News and notes from around the interweb:
- Austin airport’s new-ish ‘welcome back to travel’ video. Recommending showing up at the airport 2 to 2.5 hours prior to travel seems insane to me, and to ‘give yourself a little extra time’ on top of that if you’re checking luggage or returning a rental car (there’s no rental car shuttle needed here) seems doubly so.
The airport did just have its busiest day ever and security lines, especially without PreCheck or CLEAR can be long. They should call out the reason some people have to show up early! Oh, it’s also because Frontier and Allegiant passengers don’t realize they have to go to a whole different airport and that eats up half an hour.
- American Airlines has a new way to finance ticket sales. A surprising number of people finance their travel and Delta has even looked at offering financing as a tool to sell upgrades. The upside here is more sales, revenue off the revolve, and savings on credit card interchange.
New slogan: “American Airlines, Your Job Is Your Credit!”
- No one can undercut American Airlines from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh so they no longer try.
- IHG Rewards extended elite status through February 2023 leaving Hyatt as the only major hotel loyalty program in the U.S. not to do so (HT: One Mile at a Time) Of course there’s limited value in IHG status since they do not promise suite upgrades or even late checkout to their top elites.
- United elites lose their Hertz status benefit and Chase United cards lose it too. Delta elites still get Hertz status, remember when the rental car company joined SkyTeam? Not to worry, Hertz is an easy status match.
- Rough crowd.
Was this before or after the flight was cancelled?
— Jim McCall, APR (@JimMcCa11873622) October 28, 2021
Oh yeah, let’s offer financing on airline tix and upgrades … why didn’t I think of this? The people who are drowning in debt and have no money should be able to take trips, yes? It’s their right to travel and not being able to pay for a tix should be no barrier to them exercising their rights.
Judy Judy Judy!
Why are you worried about total strangers financial decisions!!??
Do I detect a bit of bias against the
“Deplorables?”
Touch your face!
Showing up at the airport 2.5 hours in advance might mean the difference between getting a seat on your flight. Or your bags being up in the air and still sitting at the airport wishing upon a star for the next flight, because the previously airplane was too jam packed with people who paid for tickets in advance before you.
Financing / payment plans were a big part of the airline business in the 1960s – take a look at some old timetables online
Greg – flight financing is back because everything old is new again – from the good old sky high inflation of the Carter 70s to the barely there crop of wannabe 60s astronuts.
Showing up at the airport a couple hours early sounds like perfectly normal advice to me. Of course the airport is going to err on the side of more time not less.
My home airport, the tiny VPS, was so overcrowded and understaffed this summer that’s two hours was suggested if you had Pre and priority check-in. If you were flying Allegiant and didn’t have Pre, 4 hours was a minimum if you wanted to make a flight. The TSA backup would get so bad that the general security line would stretch long outside into the passenger drop off zone and in the Florida summer, you’d get people passing out from the heat while in line. Allegiant gets their own concourse in 2022 which will fix a lot of the indoor overcrowding but not the understaffing
The 2.5 hour time might have been related to the Formula 1 race weekend, which had a very large group of pax wanting to leave right after the race.
Recently I’ve seen very long PreCheck lines early morning (6-ish), evidently caused by lack of enough TSA staff to open both lanes.
It may seem to Allegiant and Frontier pax that they have to go to a different airport, but it’s actually just a different terminal at the same airport.
Logan Airport is turning into a 2.5 hours in advance. Saturday 8 AM and who would have expected a 48 minute bag drop for B6, then a TSAPre line that snaked around the inside and went out the front door. I chose traditional security and made it through in minutes. We’ve been conditioned to pay for Pre but TSA isn’t staffed for that and B6 makes sure dozens of flights leave at the same time. Pre-pandemic things were rough for several hours a day but now Logan Airport is nothing short of horrific. If every bag drop station is covered and TSA has someone at every station it’s not a labor issue anymore, its greed trying to maximize revenue by pushing the gate use to the limit. And this is without any weather delays… Ugh. Flying just isn’t fun anymore.
I have found that if the Pre line is closed or long and you go through the regular line, you often still get Pre benefits – they’ll hand you a card indicating you’re a Pre and you’ll get guided to the Pre scanning station anyway or not have to remove your shoes, etc. You just hand the card back on the other side of the magnetometer. So do whatever gets you through security fastest. At least if you have Pre, you have a choice.
AUS is severely understaffed across the board recently, so I buy it.
I live approx equidistant to the two airports, and I used to probably pick AUS 60/40, but lately it’s been 90/10 SAT and will probably stay that way until AUS calms down, and that doesn’t look to be anytime soon.