they wouldn’t tell us what the new prices would be.
Apparently, however, prices are actually loaded into BA systems.
British Airways has a history of making changes to its award pricing without notice, and also of giving a few months’ notice. When they moved from an award region chart to distance-based pricing in 2011 they told us they were changing pricing but not what prices would be. When that happens you know they won’t be ‘changes you’re going to like’.
Now we’re once again learning of impending changes but not what the details of those changes will be.
After the Ethiopian Airlines disaster and before the FAA grounded the Boeing 737 MAX American Airlines pilots came out declaring the aircraft safe.
Now they suggest it’s not safe to bring back as-proposed. Those are two positions which are difficult, but not impossible, to reconcile.
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.
Starbucks was asked about devaluing their program on their earnings call and they claimed customers don’t mind because fewer customers picked up the phone to call and complain than they had anticipated and fewer customers are complaining about this devaluation than their 2016 devaluation.
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 »
