Tag Archives for united airlines.
United’s MileagePlus program offers the most generous lifetime elite benefits. What United has gotten really good at in the past couple of years is recognizing lifetime achievement in the moment and making it special.
While it’s taken them a long time to get started replacing current cabins with new ones, the first plane – a 25 year old Airbus A319, registration N801UA – is in the shop for the retrofit.
The project will finish in less than 3 weeks, and then a 25 year old Airbus A320 goes in for work. Together these two will serve as prototypes for their respective fleets. And a photo of the retrofit process has leaked.
Right now United Airlines MileagePlus is making a lot of summer business class seats available to and from Europe at saver level pricing. For MileagePlus members that means you can book these seats between 60,000 miles each way, and may be able to add connecting flights within the U.S. and also in Europe onto your itinerary.
Delta lets passengers choose in advance the option to skip a meal, and save the airline money. Japan Airlines even suggests that doing so is a moral imperative.
This is a trend sweeping the industry, reducing food cost by getting passengers to pre-committing not to eat. United is a part of it too, and they are offering customers more than one choice now to nudge them not to eat. Both of these options that appear when pre-ordering mean the same thing, United can spend less on catering.
The idea that United Airlines could convert 175 domestic aircraft in 2023 seems unbelievable at first, considering they haven’t completed changes to prototype aircraft yet. However this is a scaled back ambition from 200 planes, and it’s not a notional number but one that’s tied to a real plan. It could still slip, but having over 300 planes including new aircraft with the new interior in service this year is a real possibility.
Dubbed United NEXT, the fleet plan was ambitious and positioned the airline as a more premium airline. And then… nothing happened. A year and a half passed and they didn’t actually do any of the retrofitting of their existing planes to offer more premium seats, seat back TV with bluetooth, and fast internet as they’d promised. There was hand waving about supply chain.
That’s finally changing.
United occasionally runs short-term award sales, and doesn’t always tell everyone. For Cyber Monday they ran up to 50% off coach awards to Europe and Asia Pacific.
Today they’re doing up to 47% off of Hawaii awards, with the best deals for elite members who also have a co-brand credit card.
The saga of one United Airlines customer’s lost bag, tracked down using an AirTag, is the story of one of these third party delivery services. The airline turns it over, and basically loses track of the bag, assuming that their contractor will do their job and make the delivery.
Captain Neil Swindells was elected to head the United Airlines pilot union in a controversial and close vote, where members of the group’s Master Executive Council tried to shut down discussion of his homophobic, misogynistic, and anti-Semitic online commentary.
I wrote, though, that he was unable to represent all of his pilot members equally. And this wasn’t just an internal pilot issue – the head of the pilot union gets a board seat at United Airlines. He was clearly unable to represent shareholders, either.
The Air Line Pilots Association negotiated a new contract with the airline. Seeing pilots at other airlines getting more than they had negotiated they ripped up the agreement rather than sending it to their members. And many United pilots now want a fight with the airline.
But just-elected Captain Neil Swindells is the wrong person to lead them, because he cannot represent the full membership of his union with racist and misogynistic commentary.
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 »
