Category Archives for Airlines.
Over time the American Airlines video will take on less importance on domestic flights. That’s because the new standard domestic configuration does not include seat back video or drop down screens in the cabin either.
However in the meantime the airline has made a minor tweak to the way the video plays on overhead screens, and in March the change will roll out to those aircraft with seat back monitors.
British Airways is back with their buy business, fly first promotion.
British Airways business class isn’t a very good product so if you can get into first you want to.
A father and daughter were traveling from Toronto to London. The 14 year old girl is quadriplegic and has cerebral palsy. They had gone to Canada to watch ice hockey after her deep brain stimulation treatments.
At the airport staff dropped her wheelchair and broke it. Here’s British Airways’ response.
Air France strikes are rarely worth covering. On any given day of course there’s a threat of a strike. They’re French. That’s what they do.
While much of the Air France KLM business has performed well, though not as well as peers, mainline Air France managed just a 1% operating margin in the fourth quarter. That’s despite holding labor costs constant. They have a revenue problem, and labor groups aren’t happy that they don’t have a cost problem too.
Delta, American and United keep arguing that Emirates, Qatar, and Etihad accept government subsidies and that this violates the Open Skies treaties that the U.S. has signed with the UAE and Qatar. Only it doesn’t violate those treaties. At all. Anyone that reads the treaties knows that.
In the old Aaron Sorkin HBO series The Newsroom the cast makes an important point about journalism. The media is biased towards fairness and simply doesn’t call a lie a lie.
American used to share a ton of information about the financials of the AAdvantage program in their annual 10-K SEC filing. They stopped doing that last year. They no longer tell us how many members there are in the program, how many miles were issued, sold to third parties, and remain outstanding like they did up until two years ago.
Nonetheless as a result of their newly filed 2017 SEC 10-K form we know that the percentage of American’s seats occupied by award travelers dropped again in 2017, after a drop in 2016. When US Airways management took over there was clearly a new philosophy of not releasing award seats to customers.
Whenever there’s an aircraft evacuation there are photos of passengers taking personal items out of the plane. Sometimes it’s a purse or laptop bag from underneath their seat. Other times it’s the rollaboard out of the overhead bin.
ViaSat internet has been free. They’ve been working out kinks since the beginning. On the inaugural 737 MAX flight at the end of November ViaSat internet simply didn’t work much. When it did work it wasn’t fast.
ViaSat installations are working better now. A few planes have Gogo and ViaSat retrofits now. And American is prepared to start charging in March.
Dropping to 20 or 24 business class seats would make awards and upgrades super difficult on the aircraft (awards are nearly impossible now in business class as it is).
It would represent a loss of 14% or 28% of the business class seats on the aircraft. In contrast United’s Boeing 787-8s have 36 business class seats.
Through February 25 premium economy starts at $999 for US-Asia roundtrip and business class starts at $1999 for US-Europe roundtrip.
You can travel May 1 through August 31 for business class, May 1 through December 14 for premium economy.
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 »
