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 woman screams “I know my rights” as she shoved past a TSA checkpoint in Orlando. I know her rights too, that’s one that no court has recognized. But it’s also not where the story starts to get weird, or where it stops.
The 38 year old woman drove up to curbside at Orlando International airport departures on Wednesday at about 8:30 p.m. She went inside and demanded at the Southwest Airlines ticket counter “to be checked in for a flight and to have her truck parked.”
You can probably guess where this one eventually ends, but not how it gets there.
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.
Pakistan International Airlines is the worst airline in the world. Best known for sacrificing a goat for safety and flying with more passengers than seats (and making customers stand for 1700 miles), the airline’s former CEO was actually detained as a result of his efforts to provide good seats and service by wet leasing aircraft from SriLankan.
Airlines have fought against ‘throwaway ticketing’ for years. A ticket on United Airlines to Chicago might be super expensive, but connecting through Chicago to Milwaukee may be cheap. So passengers might buy a ticket to Milwaukee and just get off in Chicago and not board their final connection.
This past fall though we learned that United Airlines was threatening passengers with sending them to collections for the fare the carrier believes that they lost. They’re threatening to trash their customers’ credit report with a dubious debt, since the passenger never agreed to pay a different fare in the first place.
Southwest Airlines doesn’t charge checked bag fees or change fees, and they’ve been profitable 46 years in a row. They don’t offer assigned seats, but generate $400 million a year in early boarding charges which let customers have a better shot at the seats they want. That’s an improvement for those customers compared to the airline’s base product.
While they continue to eschew bag and change fees, there’s talk of adding extras that they could charge… extra for.
Readers have lots of opinions of whether young kids belong on planes in the first place. If there’s anything close to an official word, though, you’d expect it from the columnist who calls herself Miss Manners. And she declares that “It is public transport: There is nothing prohibitive about who sits in which class except for the cost itself.”
Putting Milwaukee in the airport name emphasizes where it is but I don’t think anyone was confused about the Milwaukee airport’s location. The idea that this rebranding is going to “help[..] more people recognize MKE as an option” when they want to fly to Milwaukee seems to me patently absurd.
Meanwhile the irony of an airport named for General Mitchell – who had his title of General stripped by the military — having his title stripped from the airport that honors him is a bit too much.
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.
Banked hubs are costly to an airline, there’s a lot of activity, a lot of downtime, and they wind up paying people to stand around. But they’re attractive for selling tickets — shorter connecting times mean flights filter up to the top of search. Customers want to get where they’re going quickly. The problem is during irregular operations — bad weather can delay flight departures, then there are no gates for arriving flights, and challenges connecting cascade.
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 »
