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.
An African American social service worker is suing American Airlines after she was accused of kidnapping a one year old white baby while traveling with him on a flight. She was accused of “holding a kidnap victim.” In fact she was returning from a two week court-ordered visit for the child with his father.
See something, say something isn’t just for airport security, it’s supposed to stop human trafficking and travel industry employees are asked to speak up when their prejudices training makes them think something could be amiss.
Florida Senator Rick Scott thinks it is wrong wrong wrong that airlines took payroll support money and are going to turn around and furlough workers – and he wants to meet with airline CEOs to give them a piece of his mind!
Senator, let me save these CEOs the time of meeting with you so they can focus on saving their businesses.
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.
Vietnam, with its borders still closed to the world, actually has more domestic flying scheduled now than they had a year ago. Vietnam is one of the countries that did the best battling COVID-19, despite sharing a land border with China. They haven’t had a single death.
China, too, has brought back substantial flying – and is at nearly 85% of the domestic seat capacity that it was a year ago. That may not be all driven by demand, but by a mandate to keep workers employed and the economy moving even when flights aren’t full.
The U.S. is actually only 11th in bringing back domestic flying capacity.
The Bahamas is trumpeting their re-opening plan to welcome tourists. Americans can visit with a negative Covid-19 PCR test and filling out a health screening.
The Covid-19 test just has to be within 10 days of travel. That’s convenient given how backed up testing is in the U.S. But it’s also useless – in fact a positive test that’s 10 days old might be better!
This new American Airlines-JetBlue partnership paints a path forward for American Airlines to grow and compete in New York, one of the key elements that has been missing from its strategy, including from its co-brand credit card strategy. It has the potential to make American Airlines more relevant to cardmembers in the financially-important New York market, just as the Alaska Airlines partnership can help in the Bay Area and Seattle where tech money is significant. Whether or not this succeeds comes down to execution and whether the partnerships grow to their potential.
Frequent flyers know the feeling of waiting for a ‘battlefield promotion’ at the gate. We have our elite status and upgrade requested, and we’re hovering waiting to see what our chances are.
Now you don’t have to wait until four hours prior to flight to begin refreshing the upgrade list obsessively in the American Airlines mobile app because it now shows your flight’s upgrade list 12 hours prior to departure.
American Airlines told employees today that revenue was down 80% in June and they believe that’s “better than others in the industry.” And they shared that “demand for air travel is slowing again.” As a result they have to be prepared to slim down staff once government payroll subsidies run out October 1.
They believe they will have 20,000 too many employees at that point, but they’re sending out 24,248 notices of potential job loss. Here how the notices break down by work group, and what (more senior and expensive) employees are being offered as an alternative to leave voluntarily.
Today American is sending WARN Act notices to about 25,000 employees, but they want those employees to lobby for more federal government subsidies to stay on payroll.
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 »
