Tag Archives for american airlines.
American Airlines has added a second daily Dallas Fort-Worth – Rome flight for a limited summer season, July 2nd through August 17. That’s a peak of peak travel period.
While the pre-existing daily flights, AA239 and AA240, appear to rarely if every offer award or upgrade space (as we have come to expect from American Airlines), this new flight appears to have upgrade but no award space open every single day and indeed open with enough seats for the whole family.
American’s new overhead bins have enough space for each passenger on a full plane to bring a standard-sized carry on bag on board, which means passengers shouldn’t have to gate check their bags. That’s great for passengers, and also for the airline because gate checking can cause delays.
With more bags inside than before, the overhead bins can get heavy and difficult to close. It turns out there’s a trick to it.
Customers flying first class on regional jets have traditionally been given a ‘yellow tag’ for their carry on. The purpose is so that those bags get priority.
Starting November 11th these yellow tags will become an Executive Platinum and ConciergeKey benefit. Instead of just being available to first class passengers (on regional jets with first class), they’ll also be a top tier elite benefit when those customers are flying coach.
American Airlines is looking to reduce the cost of delivering checked checked bags – and as a result
they are “in the process of reviewing” their policy of standby free of charge (or for a fee) for elite customers who have checked bags.
With this change – reversing the benefit American trumpeted a decade ago that one way awards would never cost more than half a round trip – there was no press release.
Nonetheless it makes sense in the new world American AAdvantage has put itself in. Paid roundtrips are still sometimes less expensive than two one ways for international travel. It’s not surprising that awards would mirror this.
American Airlines released third quarter earnings and held their earnings call this morning. The carrier reported $557 million in pre-tax income for the quarter.
Their 4.6% pretax margin during the peak summer third quarter is weak. However CEO Doug Parker kept his job through the quarter and that’s the biggest victory for this management team after alienating employees, shareholders, and customers.
Three years ago I wrote about the problem of gate agents skipping over people for upgrades if they weren’t waiting at the gate. American has just sent out a memo addressing this problem.
Airlines fight tooth and nail to operate on time. When they’re lucky they push back a few minutes early. It isn’t often you see flights leaving 5 to 7 hours before they’re scheduled to depart. However a unique situation in Santiago, Chile is causing American Airlines to leave that much earlier than planned.
Are these recent reports from American Airlines international first class really that surprising, when there’s so little emphasis on what service delivery for premium customers looks like at American?
I criticize many of the decisions that American Airlines leadership have made. They’ve managed to anger shareholders, employees, and customers alike. While racking up more debt and worse operating statistics than competitors they’ve also re-started their project to degrade the domestic product.
There’s one area though that they’ve performed at an outstanding level.
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 »
