New American Airlines Tool Will Auto-Cancel ‘Backup Flights’ In Your Reservation

plane from a 45 degree angle
Sep 14 2019

American is making it harder once again to deal with irregular operations despite a long hot summer of cancelled flights and displaced passengers.

American has a new system set up to cancel extra backup segments in an itinerary. If agents add extra segments to give you options when things go bad those segments will be removed automatically.

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Review: Flying Air Tanzania’s Airbus A220 From Lusaka to Dar es Salaam

Sep 14 2019

Five years ago reader Doug Hess shared his experience flying African low cost carrier: Fly540. Since this was something I haven’t done, but I enjoyed hearing about it, I asked if he wouldn’t mind briefly writing up the experience so that I could pass it along.

Now Doug is back with his experience flying an Air Tanzania Airbus A220 from Lusaka, Zambia to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Oh yes, and he did redeem points for the flight.

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Will the Real Scott Kirby Please Stand Up?

united plane
Sep 13 2019

United Airlines President Scott Kirby spoke yesterday at the Morgan Stanley 7th Annual Laguna Conference. There probably no one in the industry that’s been more ‘by the numbers’ than Kirby, and in my view no one that’s been more an enemy of customer experience. I’ve often called him a destroyer of airlines.

Yet he told the gathering that “more and more” United has to be “competing on quality instead of just schedule and price.”

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The Business Travel Culture That Is France

Sep 12 2019

A French business traveler died while having sex on a business trip. Although the man’s employer argued that he wasn’t “carrying out professional duties” when he had the cardiac arrest in the woman’s hotel room, under French law “an employer is responsible for any accident occurring during a business trip.”

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