Tag Archives for united airlines.
Senator Ted Cruz left the country on Wednesday, flying United Airlines with his family to Cancun, as millions of Texans were without power during a once-in-a-generation weather event and near collapse of the state’s power grid. Many more (including me) are without water.
It looks now that he’s flown back to the U.S. – and while everyone else on the upgrade list cleared into business class, Cruz was the only passenger United left stuck in coach.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz just bailed on the state and headed for Mexico, in the midst of a tremendous crisis.
There’s not a ton that Texas Senator Ted Cruz can do to fix the problem now but it’s not a good look, bailing on Texas for a United flight out of Houston to Cancun for warmth while state utilities melt down.
A passenger on a Los Angeles – Tokyo flight last year attacked a flight attendant who refused him a cocktail. The captain diverted the flight to Anchorage, and now the man has to pay $49,793 to cover meals and lodging for passengers and crew during the diversion.
He doesn’t have to pay the airline’s additional costs, such as fuel or labor costs, resulting from the diversion. He’ll get 5 years of probation. But he won’t go to prison because his lawyer says he has diabetes, which is a co-morbidity for Covid-19. Covid-19 is his ‘get out of jail’ card.
United Airlines admits it made a mistake leaving New York JFK six years ago. They’ve been trying to get back in, and the pandemic gave them a chance. They announced service but delayed it last month. Now they’re delaying it again, and scaling back their initial flying to both San Francisco and Los Angeles to less than daily. There’s no word yet on whether they’ve found permanent flying rights from the airport, either.
Bringing a child under two with you in your lap when you travel on international award tickets just got a whole lot cheaper in some cases.
United recently made a change to their award ticket policies that’s a real improvement and ahead of other U.S. frequent flyer programs – and oddly they haven’t even announced it.
United Airlines announced this morning that it has made a commitment of more than a billion dollars to electric aircraft through a partnership with Archer Aviation to develop air taxis for urban markets, while asking the federal government for a multi-billion dollar third bailout.
The deal has United acquiring 200 electric planes that travel up to 60 miles, providing a cost and speed advantage to the airport compared to UberX and helicopters.
United Airlines Senior Vice President of Financial Planning John Gebo told the carrier’s employees that the carrier is open to mergers and acquisitions. My bet is this doesn’t happen, but there’s a way that it could.
Christopher Elliott has naughty and nice list for travel companies during the pandemic. He sees some behaving as though “they think COVID-19 is a hoax.” That seems like an odd position to take considering their billions of dollars of losses. But what he’s saying is that airlines and hotel companies are making travel more comfortable or fun, that encourages travel, and that’s bad. And the self-styled consumer advocate glosses over a company that tried to steal customers’ money because they promise to make employees take vaccines.
Two brothers were kicked off a United Airlines flight departing Newark on January 23 because they were wearing too much personal protective equipment, not too little. Usually we hear about anti-maskers. And Dr. Fauci even recommends wearing two masks. But United wasn’t having any of the more-protective masks these passengers wore.
In a move perhaps akin to selling upgrades from United Cargo to Economy, United is offering customers who buy basic economy tickets the ability to pay up after purchase to convert their ticket to regular economy.
With basic economy now a tool to segment business travelers from leisure travelers, and with virtually no business travelers, there’s little downside and only incremental revenue in offering passengers the ability to ‘buy out’ of the restrictions on the tickets they’ve purchased.
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 »
