Tag Archives for austin.
The Austin airport was supposed to be getting a new lounge accessible by American Express Platinum cardmembers. A contract was set to be awarded right before the pandemic. But the owners of Priority Pass disputed the award, wanting to build their own club. This stalled the process, the award was cancelled, and now the airport says they have no plans to try again.
When face mask policies were introduced for air travel last year, ‘but I’m drinking’ became a common excuse and passengers could nurse a Starbucks throughout the entire flight. This is no longer acceptable, or at least while some passengers will still do it – and some flight attendants allow it – the rule doesn’t permit it and you may get kicked off the plane.
Reclining seats has been a flashpoint between passengers for years. Spirit Airlines seats don’t recline at all – imagine the conflict on a Spirit flight if they did. Spirit has claimed their seats are ‘pre-reclined’.
But what happens when an American Airlines regional jet flight has a seat that’s pre-reclined, possibly due to poor maintenance?
Major airlines today seem more worried that some member, somewhere might actually benefit from a promotion than they seem to care the promotion actually incentivizing customer behavior.
With the return to travel, and passenger growth at the airport, the South Terminal is seeing more passengers than ever before and it cannot fit them all. So passengers are being kept outside the terminal in tents. In the Central Texas summer.
Austin plans to eliminate its nearly new second terminal to make way for growth of the 1999-era main terminal. One of the fastest growing airports in the country for several years running, they’re figuring out how to accommodate the flights passengers want and airlines want to offer. But in the process they risk what makes the airport so attractive to fly out of in the first place.
American Airlines is launching service between Austin and Washington Dulles in August. This flight is absolutely ideal for me. I live in Austin and in the Before Times my most frequent destination was Washington DC – a minimum of once a month, and often twice.
But the flight times are terrible – scheduled to allow a single plan to operate the route, rather than being scheduled for the business travelers who would actually take the flight.
For years Austin has been one of the fastest-growing aviation markets in the country, tracking the city’s growth more generally. Before the pandemic American Airlines was looking at three new routes to augment its flights to hubs.
Earlier this year they announced 10 new routes. The ones that have launched are doing well. Now they’re announcing 14 new routes, 5 of which are international. They’re converting seasonal service to year-round. And adding frequencies to existing routes. All in all they’re quadrupling their destinations in a little over a year.
American Airlines passengers have built Austin into a make-your-own connecting hub, using the ramp-up in Austin destinations and the run-up in prices for flights they’d traditionally take as an excuse to use this smaller, friendlier airport for easy connections and savings. That’s helped achieve record-high load factors for Austin flights, even for the airline’s new routes.
American Airlines is launching 7 new year-round routes out of Austin and 3 seasonal routes. American is the second largest carrier at the Austin airport, behind Southwest, and historically it has produced some of their highest non-hub yields. With these additions, together with their partners they’ll service 26 destinations from Austin.
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 »
