Software engineer Saarah Sareshwala was flying Southwest Airlines from Orlando to Phoenix on Saturday. She expected an uneventful trip after an enjoyable ‘women in computing’ conference. She walked away with a head injury, and she’s left shaking her head trying to understand why.
Ms. Sareshwala’s husband took to social media to detail what happened when the passenger seated in front of her slammed his seatback into her head while she was asleep against it.
A Delta Air Lines passenger shares what happened when they rang their flight attendant call bell to ask for a drink while flying from Atlanta to Boston recently.
Seated in extra legroom coach, which offers free cocktails, they asked for a Jack Daniels and Coke during the drink cart pass through the cabin. Half an hour later they wanted another drink so they pushed the button about their seat. It lit up. About five minutes later a crewmember showed up and declined their request.
There are numerous rules that go along with flying so-called ‘free’ (there are often fees for international travel, and for some there can be tax consequences as well).
One of the stranger ones on American Airlines is that employees cannot book conflicting paid travel and non-rev travel. In fact, they aren’t even allowed to list for non-rev travel on American is they have paid or mileage award tickets with the same origin and destination within 24 hours on another airline like Delta. This actually makes American Airlines less reliable for customers.
Research suggests that traveling abroad while young and still forming worldviews and spending time speaking with ordinary people at your destination appears to foster Twain’s notion of becoming more open-minded and empathetic towards others without respect to geographic boundaries.
Not all travel meets these conditions, of course.
Chase earns over $5 billion in revenue from its credit card portfolio per year, but they’ve made it a corporate priority to build a product that’s intended to kill the credit card business. And CEO Jamie Dimon threatened to fire senior leaders who get in the way.
Delta Air Lines was the second airline – behind only Qatar Airways – to launch business class suites with doors into commercial service. American Airlines is going to enclosed suites with their Boeing 787-9 and Airbus A321XLR new aircraft deliveries in 2024. British Airways has been putting doors on business class seats, and Air France is going to be doing the same.
United Airlines isn’t going to be left behind in this race. In fact they’ve been vetting new seats with doors for a new Polaris product, as I reported this past spring.
One woman is going viral because her phone screen was visible to other passengers on a flight. Bored passengers look for interesting things – and a married woman’s screen was interesting enough to inspire a TikTok video. The woman, wearing a wedding ring, was traveling with her husband and her kids – and her phone showed 22 notifications from Tinder.
United Airlines has gone woke. Airlines are fighting over who can be the most environmentally-friendly. Delta even claimed to be carbon neutral before the pandemic, even though they literally own an oil refinery and most of it was dubious carbon offsets.
Expedia’s Chairman Barry Diller is bucking the trend dismissing ESG as virtue signaling.
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.
SkyTrax has named the 20 best airlines of 2022. Their top 4 world airlines are all greats, though we can quibble about the order. Qatar Airways, ANA, Singapore and Emirates are very good airlines. This new list is gaining a lot of traction and publicity, but dig a little deeper and it gets absurd.
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 »
