Japan Airlines has a new cost-saving measure they’re testing on Bangkok – Tokyo Haneda overnight flights (JL flight 34): letting customers choose in advance to skip meal service in exchange for an amenity kit.
United Airlines has announced that they’ll reduce greenhouse gas emissions 100% by 2050, making a bolder claim than world airlines through trade association IATA which commit to a 50% reduction in carbon footprint by 2050. Both goals are far enough off as to be largely symbolic, but what’s got great potential here is the path United plans to pursue to get there.
The airline will invest in directly removing carbon from the atmosphere – not feel-good measures like planting trees where the accounting is murky. The technology is too expensive today, but payment processor Stripe just announced their own investments here. Adding United and perhaps soon others could help bring about critical mass that makes this technology viable to solve our environmental problems.
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.
There can be long lines to wait in when you land in Hawaii, not always well socially-distanced, to show you’ve met the state’s testing requirements to avoid a 14 day quarantine. And the state makes mistakes, too, one family showed up with negative results from an approved testing provider but was told to quarantine anyway by mistake. By the time the state sorted it out, they’d already turned back around and flown home to California.
Fortunately there’s now a solution to all of this.
A video viewed nearly 110 million times, and liked 11 million, shows a woman clipping and destroying the hair of the passenger seated in front of her on a flight when the woman keeps flipping her hair over the seatback and blocking the video screen behind her.
It speaks to something we all feel sitting in the confined space of an economy cabin when another passenger violates norms and invades our limited space, captured by the comment “I fully support their actions.”
Here’s a new twist on the age old marriage proposal in the skies. A woman who met ‘her soulmate’ online 10 days earlier showed up at the Las Vegas airport to propose to him.
Since meeting they had video chatted every night, but they had never met in person. This would be their first time seeing each other in person – and he doesn’t know she’s coming.
As the weather has turned colder in much of the country this presents a challenge. It’s no longer viable for many restaurants to attract diners to an outdoor setting. So some restaurants have turned to offering meals inside private hotel suites. Hotels are frequently empty, so there’s an easy unused resource to leverage and private rooms provide guests the comfort and safety of outdoors, without being subject to the elements.
Low yield traffic may lead the way out of the pandemic, and if there’s hope for success it’s precisely that Jet Airways sat out Covid-19 in bankruptcy court – they already went bankrupt – and reviving the concept might mean facing scaled back competition, albeit alongside scaled back demand.
Etihad owns a 49% stake in Air Serbia, and the Serbian government owns the other 51%. This was one of the better airline investments previous Etihad management made in its effort to acquire stakes in airlines and redirect their traffic through its hub in Abu Dhabi. But it’s now falling apart.
Etihad has terminated flights from its Abu Dhabi hub to Belgrade, and will reportedly end its codesharing with the carrier it half owns next year.
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.
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 »
