Category Archives for Airlines.
It was only just Saturday when I wrote about a British Airways business class passenger discovering bed bugs on his London – Cape Town flight. I wrote about bed bugs on a BA flight back in October too.
Now there’s a new story out about British Airways having to cancel a flight from London Heathrow to Accra, Ghana because cabin crew refused to work the aircraft due to the presence of bed bugs.
Over the weekend a Boeing 737 overran the runway and went off on an embankment in Northeastern Turkey.
There’s now video from inside the cabin during the evacuation and more is known about the incident.
Singapore Airlines is introducing fantastic new products for their Airbus A380s. They have 5 new planes replacing 5 that are being returned to their lessor, and those are being delivered over the next year. They’ll be introduced into service with the new first suites and new business class that offers double beds for passengers traveling together.
The plane has flown to Sydney, and now we know its next two destinations.
At a Crew News update last week a Dallas-based flight attendant asked American Airlines CEO Doug Parker about seat back entertainment. She said she’s noticed that most passengers really appreciate inflight entertainment “with the TV’s” and she wanted to understand why American wouldn’t install seat back tv’s going forward?
She says that passengers “don’t even remember their headphones” yet alone their own entertainment devices. Customers prefer it, flight attendants prefer it, why wouldn’t they offer it? (“Why are we going in that direction if we’re Going for Great?”)
Bed bug lawsuits against hotels can be lucrative, and of course shocking photos can be persuasive to juries. Perhaps lifting liability limits for airlines would improve airline avoidance procedures.
American’s CEO Doug Parker says he thought the airline “could live with” not offering seat power on their legacy US Airways aircraft, and that he’s never flown the new Boeing 737 MAX — which reduces seat pitch for customers and shrinks the lavatories.
Southwest Airlines is customer-friendly in many ways, from no change fees to not hitting customers with checked bag fees. Their employees are friendly and actually seem to like their jobs.
There’s really just one part of the company that seems to hate people, and that’s legal. They’ve been more aggressive than most airlines in going after websites that pull data from Southwest.com and make it more useful to customers.
In September 2014 American and legacy US Airways harmonized their catering — and the results were not good. American took the overwhelming feedback of customers — and from embarrassed crew — to heart and introduced better meals in August 2015.
American ostensibly introduces all new meal service each year. We got a new set of meals in November 2016, and last month they began to rotate new dishes in as they overhaul the domestic first class menu.
Two weeks ago I wrote that British Airways is introducing seats with 29 inches of pitch and no recline. That’s an inch less space than Ryanair offers from seat back to seat back.
Since word of BA’s new seats without recline came out the buzz word has been that they’re pre-reclined, a phrase I first heard from former Spirit Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza. It’s a silly statement, but it’s also true that their seats aren’t completely upright.
The idea of compensating customers onboard is hardly new. You can contact customer relations after a flight, you can even get a proactive email from an airline after a flight, but the immediacy of onboard compensation can quell problems while you’re still stuck in a metal tube and frustrated.
American Airlines is rolling out this capability next month, loading iSolve software onto flight attendant tablets.
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 »
