Vietnamese carrier Bamboo Airways plans U.S. flights starting later this year. Now they’re offering a status match for elites in any airline’s program that’s part of a major world alliance, up to their top tier, and they aren’t requiring any flights in order to get it.
It’s amazing that lawsuits over Covid-19 haven’t been nearly as significant as feared. At one point Covid-19 legislation was being held up in Congress over disagreements about including lawsuit immunity for employers (predictably Republicans favored this on behalf of business, and Democrats opposed on behalf of trial lawyers).
Yet there’s a new lawsuit by a Southwest Airlines flight attendant who says she contracted Covid-19 during recurrent training, gave it to her husband, and he died.
While there’s now an all-volunteer U.S. military, can the same be said about the American Airlines flight attendants corps?
I wrote earlier in April that the airline was considering drafting flight attendants to return to work. The airline is drafting 104 flight attendants back to work off of leave as follows.
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.
The real estate market is hot in many areas of the U.S., and mortgage rates remain low by historical standards. Real estate agents will pay for their next lead, and lead generators will rebate part of that payment to you in the form of airline miles. It’s potentially win-win-win.
And in a sign of the times not only can you earn miles buying or selling a house (or both!) but there are now ads for American AAdvantage partner Miles From Home Realty running at American Airlines gates across 75 airports.
American’s new domestic coach product is worse than Delta’s. It’s worse than JetBlue’s. It’s worse than Southwest’s. The customer experience just wasn’t a priority. The airline didn’t bother building a cabin mockup before declaring this their standard product and rolling it out. Airline CEO Doug Parker didn’t even try it himself before the decision was made – or even until it was flying for six months.
It has hard seats and less space per passenger, and the airline even took out TVs from the seats.
Marriott’s top tier 100 night elite status is called Ambassador. The unique selling proposition is supposed to be a dedicated contact who takes care of all the member’s Marriott needs, ensuring a seamless experience.
Only they laid off these agents, and Ambassador members no longer get an Ambassador. Marriott is surveying how these top customers are managing under the new regime.
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.
Europe plans to open to vaccinated Americans this summer. Greece and Iceland have already done so, but we can expect France, Italy, Spain and others to follow suit.
And with little business travel yet, airlines are selling the front cabin at a real discount in many cases. But there’s an incredible deal right now on United Airlines partner and Star Alliance member TAP Air Portugal which has business class roundtrip fares from several U.S. cities to several points in Europe starting at just $873 roundtrip.
We tend to look at the success story countries and extrapolate from them, why can’t the U.S. be like Australia? And of course there are reasons like Australia not having to worry about the virus coming in from abroad in as uncontrolled a fashion since the country is an island. But do travel restrictions inside a country, like we’ve seen in Australia where citizens couldn’t travel between states for much of the pandemic, usually work so well?
A new paper out of the University of Chicago finds that domestic travel bans may be counterproductive for controlling spread of Covid-19.
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 »
