Tag Archives for united airlines.
Usually onboard harassment involves a creepy guy and alcohol. This time onboard harassment involved alcohol and a creepy girl. Maybe that only happens, or at least happens most often, when the victim plays in the NFL.
In order to lay off pilots, United’s union contract requires them to remove seats from regional jets. They’re preparing the engineering work now in order to have seats out of planes by October 1.
While they expect to be a smaller airline, and for leisure travel to come back before business travel, they see opportunity to encourage existing co-brand credit card customers to spend more on their cards and are preparing new promotions to encourage that.
According to financial markets, the major U.S. airline most likely to wind up in bankruptcy is American, followed by United.
At this point the big airlines talk about how much cash they have to make it through this year. But that’s not the issue. After $58 billion in subsidies allocated to commercial airlines, airlines will make it through 2020. The question is what happens in 2021.
My dinner parties could use some new recipes featuring “the ingredients, techniques and flavors of” United Polaris on board dining. Don’t tell my wife, she’s a former professional chef. But shouldn’t we all have a ‘seasonal salad’ in our repertoire that is the same every season?
Unsurprisingly with so little demand for air travel airlines are doing their best to get workers to take leaves and early retirements. United has a new offer that includes airline elite status and miles.
Ellen Church was a pilot and a nurse. She sought a pilot job with United Airlines (then Boeing Air Transport) but got nowhere. Then she suggested the airline hire traveling nurses, helping to ease the fear of flying people had so early on in aviation.
She was hired in 1930 as head stewardess and she then hired seven other women on a three month trial basis. They formed the ‘original eight’ of what would become flight attendants.
Airlines are required to provide a refund when they cancel a flight, or make a significant change to their schedule. Federal law does not define what either of these two things mean, so airlines can create their own definition as long as it’s reasonable. United has adopted an unreasonable interpretation.
However the Department of Transportation reminds that even that new interpretation cannot be applied retroactively to tickets that were purchased before it went into effect.
Delta and American Airlines are limiting the number of seats they’ll sell on each flight, to give customers confidence they can travel without having another passenger squeezed up next to them in a middle seat. United is not doing this, and says if you don’t want to be crammed in next to someone else then don’t take the flight.
Redeeming airline miles or hotel points for retail products is almost never going to be a good deal. The loyalty program has to actually buy the item, perhaps they’re getting a modest deal compared to street prices but there’s usually a third party managing the process for them too that takes a cut. There’s not going to be any leverage redeeming miles this way.
United has gotten a lot of attention for taking government money to save jobs while at the same time planning publicly to furlough workers and to terminate non-union employees without severance.
Is United’s Scott Kirby painting a picture of job losses one month before the election to leverage the President to support a second round of bailouts for the airline industry?
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 »
