News and notes from around the interweb:

• Delta CFO Paul Jacobson suggested their American Express co-brand is doing well during the recession at the Cowen investor conference this morning.

  “Loyalty is showing its value” and “more resilient through a downturn than airline revenue,” and by loyalty he appears to mean American Express revenue. He reports that “card spend held up well.” It fell at the beginning of the pandemic, but the “Delta card has held up against other [American Express] portfolio cards.” People are “attracted to the [Delta] brand” and the idea of flying. Customers believe the pandemic will pass, Jacobson believes, because if the mindset was it would take 3 years to get through the pandemic customers would switch to earning other currencies with their spend.

  

• An interesting discussion of whether the Aeromexico program has gotten better, now that they have a new online award booking tool. I’ve never had much luck with the program and place very little value on their points simply because of how hard they’ve been to deal with.

  Though others have promoted their round the world awards, when I rounded those up I left Aeromexico off the list because though published pricing is low I’ve never been able to successfully book one and I’ve never seen definitive proof of anyone else successfully booking one either.

  
  Copyright: noratm / 123RF Stock Photo

• Female surfer dragged off Spanish beach in cuffs by hazmat-clad cops for ‘riding waves while infected with coronavirus’ so she’ll infect other prisoners in an indoor cell instead.

• Two mayors, whose towns are separated by a shut border during Coronavirus

• Boeing has quietly rebranded the 737 MAX dropping the ‘MAX’ designation, apparently following the advice of one of the plane’s biggest customers Steven Udvar-Hazy and Air Lease Corporation.

  Házy said he has told Boeing president and CEO Dave Calhoun that the MAX is a “useless name.”

  “I told Calhoun, ‘It’s not an asset to Boeing. It’s a clear liability.’ In [regulatory] documents, it is just 737-9 … I know it’s hard for Boeing to drop that name, but it doesn’t serve any useful purpose,” Házy said.

• The head of British Airways parent IAG has retired. He was against airline bailouts when he didn’t want Virgin Atlantic to get one, by the way when United, American, and Delta were clamoring that subsidies of Gulf carriers were bad British Airways disagreed and had no problem with subsidies.

  Well, now that Virgin has made it though re-organization and IAG airline Iberia has taken subsidies he likes them again presumably wanting some for British Airways the way Lufthansa and Air France have gotten that sweet, sweet government cash.