A man pled guilty today and is expected to get probation after scamming American Airlines out of $160,000 in tickets paid for with gift cards.
Billy Schwarze booked travel for friends and family. He bought gift cards to pay for the tickets, and then refunded the tickets – to his own credit card. This cost American $160,000 “and his friends and associates..$20,000.”
When calculating the cost of ‘jobs saved’ for six months via a ‘clean extension’ of CARES Act payroll support, we were looking at a cost of $333,333 per job since most of the money goes to fund payroll that airlines will have whether a bill passes or not. In other words it funds $200,000+ a year pilots and it funds the salaries of executive management, having taxpayers pick up the tab rather than shareholders and creditors.
Now though against actual announced furloughs we’re looking at a cost of about $625,000 per job saved – and many of those will just mean job losses six months down the road.
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.
A passenger on an easyJet flight from Manchester to Tenerife used what some might call the Ted Cruz exception, milking a single food or beverage item for the full flight to take advantage of airline rules allowing passengers to go maskless while eating or drinking.
He says he doesn’t actually have an issue with masks, it was just an experiment to see if he could get away with it: he bought a can of Pringles potato chips on the flight, and spread 100 chips out across the length of the flight, making each chip last two and a half minutes.
Ironically, the airline says “[t]he passenger was removed for repeatedly disrupting the pre-flight safety briefing which includes reiteration of our inflight face-covering policy.”
On this delayed flight to Phoenix someone was airdropping porn from their iPhone. A flight attendant made an announcement telling parents to make sure kids with iphones have their bluetooth turned off, and that their setting won’t allow receiving files from people not on their contact list.
Airlines have delay codes for weather, mechanical, crew availability and a host of other reasons. This may be the first flight, however, that was delayed by porn.
The grand experiment in ‘work from home’ has gone better than expected for many companies. Employees all over the world are learning how to do it successfully. It’s not a replacement for in-person interaction, that will happen, just not as often in the office. We’re going to see a new kind of business travel, starting 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.
A passenger on Saturday evening’s American Airlines AA883 from Phoenix to Chicago O’Hare delayed all of his fellow customers by an hour when he refused to wear a mask and was removed from the flight.
As he was escorted off the Boeing 737-800, the man sang to himself and anyone in the cabin inclined to listen, “Trump Trump Trump Trump, Trump Trump Trump.”
Here’s how airlines decide to make confirmable upgrade space available. They project how many first class seats they may sell in the cabin, and leave a buffer.
Seats that they know won’t be sold for cash might be given away as upgrades – but they also want to make sure that frequent flyers don’t confirm upgrades instead of paying cash so they’ll limit upgrades even still (often to when first class seats are available inexpensively – then the revenue tradeoff isn’t great, and the temptation not to pay cash is small).
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 »
