A bird was discovered in business class twelve hours into flight SQ322 from Singapore to London on January 7th. The bird continued to fly around and when the plane touched down it was “handed over to animal quarantine authorities.”
Naturally when the Mynah arrived at London Heathrow it declared, “boy are my arms tired.”
Back in 2012 Ryanair floated the idea of ‘standing seats’ to pack more passengers in and lower costs. And Airbus has a patent for ‘double decker’ seating. But neither idea is supposed to be real or is approved for flying — anywhere.
That was little comfort to the family of three who had paid about $1700 to fly from Mahon in Spain to Birmingham in the UK on TUI airlines. They were assigned seats 41 D, E and F but because of an aircraft swap there were no seats like that.
Airline investor Indigo Partners threw Wow Air a lifeline and Wow Air is partying with $49 flights to Europe.
From BWI I see January 21 through March 11 available to Brussels, Dublin, Frankfurt, London, and Iceland. There are similar offerings from Newark, Detroit, and Boston. This sale ends January 18 but limited inventory will sell out faster than that.
TSA agents are expressing themselves at New York JFK during the government shutdown, while they’re expecting not to be paid until the shutdown ends — though they’re getting some pay anyway, in hopes they’ll show up to work.
Their choice of music is everything.
The Fidelity Investment Rewards Visa has a signup bonus of $100 cash back after $1000 in eligible purchases within the first 90 days of account open.
They’ve offered this before but not regularly. More often than not this card has had no signup bonus at all.
Sometimes you forget the code to the reinforced cockpit door, and you’re desperately afraid of management’s obsession with an absolute on time departure (“D0”). So what are you gonna do?
United, like many airlines, has long had special programs for high revenue customers. Their primary offering is Global Services. It was a relaunch of the airline’s old VIP program.
The status is invitation only, except that United 4 million milers are granted lifetime Global Services status. In general flying over 100,000 miles and spending at least 30 cents per mile on United tickets is required. The benefits you receive as a Global Services member are impressive.
It turns out American Airlines isn’t aware of any bar fights in their lounges. However they’ve instructed clubs not to show national news on their televisions unless requested by a member.
Often the best inflight meals are soups. That’s something tough to mess up in a galley. They can be heavily seasoned to counteract the taste bud-dulling affects of cabin pressurization, and they just need to be heated.
Soups work well in club lounges as well. You don’t have to rely on actual skills from Sodexho or other outsourced employees to prepare a good dish, and they sit well too.
Apple is by far United’s biggest corporate account. They spend $150 million with the airline. Focusing on California-specific accounts the biggest are Facebook, Roche, and Google which spend ‘over $34 million’ and then Deloitte, McKinsey, PwC, Cisco, Oracle and Applied Materials in the $12 million to $17 million range.
Apple’s spending on San Francisco – Shanghai though is shocking, even accounting for all of the manufacturing done in China — one quarter of total company spend, 50 business class seats a day. That’s presumably 25 business seats in each direction.
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 »
