News and notes from around the interweb:
- CleanPlus.
@united This plane is disgustingly dirty. pic.twitter.com/TzhpzkOOeh
— Soul Pope (@The_David_S) September 28, 2024
@united thanks for not cleaning the plane on UA2310 and thanks for the gum on my seatbelt which ruined my pants. #CustomerService @nypost pic.twitter.com/J3GNQgvuVA
— SoHoScott (@SoHoScott22) September 28, 2024
- 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.
United is a bad airline. Always has been.
@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.
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.
Why should Kirby care whether his planes are filthy? He runs the best airline in the world, remember?