Either Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar are a threat to Delta’s business or they aren’t. If it’s even close to the existential threat that Delta executives claim, that should be priced into the the market’s valuation of their future prospects. If it doesn’t matter, then the controversy is a tempest in a teapot.
At the very least, critics of the Gulf carriers have to explain why the stock market doesn’t appear to see validity in their position.
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From a marketer’s standpoint the great thing about electronic communications — and data — is that your messages can be mass-customized so that they are directly relevant to the consumer.
In theory this drives far better response, and it turns unwanted marketing messages into useful information. You see what makes something “junk mail” is precisely that it isn’t relevant to us, not that it’s marketing.
A legacy US Airways Airbus A320, retrofit with Gogo’s 2Ku satellite internet technology, is now in service.
The registration on this plane is N102UW and you can track what routes it’s flying.
American Airlines flight AA218 from Atlanta to Chicago on Wednesday was delayed several hours when a woman attacked a flight attended while the aircraft taxied on departure.
The passenger reportedly hit a flight attendant after arguing when she wouldn’t sit down.
If you didn’t already understand that this is a crony capitalist play, with big airlines using their influence over Members of Congress to benefit themselves at the expense of consumers, the fact that the statements of Members are literally being written for them by United, American, Delta the change history in a Word document appears to prove it.
With so many premium credit cards now bundling Priority Pass membership, the number of people with airport lounge access has exploded.
Only about 5% of the 1000 or so participating Priority Pass lounges are located in the U.S. but an outsized percentage of members are U.S. based. That’s meant crowding in a handful of high demand locations, and even Priority Pass members turned away at peak times from places like the Alaska Airlines Lounge in Seattle and the Turkish Airlines lounge at Dulles.
Etihad used to have perhaps the most generous car service options for premium cabin passengers, and until recently even for most premium cabin passengers booked on award tickets.
Etihad’s new paid airport transfer option is just a referral relationship with another company, conxxe, but that earns miles.
Alaska has already broken up with long-time frenemy Delta which had attacked the Seattle-based airline in its home market by building up a competitor hub.
Now their relationship with American is more or less falling apart at the end of the year, with some components surviving into the new year.
Frequent flyer programs face significant fraud. A hacker takes control of an account, redeems all the points for gift cards, and uses the gift cards for merchandise before the account owner notices the points missing. By the time the theft is reported, someone has a ton of new iPads… that they’ve already liquidated for cash.
Or they’ll book travel.
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 »
