News and notes from around the interweb:
- Wut? Delta is ‘celebrating’ open skies agreements, even after spending huge amounts of money on lobbyists and P.R. trying to get the U.S. to abrogate its open skies treaties with Qatar and the U.A.E. Of course Northwest, acquired by Delta, was the major beneficiary of the first open skies treaty with the Netherlands (home to KLM).
- Airbnb search tip:
- Sleazy major devaluation of the international Radisson Rewards program (not the U.S. program).
- Air Canada Has Been Ordered to Pay Compensation to a Passenger Refused Boarding After Recently Testing Positive For COVID-19 The details aren’t nearly so crazy – the passenger’s positive test was old enough that they should have been eligible to fly (10 days after a positive test a new negative one wasn’t required) but airport agents confused their carrier’s own rules.
- How Holiday Inn hotels are supposed to welcome you into their restaurants. Because, yeah, all of them do this.
- Oh, and Holiday Inn breakfasts are just like this.
- Hilarious old training video encouraging hotels to sign guests up for Marriott Rewards.
So, Marriott International gives performance-related bonuses to properties that sign-up the most new members of the loyalty program?
This seems ripe for fraud. It makes you wonder how many of the Bonvoy accounts are fraudulent or duplicative. I could see a rogue property signing up every guest as a member of Bonvoy even if they didn’t ask to join. After all, it’s pretty easy to create a bunch of Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail accounts using the names of non-Bonvoy member guests.
Maybe financial analysts should ask Marriott about this on its next corporate earnings call.
One of the few times I hear Marriott pronounced correctly.
@ Gary– I think I’m switching my businessn to Holiday Inn. For the breakfast.