If you’re a resident of California, and not already a member of Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan, you can join and get a free intra-state trip. Technically what they’re offering is a $0.01 base fare, plus taxes.
Frontier Airlines cancelled its Miami – New York LaGuardia flight 2878 Sunday evening over a mask incident. The airline says that a ‘large group’ of passengers wouldn’t wear masks. The family, and some other passengers, dispute that characterization – say it was a maskless 18 month old who triggered the incident which caused the planeload of passengers to be rebooked for this morning.
With Chinese airlines off the table for MAX aircraft acquisitions, and Boeing struggling more generally, United clearly got much more favorable pricing than the standard 50% off of list to do this deal, and to do it now during the pandemic. United hasn’t aggressively retired aircraft types during the pandemic, either – so while they’ve been due for a fleet refresh timing on their end is somewhat more flexible than it otherwise would be as well.
At the beginning of February Delta devalued SkyMiles partner award pricing for the second time during the pandemic, and in a big way. Since the start of Covid-19 one way business class between the US and Europe on Air France and KLM went from 75,000 to 95,000 miles and now starts at 120,000 SkyMiles – for a 60% increase in less than a year at a time when flights are empty and prices low. Because they can.
Delta says they have no award charts any longer, but that isn’t true. They just hide their award charts. Mexico is a separate region from the United States, and while they’ve massively increased their award chart pricing for partner travel to and from the U.S., they haven’t (yet) done so for travel to and from Mexico.
A year and a half ago American Airlines CEO Doug Parker was scoffing at United’s investments in biofuels being good for the environment. There was real evidence for his position, that current biofuel technology is simply too resource-intensive to be useful.
Now, though, American has done a 180 – with a new President whose environmental priorities open up the possibility for new subsidies.
Lufthansa will set up a Covid-19 vaccination site inside Moscow Domodedovo airport so that people can fly in, get the Sputnik V vaccine without clearing immigration or customs, and then fly back.
Ultimately we need more jabs in arms, the quicker the better, through whatever means necessary. Many governments have been more focused on who gets shots out of a limited supply than making sure people get shots, and increasing supply. That prolongs the pandemic and costs lives.
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Delta Air Lines is paying out bonuses to management employees to compensate them for pay cuts mandated in 2020 as part of the airline’s pandemic belt-tightening, which in some cases can exceed $250,000 per person.
These bonuses are being paid out while Delta is receiving payroll funds from the federal government, and aren’t being offered to the airline’s frontline employees who earned less in 2020 than in 2019,.
It seems to me that this take is both typical and likely wrong: “These new premium cabin mask exemptions are honestly, hilarious. Cathay Pacific’s logic here is essentially, as long as you lie at a 180° angle, you can’t get COVID.”
United Airlines will pay a $49 million fine to the federal government to resolve criminal fraud charges for falsifying records that allowed it to collect payments for transporting U.S. mail on time, when in fact it failed to do so.
United “falsified parcel delivery information…[b]etween 2012 and 2015..by submitting false delivery scan data to make it appear that United and partner airlines with which it worked were complying with the [on time mail delivery] requirements, when in fact they were not.”
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 »
