Credit card premium lounges are a victim of their own success, attracting more customers (which detracts from the experience) and driving up costs (which lead to cutbacks in the experience). I’d love to see premium cards offer an annual skip the line pass. Charging feels gauche. At the same time I’d pay. It’s just that if I pay to skip the line at a The Club I’ll feel pretty cheated. What do you think?
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.
The ‘number of members’ is really just ‘records in the database.’ The more rooms you have, the more people are booking them, the more sign up for a program usually just to avoid paying extra. A large marketing file is valuable! But it says little about the value of the program. Far more interesting is which programs outperform the size of the chain.
Here’s a dog standing up on the furniture at the American Airlines Admirals Club in Los Angeles. Since customer provisions there lag what United and Delta offer at their clubs, this dog is presumably eating and drinking there just as well as the passengers.
Some of the routes Delta has been running have been ‘intra-Texas’ flights that seemingly make no sense, other than they are short flights using cheap outsourced planes. Cities include Harlingen, McAllen, and Midland, Texas. Harlingen and McAllen seemed like super-strange choices at first, since they’re just 45 minutes apart from each other by car.
Will they be bankrupted by this American Airlines mistake? What’s it going to do to their credit score (that’s some hefty utilization!)? Will American Express close down their account? Will other card issuers?
Flight attendants union head Sara Nelson was the guest on the Airlines Confidential podcast this week. She shared the story of getting involved in union activism after 9/11 and said that “the biggest complaint I heard from flight attendants was ‘I didn’t feel seen, I didn’t feel respected’” and said that people didn’t realize that there were unions then. By her own standard then, she’s failed her members.
An American Airlines customer bought a $1,000 ticket and later refunded it. American returned $100,000 instead.
An investigations has found that Venezuelan state gold was laundered by blending its proceeds with COVID-19 bailout funds to Spanish long haul carrier Plus Ultra Airlines. And Venezuela’s government may have helped the airline qualify for the pandemic bailout from Spain in the first place.
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.
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 »
