Starting Tuesday, September 14 American Airlines will sell access to its business class Flagship Lounges to any passengers flying an American Airlines or oneworld flight for $150 per person. This will even be available to domestic passengers. This fee is per day not per visit not per day, so a passenger connecting through multiple cities with Flagship lounges on the same day can’t visit them all for this price.
With the extension of the mask mandate into January 2022, Southwest Airlines told employees that it’s not bringing back alcohol this year. No word yet on what happens to expiring drink coupons.
While alcohol won’t be served on board, mixers will be as a standalone starting next month because the airline had planned to bring back cocktail service and had to order these ahead of time.
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.
Early this morning Delta flight 1732 from Charleston, South Carolina to Atlanta pushed back from the gate – with more passengers on board than seats. The Boeing 737-900 has 180 passenger seats, but there were 182 passengers on board.
The aircraft returned to the gate quickly to offload the extra passengers, but this is uncommon enough I tried to find out how this happened and why the aircraft was moving back from the gate without everyone on board being seated.
American Airlines is starting to bring back hots nuts, at least on some long haul business class flights. My domestic first class flights over the past 10 days still had packaged nuts.
Soon you won’t have to buy your own first class nut mix online anymore, and bring the nuts on board yourself for a flight attendant to heat up.
Over the summer I wrote a guide to the mind-numbingly complicated differences between an American Airlines trip credit, travel voucher, flight credit and gift card, including a helpful internal grid that the carrier’s employees use.
American has been replacing paper vouchers with ‘trip credits’ which allow payment towards an adult passenger fare on American and American Airlines codeshares only. These can be used as partial payment towards a ticket (topped off with a credit card) or partially used towards full payment of a ticket, with residual amounts emailed to the passenger. Trip credits can also be used to book yourself an extra seat.
After 10 p.m. Friday night the House dropped their 600 page infrastructure reconciliation package. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, just the 41 page summary.
U.S. airlines last week increased their commitment to use biofuels. It’s no wonder why
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.
Marriott CEO Tony Capuano lays out a plan to make sure that hotels get their share of taxpayer loot the way airlines did in the next crisis. He is working with the heads of other hotel chains to make future requests for cash about the employees. He also explains how they’ll become more transparent with customers as they work to keep pandemic cuts in place into the future.
American Airlines updated its rules (‘contract of carriage’) to make clear that it has almost no responsibility to you, the customer, when they delay or cancel flights.
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 »
