Category Archives for Airlines.
Star Alliance introduced the connecting partner model last year which is like ‘alliance lite’.
Now oneworld has announced the same thing and even called it a ‘connect partner’ (as opposed to a connecting partner). The first oneworld connect partner will be Fiji Airways.
Airlines have made the travel booking experience more complicated. There are checked baggage fees, seat assignment fees, and fares that don’t allow advance seat assignments or even full-sized carry on bags at all.
Now they want to dictate the way that all online travel agency sites display their fees. And they don’t even promise to give these sites the information that would allow them to do so. “I’m from the airlines and I’m here to help.”
Yesterday I wrote about the class action settlement over fuel surcharges imposed by British Airways on U.S. customers between November 9, 2006 and April 17, 2013.
Commenter Steve reported the page to select your cash or points is now live: “They are offering me 35,000 Avios or $955. Not bad.”
For several years Air France has limited first class award redemptions to members using their own Flying Blue miles, who had elite status in the Flying Blue program, and made those members pay the double/triple miles price for the seats.
Right now first class awards are available to anyone, and on most flights.
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.
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 »
