Last month President Trump said air travel is safe because he’s tough on the airlines.
This pasat week he said air travel is safe because some pilots carry guns.
Tag Archives for usairways.
by Gary Leff
Last month President Trump said air travel is safe because he’s tough on the airlines.
This pasat week he said air travel is safe because some pilots carry guns.
by Gary Leff
American used to share a ton of information about the financials of the AAdvantage program in their annual 10-K SEC filing. They stopped doing that last year. They no longer tell us how many members there are in the program, how many miles were issued, sold to third parties, and remain outstanding like they did up until two years ago.
Nonetheless as a result of their newly filed 2017 SEC 10-K form we know that the percentage of American’s seats occupied by award travelers dropped again in 2017, after a drop in 2016. When US Airways management took over there was clearly a new philosophy of not releasing award seats to customers.
by Gary Leff
Dropping to 20 or 24 business class seats would make awards and upgrades super difficult on the aircraft (awards are nearly impossible now in business class as it is).
It would represent a loss of 14% or 28% of the business class seats on the aircraft. In contrast United’s Boeing 787-8s have 36 business class seats.
by Gary Leff
American Airlines has myriad aircraft in different configurations from legacy American Airlines decisions before the merger and from US Airways, and a series of individual decisions along the way. Customers can luck out with better aircraft for passenger experience and worse aircraft.
They’re making efforts to standardize the fleet where they can, and that means the 13 Boeing 777-200s with 45 business class seats will each be losing 8 seats up front.
by Gary Leff
US Airways-turned American President is now United’s President and the airline is on a quest to ‘densify’ aircraft making them less comfortable for passengers.
United Boeing 757-300s currently have 213 seats (189 coach and 24 first class). In December a leaked memo showed that they’re taking Boeing 757-300s up to 234 seats (210 coach and 24 first class). That’s 21 more coach seats.
by Gary Leff
American’s CEO Doug Parker says he thought the airline “could live with” not offering seat power on their legacy US Airways aircraft, and that he’s never flown the new Boeing 737 MAX — which reduces seat pitch for customers and shrinks the lavatories.
by Gary Leff
USAirways has apparently added a $5 surcharge to flights booked on its own website. CrankyFlier has the goods. This seems inconsistent with USAirways’ own policiesThere is no booking fee for tickets purchased or redeemed on usairways.com. However, when CrankyFlier confronted USAirways with evidence — that the website was pricing out itineraries $5 higher than the airline’s published fares — they acknowledged it, but refuse to call it a booking fee. [T]he $5 increase you’re seeing is essentially a fare increase to fares booked at usairways.com.” Regardless of the semantics, it is now $5 more expensive to book tickets at usairways.com than it is to book at some other online engines such as Priceline.com (their traditional airfare booking site, not the name your own price site – Priceline doesn’t add booking fees). Even booking through Expedia,…
by Gary Leff
Juniper Bank, which issues the USAirways Mastercard — one of the better airline mileage card values — now has a business card though it isn’t quite as lucrative. The best offers for the personal card include two years fee-free, 50% bonus miles on first year spending, and 15,000 miles with first purchase. The business card will match the signup bonus but at a $79 annual fee. (There’s a no fee version with just 5000 bonus miles at signup.)
by Gary Leff
Via NotiFlyer, a new search engine is launching that’ll pay you miles (up to 1000 a month with your choice of Delta, Alaska, Midwest, Northwest, USAirways or Continental) for using it.Sign up at Zoomiles.com for an invitation when the site launches.I’m willing to try it, though I’m skeptical. Miles are enough to get me to try an alternative to Google, but 1000 miles a month aren’t enough to get me to accept an inferior alternative. So we’ll see.
by Gary Leff
USAirways and most other airlines have offered status matches — a way to pilfer the best customers of other airlines. Elite status with an airline usually locks a customer into flying that airline. They get upgrades, bonus miles, and other perks. How can they give that up, even to change to another airline? Airlines make it easier for customers to switch by advancing status to customers who already have it with a competitor — if I were an American Platinum member I could get Continental to give me Gold status right away so I’d still have elite benefits when I switched. (The definitive discussion of the subject is a Flyertalk thread I started in October, 2003 that’s still going strong.) Most US domestic airlines offer status matches of one kind or another. American has long…
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 »