Category Archives for Commentary.
Phil Washington, who runs the Denver airport, was nominated by President Biden to head the FAA and confirmation hearings were held today in the Senate. Among other roles, the FAA has a huge responsibility in aviation safety as well as directly providing air traffic control service.
Frequent flyer miles have an amazing characteristic. They cost about three quarters of a cent to produce while people value them at twice that much. The more you produce, the more you profit, so you go around generating as many miles as you can. But now there are too many miles chasing too few seats, airlines have to raise the number of miles required for the seats, and the miles aren’t worth so much.
Interesting in U.S. law you cannot protect the recipe for wine. You can only have intellectual property in its packaging. If the wine tastes identical, then customers are really getting what they expected right? And it’s just the famous brand that isn’t making profit off of it.
If you look at once high quality brands that have been acquired and watered down their products… think Tumi in luggage, Dom Perignon in champagne (not every vintage should be released, and once wouldn’t have been!)… then the brand is actually what’s lying, communicating to consumers a quality that turns out not to be delivered.
Foreign visits to the U.S. are down substantially compared to pre-pandemic times. That’s bad for airlines. It’s bad for hotels. But it’s bad for the entire U.S. economy, too. And it’s an own-goal, with the U.S. government slow-walking people who want to visit here from around the world.
There’s been zero discussion of updating the NOTAM system to focus on giving pilots (and airline ops centers) the right information, in the right form, at the right time – just how to keep the existing system from dumping again.
We can expect a more aggressive approach that pulls whatever tools are convenient in pushing for greater competition in transportation policy.
New refund rules and fee disclosure rules are already pending at the Department of Transportation.
The New York Times ran an op-ed on Friday by William J. McGee full of bizarre nonsense, arguing that it’s time to re-regulate the airlines, because Southwest Airlines melted down over the holidays and the FAA (government regulator!)’s antiquated NOTAM system failed for several hours this past week.
The author makes the case for the Civil Aeronautics Board – abolished by deregulation – because it limited competition and ensured airline profitability. That’s obviously bad for consumers.
A confluence of events, from weather to staffing to technology, combined to drive the meltdown which will cost Southwest more than more investment would have, in other words it’s a story of management error more than greed. Management lost free cashflow rather than increasing it.
It’s a tragedy for people whose holidays were ruined, but it’s not an easy story about industry consolidation (this didn’t happen because Southwest bought AirTran) or ‘financial capitalism’ (until the meltdown Southwest was the story of a company that’s highly unionized with a great culture). Trying to make it an allegory for a hobby horse doesn’t work when the facts aren’t there.
The Ambassador program was a paid program, and you had to be a member to qualify for its invitation-only level Royal Ambassador. But when you made Royal Ambassador you used to get a referral certificate to gift the status to someone else. And they got a referral certificate to give to someone else, and so on.
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 »
