Category Archives for Airlines.
DOT should certainly enforce refunds for services charged but not provided. But they shouldn’t lock airlines and airfare search sites into displaying specific charges in a standardized way, the same everywhere. We should be encouraging competition in meeting consumer needs, not making airline sites and Expedia displays the same forever. It’s not only seat and bag fees that matter – and even those don’t always matter!
For Parker and American, this was the heist of a lifetime. He spent all his time in D.C. lobbying and Nelson played a key role. Without Nelson’s cover with the narrative about workers, and bringing along Democratic leadership, it would never have worked. Together, they robbed the American people of $54 billion in direct cash, $25 billion in subsidized loans, plus money for airline contractors and tax subsidies as well.
The new American Airlines flight attendants contract that workers will be asked to vote on contains new language about the union helping the airline track down and discipline members who sell their seniority.
Southwest Airlines has a lot of aircraft on order from Boeing. But they said some very strange things on their earnings call. They’re bringing on planes, but aren’t going to grow their flying at a rate faster than GDP.
In fact, they say growth in their flying is expected to come from taking their current planes and keeping them in the air more – redeyes, and faster turn times on the ground – not from Boeing deliveries. That has to mean they’ll be cancelling or deferring deliveries. They just haven’t announced it yet.
Flight attendants union head Sara Nelson has some interesting things to say about bargaining at United and efforts to unionize Delta – though what’s going on at American could play into her hands nicely.
It was something so bad that “with this kind of being a biohazard, I think we need to get this plane on the ground ASAP” according to a doctor on board. “The crew is vomiting and passengers all around are asking for masks…I talked to the crew and it sounds like it’s quite bad back there.”
She’s three years into her flight attendant career, already has a social media following of over 100,000 to sell to, and since flight attendant pay is very low until you gain seniority she’s looking to make extra money.
An Air Canada flight from Casablanca to Montreal was cancelled on Friday after a flight attendant went berserk on a passenger who asked for a blanket. The cabin for flight 73 was cold, and video shows the purser responding aggressively.
The crewmember yells in French and in English, “You will behave or we will get off!” and “I don’t want no bullying against my crew.” She also yells at passengers who were recording her rant. The blanket offender asks for the captain, and the flight attendant refuses.
One Mile at a Time says ‘pulling strings’ to do this is ‘creepy’. But would he even have needed to ‘pull strings’ with a connection as the son of the airline’s by then deposed founder, in order to do this?
A new American Airlines flight attendants contract gives crew immediate 18% – 20.5% raises, starts paying them (at half pay) during boarding during the first time, and adopts Delta’s generous profit-sharing formula. They also get changes to work rules, meal costs on the road and retirement contributions. It was likely the most they could get from an airline that underperforms financially, putting them on equal footing or slightly above the next-best paid flight attendants in the industry. But it doesn’t give them everything they’d hoped for.
Online, flight attendants are griping.
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 »
