A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
With borders closing in response to the spread of the novel coronavirus, and national policies in some cases changing quickly, some passengers got stuck in the middle. Most people got advance notice, but what if their flights home were cancelled? Or there was confusion, and they were allowed to board a flight when they won’t be admitted at their final destination? Not every country ran rapatriation flights, either.
Delta is capping all flights at 60% of capacity through June 30. To maintain that commitment they’re adding flights “to give confidence” to customers. Even if Delta is able to sell 60% and eventually 75% of seats on planes, we can expect them to then add flights and seats which will continue to put downward pressure on prices. And of course as other airlines as seats that’ll push pricing down even further.
Many airlines are no longer shipping pets but apparently parents are still sending their kids on flights as unaccompanied minors.
In fact American Airlines has a new warning parents booking their children to fly solo in the age of corona.
Yesterday American Airlines decommissioned their old award calendar. The airline confirmed to me that it was supposed to be gone for good.
However there’s still a way to access this tool that lets you display award availability across a month by award type, something the new calendar does not offer.
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
A year and a half ago American Airlines launched a new award search tool clearly geared towards dynamic pricing of redemptions.
While many readers preferred the old award calendar, which lets you show availability by award type (special, saver, standard) and not just the single lowest price on a given day for each cabin, it was clear that the airline was investing only in the new tool moving forward.
Clubs remain closed not just for social distancing reasons, but to control costs. They’re only going to make clubs available when there’s a revenue proposition to do so. And international travel demand, and especially international premium cabin demand (which relies heavily on business travel), is expected to come back last.
In order to lay off pilots, United’s union contract requires them to remove seats from regional jets. They’re preparing the engineering work now in order to have seats out of planes by October 1.
While they expect to be a smaller airline, and for leisure travel to come back before business travel, they see opportunity to encourage existing co-brand credit card customers to spend more on their cards and are preparing new promotions to encourage that.
Airline CFO Derek Kerr offered that the appraised value of the program is between $18 and $30 billion. And he confirmed that the program is expected to be used as collateral for a federally subsidized CARES Act loan. The “deal is not done yet with the government, [but we] fully expect it to be [by the] end of the second quarter.”
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 »
