United debuted their new Polaris lounge at Chicago O’Hare in the old club and first class lounge space at gate C18 a couple of months ago. This is a business (and first) class lounge. It is not a Star Alliance Gold lounge and not a United Club.
Here’s the timeline for Polaris lounge openings over the next 24 months which will bring the number of new business class lounges to 9 by the end of 2018.
US airline CEOs meet with President Trump today.
The heads of United, Delta, Southwest, Alaska, and JetBlue will be there — along with FedEx, UPS, and Atlas Air. Lobbying group Airlines for America will be there, along with airport officials from “Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, Washington, D.C., Tampa, Fla., Buffalo, N.Y. and Nashville, Tennessee…”
Etihad’s new Runway to Runway program — a loyalty program for the fashion industry — launches Thursday.
There are three membership tiers, it’s free to join, and anyone can sign up.
Hilton is offering 2000 bonus points per night through April 30. As long as your room costs less than $200 per night you come out ahead compared to double points.
On top of this, Hilton has added a bonus of 500 points per stay booked through their app which runs the entire rest of the year.
IT is hard. And these legacy systems are complex, they don’t know where the next problem will creep up from. But these failures don’t just inconvenience customers they even prevent customers from buying tickets it’s a real problem.
At this point, United, when you’re spending IT resources to implement ‘Basic Economy’ fares that don’t allow customers to have a carry on, or to eliminate the ability to book a stopover on an award ticket, you’re doing it wrong.
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Earlier today I wrote about Swiss first class award space showing up at United.com — something very rare, and when it happens a mistake — and suggesting that it appeared to be phantom availability.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t book Swiss premium cabin awards, in fact Swiss business class awards are wide open this summer.
Swiss first class awards are a unicorn, and people go to sort of crazy lengths for it.
All Swiss routes are showing wide open award availability, it’s definitely not all bookable.
A brain surgeon is suing Austrian Airlines after jamming his pinky finger in his seat’s tray table.
The doctor was flying Brisbane – Bangkok and then continued on Austrian to Vienna and Manchester in business class last year. On the Bangkok – Vienna leg, “the cabin crew had folded out the horizontal table tray from his armrest before serving an in-flight meal during the Bangkok to Vienna leg of his trip.” They “did not return” to put his tray table away, he couldn’t recline his seat, so he tried to do it himself… unsuccessfully.
Qatar Airways now flies the world’s longest flight between Doha, Qatar and Auckland, New Zealand.
This puts them in competition with Air New Zealand carrying passengers between New Zealand and Europe. One competitive response is that Air New Zealand has cancelled its ‘Special Pro-rate Agreement’ with Qatar, a move that Qatar’s CEO says means “we can’t really connect the people of New Zealand to the large international network that we so wanted.”
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 »
