If You Want to Create Loyalty, Do More For Your Customers

by Gary Leff

Oct 26 2015

Yesterday Hyatt’s Jeff Zidell tweeted an article from Harvard Business Review highlighting, “[c]ultivate gratitude and loyalty will naturally follow.”

The piece suggests that ‘loyalty needs to be reciprocal’. I suggest that means striving to deliver as much value as possible to customers, and continuing to look for ways to do more (while pricing your product at a level that earns a strong rate of return). Figuring out how much you can take away from your customers, or viewing your customers transactionally, undermines loyalty. In the airline space that means re-commodifying your product, and undoing the great work frequent flyer programs have done to create differentiation amongst what’s otherwise just a seat from city A to city B.

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Awesome Luxury Auction Deals That Go Cheap and a 4 Night Paris Hotel Stay Giveaway!

by Gary Leff

Oct 26 2015

Luxury Travel Diary, a high-end travel blog with great reviews based in the UK, has a bunch of travel auctions — some about to close, others extend into October — and there look to be some real bargains. Many of these are great auctions, without enough bidders, so the items go for way less than they should.

They wanted to highlight some of these, and offered to help organize a giveaway of a 4 night hotel stay in Paris for readers of this blog.

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Caught on Video: Baggage Handler Stealing Luggage

by Gary Leff

Oct 25 2015

A passenger on a LAN flight from Pucallpa took video out the window of his Airbus A320 while waiting to deplane in Lima, Peru.

Baggage handlers were going through luggage before taking them to baggage claim. One looks around to see if anyone was watching (and didn’t do a very good job of that, apparently) and then reaches into a passenger’s bag and takes something out. He hands it to another baggage handler.

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Hotels are Now Competing to NOT Spend Money to Upgrade Facilities

by Gary Leff

Oct 25 2015

The Wall Street Journal covers the hot competition for hotel conversion brands with Marriott’s Delta hotels acquisition poised to compete with Hilton’s Doubletree for hotel owners that don’t want to spend a lot to bring their properties up to what would otherwise be a brand’s standards.

There’s no commonality – other than Hilton HHonors – that makes a hotel a Doubletree, that tells a hotel guest what to expect. That’s why Doubletree gives out the cookies.

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Did Kuwait Kick Out United Airlines In Retaliation Against US Government Non-Discrimination Rules?

by Gary Leff

Oct 24 2015

If the U.S. is going to enforce its non-discrimination rules against Kuwait Airways, which flies to the US, then it seems no US airline is going to be allowed to fly to Kuwait. That’s at least one interpretation of a spat over United’s Washington DC – Kuwait City service.

United – the only US airline flying to Kuwait – has just announced an end to service despite what appears to be their desire to continue service. So it may come at the direction of the Kuwait government in retaliation for the declaration by authorities here that an airline serving the US may not refuse to transport Israeli passport holders.

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