American Business Class Awards to Asia Wide Open, Enough Seats for the Whole Family

by Gary Leff

Jan 10 2016

Starting in March (and continuing through the fall) there’s really strong business class award availability on American’s Los Angeles and Chicago – Shanghai flights.

Interestingly the same cannot be said for Dallas – Shanghai, or American’s Beijing flights. So it’s not China generally, just Shanghai and just from Los Angeles and Chicago.

Availability is in both directions (although somewhat limited for Shanghai – Los Angeles). And the Chicago flight often has 6 or more seats open.

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American Starts “Cross-Fleeting” European Routes in May

by Gary Leff

Jan 09 2016

American will begin cross fleeting on a couple of international routes this May. Even though from a customer perspective there’s now just one airline, American, operationally that’s not quite the case. Since they haven’t fully integrated the work groups, especially the pilots onto a single seniority list, they still have challenges in scheduling planes and routes as though they were a single airline. They have to continue to meet the terms of complicated separate contracts.

Seeing cross-fleeting grow, and grow internationally, is a big deal because American still hasn’t even committed to add extra legroom seats in coach for the vast majority of the legacy US Airways fleet. That puts the passenger experience behind Delta and United for those planes.

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Which Airlines are Improving Their Financial Performance the Most?

by Gary Leff

Jan 09 2016

The indispensable subscription-only Airline Weekly ran numbers looking at year-over-year revenue and costs for various airlines in the third quarter, and the difference between those figures, rank ordering carriers.

United and American outperformed Delta by this measure — they saw their costs decline more (11% and 12%) than Delta (7%) though their revenue declined more (-2% and -4% versus -1%). American is certainly under revenue pressure from Spirit, which has it’s own problems — a 2% increase in costs despite declining fuel prices.

The gap between Allegiant – at the very top of the list – and stagnating Spirit underscores that there reaches a point where ultra low cost carriers are no longer well-positioned to cherry pick routes and must face serious competition from larger airlines.

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Federal Government Blinks, All State Drivers Licenses Still Accepted at Security for at Least 2 Years

by Gary Leff

Jan 09 2016

The federal government was threatening not to accept drivers licenses from 9 states at airport security checkpoints.

The story was being broadly reported that this would happen, since: states aren’t complying with the federal ‘REAL ID’ Act., therefore the federal government wouldn’t accept IDs from those states.

But it is not happening and won’t for at least two years.

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Delta Just Made Changes to Their Secret Award Chart Without Notice

by Gary Leff

Jan 08 2016

Delta has made changes to its secret award chart for travel starting October 1. Only they haven’t bothered to tell anyone about it.

Despite eliminating award charts, Delta does have an award chart. There is saver award inventory (all partner awards are saver awards), and the price of awards is fixed when it’s available. Delta just doesn’t publish the chart any longer.

Delta wants to go revenue-based on redemptions, but revenue-based redemptions are transparent…

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