News and notes from around the interweb:
- Virgin Atlantic has agreed to fly to Seoul to satisfy competition regulators, so that Korean Air can acquire Asiana.
Both Virgin and Korean are part-owned by Delta, and Virgin is joining Korean in the Delta-led SkyTeam alliance. One ‘competitor’ agreeing to conditions to allow another competitor to merge seems weird? Until you realize something that apparently regulators do not, that they’re only kind of sort of competitors.
- New York Times on devaluation of the Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts rewards programs
- Chase adds Pay Yourself Back to Southwest cards surprisingly ungenerous.
- Seattle, San Francisco and Charlotte to Europe for 55,000 miles roundtrip Lufthansa Miles & More Mileage Bargains
- The only March booking Air France KLM promo awards for North America are Austin and Miami in coach. Disappointing.
- Southwest’s culture recovering better than many feared.
God I love @SouthwestAir, everyone’s always friendly and this crew outta Detroit today is infectiously joyful. It’s such an antidote to travel misery.
And check out this nice serenade! pic.twitter.com/Fei5Cu11Au
— Tiffany Ten (@tiffanyten) February 28, 2023
- Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer adds $250 fee for booking Star Alliance round the world awards. These run 200,000 (coach), 280,000 (business) or 405,000 (first) miles plus taxes and surcharges.
Boy are the regulators stupid. If you use Google Flights, you will see that Asiana is the one airline that offers less expensive ticket prices in and out of ICN. Replacing Asiana with Virgin is adding a member of the SkyTeam (price fixing) Alliance and removing the low cost carrier. Brilliant.