Category Archives for Airlines.
In September American announced plans to roll out additional benefits for Main Cabin Extra seats that have more legroom than regular coach. They’d offer dedicated overhead bins and free alcohol.
The plan was for the beer, wine, and spirits to begin in the spring. But after a listening tour of employees they’ve pushed this back to summer.
During this morning’s Delta earnings call we learned that SkyMiles revenue growth contributed more than an incremental $80 million to the carrier during the previous quarter. How much of this is due to the EPA Administrator is not clear, however.
Qatar Airways tried to buy into American Airlines. However American’s CEO Doug Parker took umbrage at the move.
Now Qatar is investing in an airline that’s going to move to DFW.
What if a legacy carrier could take low cost carrier competition and – as Grover Norquist once said — “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub?”
British Airways parent IAG has acquired a 4.61% stake in Norwegian and plans to initiate acquisition discussions. Of course IAG says they view Norwegian as ‘an attractive investment’. At this point almost no one views Norwegian as an attractive investment.
A new research paper out of the University of Virginia suggests that airlines are talking about ‘capacity discipline’ in earnings calls to signal to other airlines a willingness to reduce capacity. When they do that, capacity falls. And that’s a form of collusion out in the open.
In my view United has been exceptionally slow to roll out their new business class Polaris seats. It’s been nearly two years since they announced the product. It’s been fourteen months since the product took flight.
And while new widebody aircraft deliveries have had it, they’ve put only 5 reconfigured planes into service so far.
In the fall Cathay Pacific announced that their Boeing 777s and Airbus A330s would be getting high speed internet. It turns out the retrofit of 777s also includes adding seats to coach. Cathay is going 10-abreast with slim seats in economy.
Unlike One Mile at a Time I don’t buy that the reason is many Alaska Airlines customers connect to other airlines with tougher carryon baggage allowances — that they are reducing how much customers can bring on board in order to “help” customers and make travel “easier.”
Crew left a note for the flight attendants who would be working the ongoing segment. At the end of the note they wrote, “Great group of passengers, we did our best with the limited resources we had.“
Along with American’s decision to order new Boeing 787s to replacing aging 767s, 777-200s, and A330s, they’ve deferred delivery of 40 out of the 100 Boeing 737 MAXs they’ve ordered. These now aren’t scheduled to be delivered until 2025 – 2026.
One employee commented on American’s internal message board that “Maybe AA is really listening to the customers and decided the MAX isn’t all too popular!” Unfortunately that’s not how this will work.
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 »
