Category Archives for Airlines.
Air Asia flight 5583 from Kolkata to Bagdogra — a 277 mile flight — was 4.5 hours for mechanical reasons. After 90 minutes passengers were asked to get off the aircraft. It was pouring down rain and people didn’t want to leave.
Air conditioning on board aircraft will mist in highly humid conditions. Passengers contend that the captain turned up the air conditioning in order to smoke them out since they didn’t want to leave.
Malaysia’s recently ousted Prime Minister Najib Razak cannot leave the country while he faces corruption charges. He took his family on holiday to Langkawi and apparently took quite a lot of baggage on the trip.
He’s a Platinum member of the Malaysia Airlines Enrich status. One imagines whether he meets the criteria or not that he’d have this status. And his Platinum appears to come with a very special perk. His reservation shows that he checked 535kg of luggage and had the 17,000 Malaysia Ringgit excess baggage fee waived.
American Airlines announced last month that they’re ending their Chicago – Beijing flight in October.
American’s Vice President – Planning Vasu Raja told employees in Chicago last week at a question and answer session that Chicago flights to Asia are mostly connecting traffic, that they rely on connections from cities with low fares and often their own non-stop flights to the same destinations, and that higher fuel costs make it even harder to sustain flights than before.
American Airlines is predicting that British Airways will fly to more mid-sized US cities than they do today, and that American is going to increase the size of the planes they fly to London Heathrow.
However despite complaining that there aren’t enough premium seats flying Chicago – London, American currently plans to reduce the number of premium seats flying Chicago – London (and to reduce the number of premium seats on two major aircraft types they fly).
Earlier today I wrote about flight attendants expressing concern over transporting kids who were being separated from their families as they’re split up under immigration laws. Both American Airlines and United have expressed solidarity with their crew, which isn’t surprising.
The Department of Homeland Security has come out swinging against both airlines.
AAdvantage President Bridget Blaise-Shamai appeared on the latest American Airlines employee podcast Tell Me Why which is also uploaded on several public podcast hosting sites.
She commented on Platinum Pro and ConciergeKey elite status changes, efforts to improve award availability, the future of upgrades into and awards for premium economy, and inflight credit card pitches.
When Oscar Munoz took over from disgraced United Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek the airline rolled out modest customer experience improvements as part of an overall attempt to change the narrative of the airline: Illy coffee and stroopwafels as complimentary snacks in coach.
Supposedly American is unable to program waivers based on flight number or regional carrier. They could have issued a waiver for Charlotte but that would have meant that some customers unaffected by American’s major outage could have benefited with fee waivers.
They chose to inconvenience well over 100,000 customers on cancelled flights, not counting myriad more on massively delayed flights, instead of allowing fee-free changes for passengers flying through the most affected airport — chancing that someone somewhere not flying PSA might benefit from the waiver a cost American money. Shameful.
Even though the carrier says they’re trying to simplify their fleet, operate fewer aircraft types and subfleets, they’re doubling down on flying similar competitor products.
Their regional partners, including wholly owned carriers like Envoy Air and PSA, fly CR7s, Embraer 140s and 145s, and even CRJ-200s. Regional jets with 50 seats and below don’t offer a first class cabin. While most of American’s regional fleet offers internet, most lacks seat power.
Back in March American Airlines Chairman Doug Parker described the Boeing 767 as a bad customer experience and suggested they needed to retire the aircraft sooner. Indeed shortly after that the airline announced a big order of Boeing 787s.
According to American’s Vice President for Planning, “As the 767 is retired, as it’s going through the process of retiring it, we will bring it increasingly into the East Coast to go die and fly fewer trips into other hubs.”
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 »
