Thai Airways has opened a refurbished Royal Orchid business class lounge in Bangkok. It’s an international departures lounge on level 3 of the Suvarnabhumi airport E concourse. It’s a strange time to be making capital investments and opening a lounge when the airline is not generally selling international flights leaving the country.
While Qantas CEO Alan Joyce was the first to voice a plan to permit only passengers who have been vaccinated to fly internationally, U.S. airlines are considering a vaccination requirement as well.
They want to figure out whether this will give customers confidence to travel, and whether requirements can be made uniform across airlines so they don’t have to compete for customers with vaccine policies. A vaccine requirement though will be unnecessary by the time the vaccine is available enough for this to become possible.
The new American Airlines safety video was supposed to debut back in April. It was delayed due to the pandemic. They queued it for December rollout, but decided it wasn’t a good time and tried to pull it back.
Many of the employees featured in the safety video are… no longer employees. They’ve been furloughed since the video was shot.
Yesterday I wrote about American’s holiday gift promotion and new targeted promotions for flying. Offers are now live in member accounts. What gift did you receive, and what offer was targeted to encourage you to fly?
Here’s what I got – I’m left shaking my head.
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.
Outside of Chase transfers to Hyatt, conversions of transferrable points into hotel points is simply a bad deal and a 30% transfer bonus doesn’t reverse that calculus. American Express points are just too valuable to transfer to Marriott given the weak transfer ratio.
A naked woman, wearing only white slippers, shocked Atlanta airport staff as she sauntered through the terminal on Tuesday. As she passed by one staff member she stopped to do a jig. Naturally, there’s video.
Back in April I shared details of the new American Airlines safety video. The airline held off releasing it because of the Covid-19 pandemic. I only posted an 18 second snippet to offer a taste, looking forward to the airline’s planned release.
Now, however, the video is playing temporarily on 70 aircraft so I’m happy to share it in full.
Whether 2021 status requirements are set too high or too low really isn’t clear yet, because we don’t know what travel is going to look like even as it starts to come back once the pandemic begins to get under control. And not all benefits are scarce, so that more elites mean fewer benefits for those who earn it ‘the hard and usual way’.
If it turns out there are too many elites, how a program handles that is still entirely within their control. But we’re going to have to wait to see how the 2021 travel year develops, and how programs continue to respond. Laying out elite qualifying criteria is the start of this, not the finish.
Gogo has gotten out of the business of providing inflight internet to commercial airlines and will focus on the private jet market instead. They sold their commercial aviation business to Intelsat.
Intelsat believes it can negotiate more favorable terms with airlines (raise prices) and offer more bandwidth (allowing Delta to make internet free to passengers). Intelsat will lease Gogo’s air-to-ground network for 10 years as part of the deal, because commercial airlines (especially regional jets, which largely lack the capacity for satellite internet antennas) still use the technology.
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 »
