Tag Archives for united airlines.
United Airlines is bringing back Los Angeles – Sydney service starting September 10, three days a week – Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. It’s part of larger growth in their schedule that includes a return of Chicago – Hong Kong and starting up Chicago – Tel Aviv.
But there’s something really interesting about the Los Angeles – Sydney service.
United’s CEO is personally approving ice, coffee and tea. That’s Scott Kirby the micro-manager, in contrast American’s CEO wasn’t involved in the decision to eliminate meals from first class on most of their domestic flights.
Before the global pandemic, Apple was United’s largest corporate customer spending $150 million with the airline. Unsurprisingly United’s San Francisco hub captures a large amount of Northern California tech business, and Apple is one of the biggest spenders on travel.
With significant suppliers and manufacturing in China, Apple had been booking one quarter of total company spend on just the San Francisco – Shanghai route, a total of 50 business class seats a day.
Southwest, Delta, and JetBlue are limiting the number of seats they sell on each flight so there’s no need for passengers to occupy middle seats. Sometimes middle seats will be taken, but that usually means families traveling together. American Airlines has been limiting loads about half as much as others – but that ends July 1.
United Airlines, in contrast, has been happy to sell a ticket for any seat on any flight and fill all the middles throughout the COVID crisis. Starting July 1 even more of those middle seats will be filled.
Turkish Airlines has 4 or more business class award seats available most dates next year, January – May 2021, from a variety of U.S. gateways. You can claim these seats using miles from a variety of different Star Alliance carriers, and connect onward to Eastern Europe, Mideast, Southeast Asia or Africa.
United is also offering wide open business class award space on several transatlantic routes.
You may be familiar with — and even outraged by — the famous lawsuit against McDonald’s by Stella Liebeck who was burned by hot coffee.
The jury’s $2.7 million award has long been a poster child for tort reform (the judge actually reduced her award to $480,000). That lawsuit brought change though – albeit not to United Airlines.
The program’s $5 billion in new debt could create strong incentive for current cash flow versus long-term stewardship and profitability. Of course that is not new in the airline industry, at this time, or at United under Scott Kirby’s leadership in particular.
United won’t get law enforcement involved or divert a flight. They won’t even threaten the ban to get compliance from the customer. Instead, the flight attendant can report the customer after the flight for an investigation.
If they’re not even going to mention the possibility of a ban when a customer refuses to wear a mask on board, they’re not actually serious about getting passengers to wear masks inflight.
United Airlines shopped the MileagePlus loyalty program around to lenders to raise cash, and they had to present a lot of internal data as part of the process. Now that the transaction is moving forward, they’ve had to make this data public.
Here’s how the $5 billion loan is going to work, and some facts about the program they hadn’t previously revealed.
United operates three different routes between the U.S. and India and all three have wide open business class award space looking out into 2021 – for months at a time.
I decided to show connecting availability also because it’s worth flagging business class award space for four or more people on Swiss through Zurich and Turkish via Istanbul. There’s even Air Canada business class Delhi – Vancouver for four passengers on Tuesdays.
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 »
