Tag Archives for american airlines.
American Airlines has 9 hubs: Dallas Fort-Worth, Chicago O’Hare, Charlotte, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, New York JFK, and Washington National. Given recent service changes perhaps they should drop New York JFK and add Boston.
American AAdvantage has eliminated close-in booking fees. They used to charge a $75 fee for awards booked within 21 days of departure, waived for all AAdvantage elite frequent flyers. They no longer charge this fee effective today, January 15.
Southwest Airlines sells most of its tickets directly. It doesn’t pay third parties to distribute its flights to consumers. It was the first major airline with a website (1996) and one of the first e-commerce sites to hit a billion dollars in revenue in a year.
Major U.S. airlines are a lot larger now and most transactions have migrated online. American shared with employees last week that they hit a new milestone for revenue generated at their AA.com website.
In a note Tuesday morning, Senior Vice President David Seymour congratulated employees on the airline’s “best-ever performance for both the holiday peak travel period and the entire fourth quarter of 2019.” Here are the numbers.
American created ‘Project Kodiak’ to tweak first class: Fixing row 1’s legroom, fixing underseat storage, improving separation between first and coach, and adding tablet holders and USB power to first class.
Kodiak retrofits are underway. One surprise is that it appears there’s a plane with seat back video in for retrofit, ripping out TV screens. American had previously said that these planes would receive their retrofits last so that customers could keep screens as long as possible. That appears not to have been accurate.
Brian Kelly from The Points Guy interviewed American AAdvantage President Bridget Blaise-Shamai and got some interesting tidbits from her – that they don’t plan to eliminate award charts like Delta and United have – and some answers that I’d, shall we say, take issue with.
n America Airlines passenger tells the story about buying a paid transpacific business class ticket on American Airlines but being downgraded for their Chicago – Tokyo flight a few weeks ago when their inbound Boston – Chicago flight was delayed.
The passenger says their Boston – Chicago flight was running late due to crew availability (a flight attendant “had woken up late and was on her way”) and that meant arriving into Chicago 45 minutes late. They had to run to their connecting gate, but they made it while the Tokyo flight was still boarding.
American Airlines has previously said they’ve lost about $580 million from the grounding of the MAX. I actually don’t believe they’ve lost anything close to that since they’ve largely cut what they believe are the biggest money losing flights.
However the fact that American is saying they’ll contribute an additional $30 million to employee profit sharing gives us some indication of the value of the settlement.
Airlines are tightening their belts, trying to cut what it costs them to give out denied boarding compensation to passengers when they overbook a flight. Both United and American have copied Delta in soliciting ‘bids’ from customers for what compensation they’d accept, hoping to avoid bidding wars at the gate.
In the wake of United’s April 2017 passenger dragging incident – where David Dao was told to give up his seat for two crewmembers and refused, winding up bloodied by airport – there was a huge public backlash against bumping passengers off of overbooked flights. And airlines started paying out far more compensation to avoid involuntarily denying boarding to passengers.
The story of a “mileage run gone wrong” by a former producer of The Bachelor lit up the internet. It was a crazy story of a last minute flight out of the country to earn American Airlines status that went bad.
Many observers have tried to pick apart the story as ‘too good’. It turns out to be at least mostly true.
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 »
