Back on October 16 a man flying Southwest from Los Angeles to Dallas claimed to be flirting, playing footsie with his seat opponent, and even argued that she had come on to him. She asked for a new seat though, and he got up and followed appearing to keep up his romantic pursuit.
The man, who was released on parole days before the flight, had overdosed on heroin three days prior to travel and used used methamphetamine just the day before.
Hotels encourage you to fly out for a stay while they replace single use plastic toiletries with bulk wall mounted shampoo, and offer to let you skip housekeeping, telling you these cost saving measures are out of their concern “for the environment.”
The Dutch government wants to ban flights between Brussels and Amsterdam for the environment since apparently it’s more environmentally friendly to connect at Heathrow or Frankfurt.
Ponder whether you should fly at all, while you continue to have kids and eat meat…
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.
It’s been widely reported that United’s Glasgow – Newark flight had to be cancelled on Saturday morning when two pilots showed up to work intoxicated.
However United’s efforts to inconvenience passengers weren’t limited to two intoxicated pilots, they continued to inconvenience passengers through the decisions they made recovering from the incident as well.
As a result of bad weather Wednesday’s Tel Aviv – Newark flight diverted to Cleveland, which is no longer a United hub.
United is offering non-stop Newark – Paris roundtrips from $257 roundtrip. And it’s not just for a few dates either, but across much of the schedule for about six months.
The last planned strike was called off but London Heathrow workers were planning a strike for this Monday and Tuesday. Now they say Monday’s strike is off. As of now, though, Tuesday’s is still on.
Uzbekistan Airways now has Boeing 787-8s and those have 4.7 tons greater cargo capacity than 767s. They may not be able to carry a full cargo payload when full and servicing long flights, that shouldn’t be an issue for Tashkent – London for instance. It makes sense for the carrier to consolidate operations.
However given Amazon’s penchant for growing its cargo fleet I wonder if listing the planes on Amazon Marketplace might turn out to be a more effective platform.
British Airways settled a class action lawsuit over fuel surcharges. See, these fees had nothing to do with the price of fuel (as required by the Department of Transportation). They awarded cash or miles to a whole bunch of frequent flyers, but continued charging the fees — they just stopped calling them fuel surcharges, and started calling them surcharges. In other words, extra fees that no longer even pretend to have a purpose.
While fuel surcharges aren’t a government tax, they are a tax on frequent flyers, a fee for using miles for free travel (ironic, huh?).
Interesting research from Alexander Luttmann at UC Irvine suggests that slot controls don’t actually reduce delays at congested airports because large airlines at major airports “already internalize congestion” when planning their schedules.
That makes sense. Heavily congested airports take longer to get planes in and out. Flight times are longer. That means flights are more expensive — they take up more aircraft time and airlines have to pay their crews more, too.
While the busiest airports see plenty of flights, their largest airlines don’t just keep adding flights because that’s expensive, both for the new flights and for all of their existing flights which suffer greater delays and ultimately get longer flight times.
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 »
