In the days following the David Dao passenger beating incident onboard a United Express plane, the airline’s CEO was chided for bicycle riding in front of his $6 million Florida mansion. Now that mansion has him in trouble in a different way.
This has gotten some coverage but since it’s an outage at regional carrier PSA — a wholly owned subsidiary that operates as American Eagle — rather than at mainline American it’s relatively undercovered considering the magnitude of travel disruption.
PSA operates over 100 Bombardier CRJ regional jets. Their largest operation centers around American’s Charlotte hub.
I admit I didn’t even know that 7-11 had a rewards program, which is good because if I did I might have been invested in the program and now I’d be really disappointed.
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I frequently highlight awards bookable with American AAdvantge miles in premium cabins because they tend to make fewer seats available than many other airlines on their own planes and because they have fewer partners through the oneworld alliance than United does through Star.
As a result it’s worth jumping when there are plenty of award seats available on long haul routes. That’s doubly true when you’re looking for more than two seats, because finding availability for four is exponentially harder much of the time and to many destinations.
Etihad is in the midst of re-organizing its business. The airline that launched after Gulf Air eliminated its Abu Dhabi hub by hiring away Gulf Air’s CEO adopted a strategy of buying stakes in troubled airlines around the world and redirecting their connecting traffic through Abu Dhabi. But that didn’t work out very well — the available carriers were in some cases real basket cases and not candidates for turning around with new uniforms and group purchasing agreements.
When energy prices dropped the Al Nahyan family’s appetite for absorbing losses in exchange for growing an international hub airline ran out.
I was surprised flying American Airlines this week that the onboard credit card pitch for the Barclays AAdvantage® AviatorTM Red World Elite Mastercard® included the flight attendant noting that this is ‘a new card introduced in 2017 (sic) and that if you already have the American Airlines card issued by Citi you can get this one too.’
Explicitly mentioning a competitor product seems to be a new part of the script since I’ve seen several references to this from other flyers on Facebook as well.
I’ve harped quite a bit about the lack of benefits for Hyatt elites at Hyatt Place properties, especially now that the program has eliminated check-in amenities. The program doesn’t allow top tier elites to confirm suites at Hyatt Place hotels. Breakfast is for everyone, or at least for program members booking direct going forward.
Since I rarely want a late check-out at a Hyatt Place the only benefit I experience is bottled water.
When Hyatt updated its terms and conditions with changes to expiration for new suite and club lounge awards they also added a reference to cash and points awards at MGM M Life destinations.
The Office of Special Counsel today wrote to the President and Congress to reveal that “safety inspectors at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have improperly approved aircraft for commercial operations without first reviewing critical safety information that in some cases would have prohibited their operation.”
That sounds pretty scary and this is going to get some coverage but it turns out that most of the issues didn’t actually involve safety issues. They included things like expired registrations. And the majority dealt with small charter aircraft.
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 »
