Jan 28 2017

I’ve heard from myriad readers the past two and a half weeks saying that American Airlines no longer seems to clear upgrades before the airport anymore. Planes could be completely empty up front, on flights with little last minute premium demand, and where upgrades had previously cleared in advance.

Several days to a week ago I heard from a source that there had been a technical glitch that was preventing upgrades from being processed, but that this issue had been resolved.

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Jan 28 2017

The President’s executive order on immigration, which imposes new conditions on entry for citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, took immediate effect.

There was no grace period, there were passengers who were legally headed to the U.S. when their flights took off but who – after the order was signed – became inadmissible to the United States.

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Jan 28 2017

The Trump administration executive order on immigration has most widely been reported to temporarily ban visas for people from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen — even for those who have been living in the U.S. in valid employment or student status but who need new visas for re-entry.

What’s getting less attention is section 7 of the order that demands immigration controls when you leave the U.S. not just when you arrive.

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Jan 28 2017

Hotels left and right are being taken over by ISIS. You never know when your airline employee might just be a terrorist sympathizer.

Or so must have gone the thinking of Robin Rhodes, President of a Worcester, Massachusetts metal company, during a layover in New York. He attacked an employee at a New York JFK Delta SkyClub.

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Jan 27 2017

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.

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Jan 27 2017

American Airlines spoke several times in its quarterly earnings call about its new Basic Economy fares that it will begin offering shortly.

They say that “basic and premium economy combined” will be worth more than $1 billion in incremental revenue to the airline, that they’ll get 20% of the way there this year and 80% next year. They don’t split up their projections across the two, and they haven’t even begun selling either (let alone retrofitting international widebodies to sell premium economy). But those numbers are insane.

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Jan 27 2017

Supposedly the TSA is going to stop sending people through PreCheck who haven’t registered for PreCheck (or one of the other programs that comes with PreCheck).

They’ve said this before — an end to one “managed inclusion” program, but a continuation of another. The TSA has sent ‘Behavior Detection Officers’ to pick people out of line for expedited screening. These staffers have had a short course in mind reading pretending to be Israeli reading body language to pick out who is a threat and who isn’t, but there’s no indication that the training is effective or that the employees are any good at it.

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Jan 27 2017

In the aftermath of a Mumbai – Newark flight last month where a man self-downgraded from business to a center section seat in economy so he could grope a woman (and in the aftermath of the controversy over whether first class armrests used to move) Air India plans to reserve six seats at the front of economy for women only.

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Jan 26 2017

Wine matters in premium cabins, mostly in my opinion for branding reasons. Qantas is the third largest buyer of Australian wine. Emirates is said to have spent $500 million acquiring wine for its flights.

Wine certainly can taste very different in the air than on the ground. Champagne often works well onboard, and I tend to favor it over even better old world wines.

Most people don’t know very much about wine (I suspect that the average premium cabin customer is like my seatmate who brought her own wine in a coffee cup onboard), though they think of it as a luxury good. Delta’s wine program recognizes this specifically avoiding bottles that are priced too inexpensively at retail (lest people think they’re low quality, regardless of taste) and that have too unsophisticated a label.

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Jan 26 2017

Back in September Lufthansa became the 19th airline set up with TSA PreCheck. By joining Air Canada, Etihad, Aeromexico and WestJet, what was once US airlines only — and not even all of them at that — the massive US data-sharing, surveillance and passenger-convenience program had gone global.

The TSA’s website still lists only 19 airlines however they’ve just announced the addition of 11 more airlines including Spirit, Virgin Atlantic, Emirates and Avianca.

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