Dirty Plane Complaints Are Stacking Up Against United Airlines And Passengers Won’t Stay Silent [Roundup]

News and notes from around the interweb:

  • CleanPlus.

  • 250 free Qatar Airways Avios for joining Marriott Bonvoy

  • In the Eric Adams mess, don’t forget that Turkish Airlines is a state-controlled carrier.

    Gary Leff, who runs the travel blog View from the Wing, noted that Turkish Airlines will sell excess seats for cheap to bring more people to and through the country.

    “Their interest is broader than just the air travel component,” Leff said. “They want to bring tourism dollars to Turkey. They want to expose people to Turkey, give people a positive view of Turkey.”

    Also, that there are other ways to sit up front besides graft, I also mentioned stacking Chase and AARP discounts during a British Airways business class sale.

    Gary Leff, a veteran mileage guru who writes the View from the Wing blog, said Adams could have found relatively low-cost ways to travel comfortably—without resorting to the alleged bribes. He would have steered Adams to an airline like La Compagnie, the all-business class French carrier that often offers discounted tickets nonstop from New York to Paris or Nice. Or, better yet, Leff would have recommended that Adams play the credit-card mileage games.

    “Given the risk that is borne out in this case, certainly it would have been more strategic to pay attention to his points,” Leff said.

  • I believe that Southwest Airlines has largely maxed out their model of go-it-alone without partnerships, distribute fares almost exclusively yourself, and operate a single cabin with single fleet type … and the inevitable consequence is becoming far more like other mature, less successful carriers.

    Open seating and short domestic flights — Gary Leff at viewfromthewing.com says these hallmarks have kept Southwest Airlines’ ticket prices low and customers loyal until the last few years.

    “Southwest has found that they reached the limit of their model to a large degree. And that was really accelerated by the pandemic,” Leff said.

    …Southwest’s changes could alienate their diehard customers, especially if the company becomes just another airline in the flock of airlines said Leff at viewfromthewing.com.

    “The U.S. airline industry is largely homogenized, one that doesn’t have a lot of product differentiation today,” he said. Leff explained this is what happens when an industry consolidates — the players in it take on the same strategies.

  • Double elite nights and rewards with GHA Discovery in October and November registration required.

  • Happy birthday.

  • Southwest Airlines laid out their new plan at investor day on Thursday and put their no cabin on display.

About Gary Leff

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 »

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Comments

  1. @Gary – Southwest didn’t “max out” their market. The market changed out from underneath their model post-COVID, as business travel didn’t recover to previous levels. I certainly don’t think it was “inevitable” that they would become a worse-performing airline pre-COVID, but that likely is true now.

    One sign of things to come, I think, is that new color scheme built around blue. I’m not saying it’s a bad color, but there’s a reason Southwest stuck with their warm tones for decades. Customers weren’t looking to be pacified into submission in a shitty, crowded tin can that shuttles around cattle… they were looking for a warm experience. The colors reflected that until recently. To me, the blue reads as the MBA’s having taken over and driving things based on “data” rather than an actual understanding of the business. A real shame, and probably an opportunity to recreate that Southwest lightning in a bottle, if anyone with money has the stomach for that experiment.

    As an example, Southwest needed revenue. Premium seats are certainly one way to gain that. However, they did not need assigned seats in order to have premium seats. In fact, it would have been a nice lottery to give overflow passengers the premium seats if they were last to board a full flight! That would have been more in line with the Southwest ethos, in my opinion.

  2. Help! On June 21, 2022 I had a stop in Charlotte and met a charming flight attendant in a food court. We hit it right off and she gave me her number, which I promptly lost. She said she lives in Virginia, and invited me to visit. I’m guessing she is with American since I was flying that airline and she had to rush down the concourse to her flight. Please suggest where I might post a message that other American FAs would see, and it might make its way back to her? I was wearing a pink sport’s jacket, so not subtle.

  3. Why should Kirby care whether his planes are filthy? He runs the best airline in the world, remember?

  4. Airline companies should do a more thorough job with cleaning there flights because that’s what flying customers expect and if they don’t do this, then these airline companies deserve to get bad comments chewing them out

  5. It’s common nature to pretend “things used to be great” but “now they’re not great.”

    Airplanes used to be clean. Now they’re not clean.

    People wanted to fly as close to free as possible. Now we really just want CLEAN PLANES and NON-SURLY flight attendants (Sorry, AAL, UAL, DL).

    If you don’t believe me, survey your readers. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts most care about QUALITY and less about PRICE and the more airlines devalue points and partnerships and alliances and co-branded credit cards the more true that will be.

    F the airlines that can’t even keep a clean plane going. Or DL for making my YVR–>SEA fFF completely service free (“due to the short nature of our flight”) but the SEA->YVR had full FF service. I guess it takes longer to fly north.

    In the 1990s and 2000s points and status were great. Now we want clean planes and great service.

    Focus.

  6. The problem is that airlines all have tight turns. There might be 5 minutes allotted to cleaning a plane.

  7. My wife opened her Frontier (microscopic) tray table and started wiping it with a sanitizing wipe last week. She then passed the wipe to me to clean mine. Mine was so caked with crud in the grooves around the edge, that I had to scrub hard, and wound up with a bloody knuckle when the flimsy, thin tray gave a little too much and my knuckle struck a sharp corner of the raised edge. Disgusting!!!

  8. @Rog … I may be mistaken , ( and correct me if I am wrong ) , but I understand that Erdogan was a popular mayor of Istanbul , and was elected , somehow in their system , to be the head poo-bah . So , is he not a legitimate head of government ? Also , I am not a Trump voter … I am merely a predictor , based on my thinking that Trump has the important issues in his favor : economics and immigration , ( and correct me if I am wrong ) .

  9. I guess it is United’s fault for having “disrespectful ” customers stick their gum on the seat belts and not helping to clean up after themselves. YES blame the airlines??…….LOL .to some of these comments……makes us all laugh…

    The 3rd party cleaners barely have enough time to clean the plane….

    IF you really want to clean these planes you will need to deep clean them and take them out of service…. then everyone will complain still.. …

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