Emirates has completed the refresh of the first one of its Airbus A380s and is placing it into service today, January 6, as flight EK3 from Dubai to London Heathrow. The airline has a fleet of 120 A380s, though slightly more than half will receive the interior retrofit.
These planes are receiving 56 premium economy seats, as well a new color palette in business and first class.
American Airlines is pulling out of its Miami – Tel Aviv route, a service they only began in June 2021 and which they expanded two months ago.
An Air India flight from New York to Delhi, where a passenger walked up to a woman seated in business class and urinated on her and nothing was done about it, is making international news.
And the narrative that ‘this happens on Air India’ is being reinforced because 10 days after that incident another man urinated on a woman on Air India, this time on a Paris to Delhi flight on December 6th. Once again little was done about it.
The airline has described ‘millions’ of passengers effected, though the number is over a million and likely around two million. The costs to the airline are staggering, and they are now expecting to lose money for the fourth quarter of 2022 as a result of lost revenue (they didn’t earn ticket revenue for the flights they cancelled) and higher expenses (reimbursing and compensating passengers).
Just how big of a deal was this?
Aeromexico flight AM165 from Culiacán to Mexico City was cancelled after being shot at while taxiing out for departure. The Embraer E-190 (registration XA-ALW) had bullets penetrating the cabin, as passengers ducked.
El Chapo, leader of the Sinaloa cartel, has been imprisoned in the United States since 2019. His son, Ovidio Guzmán, was arrested in Culiacán, Sinaloa, early on Thursday. The cartel sought to break him out of custody before he could be removed from the province.
Delta has been talking up free wifi for years, but they didn’t have enough bandwidth on their planes. When you make wifi free, more people use it, and that slows down the service. Ditching Gogo for ViaSat solves for this.
Gradually they’ve been rolling out free wifi, and starting February 1 it’ll be for everyone on domestic flights.
American Airlines is eliminating service entirely to Long Beach, California; Columbus, Georgia; and Del Rio, Texas. American Airlines is the only carrier serving Del Rio. This is the result of losing Mesa Airlines as a regional partner.
They aren’t requiring mRNA vaccines, and they aren’t requiring boosters. Showing proof of a Chinese vaccine whose effectiveness against the original Wuhan strain was questionable at best is considered enough. Fear of an onslaught of infected people from China demands that politicians do something. And this is something.
Connecting space within 2-3 days of travel can now be booked in Swiss first using United miles.
The explanation of technology for Southwest’s woes, while true, also exposes a gap in people. They didn’t have enough people to rebuild their schedules by hand and were taking volunteers from within the company. There’s also a knowledge deficit.
There’s going to be a lot of IT spending ahead, and also a lot of work on culture ahead, for Southwest. Passengers will forgive them. But capital spending and culture are harder. And around a fifth of employees don’t have a long-term experience with the company against which to judge recent unpleasantness, including being stranded away from home for some time.
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 »
