Category Archives for Airlines.
Star Alliance member Avianca’s LifeMiles program is useful for frequently reasonable redemptions, no fuel surcharges, and regularly selling miles on the cheap.
Miles have expired after 24 months of account inactivity, and until now any activity has been enough to reset the clock. Starting April 15th they’re revising the rules to say miles expire after 12 months and only earning more miles resets the clock, not redeeming miles.
We’ve seen cases of passengers being kicked off flights for showing too much cleavage, one woman even got a Playboy spread after being kicked off of Southwest Airlines.
I’m not sure I can recall anyone ever being kicked off a flight for wearing too much clothing, unless of course it was Naked Air.
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.
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 »
