Tag Archives for american.
Supermodel Chrissy Teigen is a legit frequent flyer who longs to blog about airline food instead of gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated.
Her twitter feed is must-follow for the latest in passenger experience.
When hotels began their loyalty programs a lot more attention was paid to airline programs. Guests were regularly given the choice to each points with the hotel’s program or earn airline miles. Hilton made their name with the ‘double dip’ giving you both points and miles, you didn’t have to choose. Hotel programs have all grown up, and double dipping (earning styles) go away April 1.
Hyatt though is offering its own double dip with American AAdvantage through June 30.
Through July 4 and then starting again August 7 and ending December 6 there’s great availability for four passengers in business class on American’s New York JFK – Rio de Janeiro flight.
Not quite as good but there’s availability for four passengers in business class New York JFK – Sao Paulo as well, and a bit better for two passengers.
The latest American Airlines “Tell Me Why” podcast for employees explains how they choose aircraft for routes, where to fly to, and why they’ve scaled back so many destinations from New York.
Over time the American Airlines video will take on less importance on domestic flights. That’s because the new standard domestic configuration does not include seat back video or drop down screens in the cabin either.
However in the meantime the airline has made a minor tweak to the way the video plays on overhead screens, and in March the change will roll out to those aircraft with seat back monitors.
There’s a business class fare from June through early December of $1292 roundtrip between New York and Buenos Aires on Star Alliance carrier Avianca.
In contrast American Airlines non-stop business class is generally over $3000 (and sometimes $4000) on this route.
Delta, American and United keep arguing that Emirates, Qatar, and Etihad accept government subsidies and that this violates the Open Skies treaties that the U.S. has signed with the UAE and Qatar. Only it doesn’t violate those treaties. At all. Anyone that reads the treaties knows that.
In the old Aaron Sorkin HBO series The Newsroom the cast makes an important point about journalism. The media is biased towards fairness and simply doesn’t call a lie a lie.
American used to share a ton of information about the financials of the AAdvantage program in their annual 10-K SEC filing. They stopped doing that last year. They no longer tell us how many members there are in the program, how many miles were issued, sold to third parties, and remain outstanding like they did up until two years ago.
Nonetheless as a result of their newly filed 2017 SEC 10-K form we know that the percentage of American’s seats occupied by award travelers dropped again in 2017, after a drop in 2016. When US Airways management took over there was clearly a new philosophy of not releasing award seats to customers.
Whenever there’s an aircraft evacuation there are photos of passengers taking personal items out of the plane. Sometimes it’s a purse or laptop bag from underneath their seat. Other times it’s the rollaboard out of the overhead bin.
ViaSat internet has been free. They’ve been working out kinks since the beginning. On the inaugural 737 MAX flight at the end of November ViaSat internet simply didn’t work much. When it did work it wasn’t fast.
ViaSat installations are working better now. A few planes have Gogo and ViaSat retrofits now. And American is prepared to start charging in March.
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 »
