Category Archives for Airports.
London Heathrow airport is capping passenger volumes at 100,000 per day through September 11, against an average of 104,000 passengers at the airport. Peak travel days exceed this number. In fact during summer 2019 volumes regularly exceeded 200,000 passengers per day, and the airport set a record above 260,000 in August 2019. The airport has asked airlines to suspend ticket sales to accommodate these limits.
Denver’s airport is planning a new ‘hotel row’ as part of their 26 acre ‘West Approach’ project. This is going to be about 3 miles from the terminal, near a future Denver rail system stop.
There are already 26 hotels along Tower Road. And of course there’s a Westin connected to the terminal. This new project is expect to launch first with a ground lease for a branded select service property with 200+ rooms, that the airport envisions will offer a rooftop bar and dining with plane spotting opportunities.
The TSA can rifle through your luggage at will and will pull sex toys out of your bags in front of other passengers. You walk through machines that take naked images and screeners get to fondle you if they find you attractive.
TSA even had a program to follow ordinary passengers and mark down when they used the bathroom. But perhaps there’s nothing more intimate than having your pancake mix obsession revealed as the price of domestic travel.
TSA is promoting their prowess at seizing liquids at security checkpoints. Great catch! They’ve rounded up liquids and gels over 3 ounces and placed them in one spot together to be photographed.
But where is the hazmat team? If these items were dangerous you wouldn’t think they’d be kept near he security checkpoint and passengers, let alone held together. There would be dangerous materials protocols. Except even the TSA doesn’t believe these liquids are dangerous. They’re seizing liquids because the rules say to do so, not because it keeps anyone safe.
After a number of gate leases Southwest Airlines had 18 of the airport’s 20 gates. Alaska Airlines had 2. And Delta found themselves without a gate in the game of musical airport chairs.
However the Department of Transportation said that the City of Dallas had to continue to accommodate Delta at Love Field even though it had no gates to do so, couldn’t legally build more, and Southwest had a valid lease for the gate Delta was using. Everyone wound up in court.
The FAA threated to issue a determination that the City of Dallas was in noncompliance with its Federal grant obligations in the operation of Dallas Love Field, making them ineligible for FAA grant funds.
Everyone wound up in Court.
While American Airlines has grown tremendously in Austin – quadrupling destinations and doubling flights – Southwest remains the largest carrier in the market by a wide margin. In fact it carries an even larger share of Austin traffic than it did three years ago, before the pandemic.
United and Delta have shrunk a bit. So has JetBlue. Allegiant has gown, while Spirit and Frontier have shrunk. Few would have guessed that of Delta, which still calls Austin a focus city.
One week ago the British government announced sanctions against three Russian airlines: Aeroflot, Ural Airlines and Rossiya Airlines. This kept them from selling or leasing takeoff and landing slots at U.K. airports. Russian airlines already couldn’t enter U.K. airspace.
We now know what this means in practice for their London Heathrow slots: Russian airlines don’t just lose the ability to profit from their slots, they actually lose the slots.
The most expensive airfares in the country are at Washington Dulles airport, followed by San Francisco, Detroit, Portland and New York JFK. That’s according to Department of Transportation data for 2021. They tend to be either expensive airports with limited competition (New York JFK is slot-controlled) or dominated by a single airline without as much ultra low cost competition as those on the other end of the list.
This is a little bit insane. In 2015 Austin entered into a 30 year lease so that a private company could build a second airport terminal. The ‘South Terminal’ also has two 5 year extension options built into the lease. But the city wants to use eminent domain to terminate the lease, because it now prefers to expand the main terminal.
They’ve offered to compensate the builders less than $2 million for a project that cost as much as $20 million, while the city teaches every business it would be dumb to enter into a lease on city property because no deal with Austin is guaranteed.
Last summer a customer on Twitter revealed that airport concessions operator OTG charging $28 plus tax and tip for beer at Newark airport. This clearly violated their lease to abide by ‘street pricing’ rules.
OTG, famous for making you order everything via an iPad, quickly claimed the pricing was a mistake, corrected it, but still argued that it really wasn’t such a bad deal after all because it was a big pour ($28 beer was better value than they’re being given credit for). Several members of Congress sprung into action.
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 »
