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.
This is going to seem like a minor thing to some readers, but I’m really excited about it. Two of my favorite brands in points-earning and redemption are now better-integrated.
Telling employees you appreciate them is great. Doing so in advance of their protests is great as well. But is it wrong to say that serving chili to people about to work inside a pressurized aircraft might not be the best idea?
CommuteAir, which operates Embraer ERJ-145s for United Airlines, left the entire U.S. federal No Fly List on a server that was easily hacked.
The best way to search Air France and KLM award space is on the AirFrance.us website. You hunt and peck a day at a time for availability. But they have a hidden award calendar and all you need to do to see it is leave your travel dates blank.
I ran into a retail shop at the Austin airport that requires a tip when paying by credit card. This isn’t a sit down restaurant with table service. You pay at the counter, and I was buying a bottle of water.
The payment terminal at the concession requires you to select a tip amount prior to processing your card. $0.00 is not accepted.
Delta lets passengers choose in advance the option to skip a meal, and save the airline money. Japan Airlines even suggests that doing so is a moral imperative.
This is a trend sweeping the industry, reducing food cost by getting passengers to pre-committing not to eat. United is a part of it too, and they are offering customers more than one choice now to nudge them not to eat. Both of these options that appear when pre-ordering mean the same thing, United can spend less on catering.
We can expect a more aggressive approach that pulls whatever tools are convenient in pushing for greater competition in transportation policy.
New refund rules and fee disclosure rules are already pending at the Department of Transportation.
On January 24th, American Airlines flight attendants will be conducting ‘informational picketing’ at the airline’s hubs and also in Boston and San Francisco. They’re unhappy with the time it’s taken to get a new contract, and that American Airlines flat out rejects many of the changes to work rules their union proposes.
American, for its part, has been telling cabin crew that on the same day as the picketing they’ll be serving free chili inside the airport instead.
Delta is back on top. Perennial strong competitor Alaska is right behind though they had numerous operational problems. Southwest comes in third – even though they completely failed over the holidays (recency bias!) and their on-time performance frequently lags with shorter turn times for aircraft. JetBlue is consistently an operational mess, here worse than Spirit and Frontier.
While I expect Delta to tout its win, note the subheading is “No one airline had a particularly good year.”
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 »
