Tag Archives for southwest airlines.
I submitted a new status challenge request around 4 p.m. on Sunday and then before 8 a.m. on Monday I had already been approved for another status challenge. They’ve added a quirk I don’t recall from the challenge last time. Fortunately there’s a way around it.
Since I earned the full year’s status through last year’s challenge, during the back half of 2018, I assumed I would have the status for all of 2019 and I’d be able to spend all of 2019 requalifying in order to keep the status for 2020. However, oddly, that’s not how this works.
Choose the airline with the best schedule, where they’re equivalent with the best reliability, and for regular coach comfort go with Southwest. Since I need to work inflight pretty much all the time I prefer American or Delta, United still isn’t an option though if I lived on Staten Island I’ve fly out of Newark and sacrifice productivity.
No airline is all things to all people, no airline frequent flyer program among those four carriers is a real differentiator and reason to go out of your way to fly a specific airline, but it’s useful to stick with one carrier and earn status where you can. Your miles will be earned through things other than flying and there flexible points transfer programs are best.
Ariline Weekly founding editor Seth Kaplan writes at The Points Guy that Southwest Airlines may be doing worse at New York LaGuardia than at Newark, and they pulled out of Newark. He says they shouldn’t pull out of LaGuardia, though, and shouldn’t have left Newark.
The challenge of course is that at this point, given slot controls at two of the three New York airport and shortage of gates, it’s incredibly difficult to re-enter the market if you leave. Do they need to change their business model to succeed?
Scott is a Southwest Airlines agent in Phoenix. The day after a United Airlines passenger was dragged off a flight in Chicago, he came up with a song to let passengers know they were valued – and wouldn’t be dragged off on Southwest.
Now he greets arriving flights with his song, to the tune of the theme to The Golden Girls, it’s “Thank You for Flying Southwest”
It was one fateful phone call with Boeing — while Southwest founding President Lamar Muse and co-founder Rollin King were meeting with the Douglas Aircraft Company — that led the airline to go with the 737.
Now they have over 750 of the aircraft. However they could look beyond the Boeing 737 for their future.
On May 19, 1967, Roy Knight, Jr. was shot down in Vietnam. The Air Force major was “attacking a target on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. He was missing in action, promoted to Colonel, and seven years later declared killed in action.
The Southwest Captain, who brought his father back to Dallas where he’d said his goodbyes 52 years earlier, can now close a chapter on a life that was “posthumously awarded the Air Force Cross, Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart and six Air Medals for his actions.”
Back on October 16 a man flying Southwest from Los Angeles to Dallas claimed to be flirting, playing footsie with his seat opponent, and even argued that she had come on to him. She asked for a new seat though, and he got up and followed appearing to keep up his romantic pursuit.
The man, who was released on parole days before the flight, had overdosed on heroin three days prior to travel and used used methamphetamine just the day before.
There are a few aviation photos that are considered trophies. Photo sitting inside an engine?
Check. Photo sitting in the cockpit? Check.
On Monday a Southwest Airlines flight attendant greeted passengers boarding a Nashville – Atlanta flight from inside an overhead bin.
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 »
