Category Archives for Airlines.
If you paid British Airways fuel surcharges between November 9, 2006 and April 17, 2013 you should get points deposited into your account — without doing anything at all — or if you prefer (and fill out a simple form) 16.9% of your cash back.
United pulled out of New York JFK entirely in fall 2015. A year ago the airline’s President Scott Kirby said that was a mistake. Now he wants to return to New York JFK and doesn’t know how to do it.
When the airline left JFK it was because bean counters looked only at revenue and expense for the those particular JFK flights and missed the bigger revenue picture — lucrative corporate contracts which made other routes profitable, and which they lost without the JFK service.
The plaintiff would like you to think of this case as picking a pack of gum up from the store shelf, getting to the register, and being asked for more money than the posted sign.
I think of this more as showing the clerk at the register the list of what you want to buy, including an auto-generated price estimate, and the clerk goes in the back and checks and says they’re all out of the limited inventory of discounted product but they’re still willing to sell it to you at regular price.
Over the past three years Etihad has devalued its program several times. That’s to be expected because it was so much better than others in the region. Qatar Airways caught me by surprise over the last month first announcing booking fees for awards – just a straight-up tax on redemptions – and then increasing the price of most awards about 60% overnight without notice. The earn and burn program went from middling to terrible overnight.
And now Etihad is making changes again. They’re only describing the changes in broad strokes, even though they’re going to be implemented in a month.
Wheatley comes from Buffalo Trace Distillery, owned by Sazerac, which is controlled by billionaire liquor magnate William Goldring, “the man who launched a million hangovers” and known as “the cheap-liquor billionaire.”
If you have Singapore Airlines miles first class awards turn out to be easy to book — on their old 777 product from Los Angeles, and flying Airbus A380s all over the world. Provided of course that the A380 doesn’t touch the U.S. (New York JFK – Frankfurt) and isn’t their newest product.
And Singapore Airlines business class awards are frequently very available too and that’s true even on U.S. routes, especially from Houston and Los Angeles.
United Airlines President Scott Kirby is probably the most interesting airline executive to listen to in the country because he lays out his thinking clearly in public. I think most everything he does is bad for his customers. But he has a model for how the world works and he defends it. He spoke today at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference.
Under American’s rules they make you give up your AAdvantage elite benefits if you fly American using miles from a partner frequent flyer program. A 100,000 mile AAdvantage Executive Platinum using British Airways points to fly on American isn’t supposed to get any of the benefits of their status — from priority boarding, to checked bags, to seat assignments.
There are two important and often-overlooked items in American’s frequent flyer rules,
Singapore Airlines used to fly the world’s longest flight, Newark – Singapore, along with what at the time was the second longest flight Los Angeles – Singapore. They held the title from June 2004 through November 2013, operating these services with flying gas cans Airbus A340-500s. It’s hard to make ultra long haul flying work. A flight scheduled at over 18 hours is going to require a dedicated aircraft in each direction, and fares are going to have to cover that plane’s full costs. With fuel prices up that’s even more difficult since they burned over 58,000 gallons of fuel in each direction. The flight used 14 cabin crew and six pilots to make the journey. Singapore initially offered 64 business class and 117 extra legroom coach seats but moved to an all business class…
A couple of years ago I wrote that the Department of Homeland Security wants hotel desk clerks to snitch on guests as possible sex traffickers based on a set of behavior that could match that of plenty of guests.
Airline flight attendants are being asked to do the same thing.
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 »
