News and notes from around the interweb:
- The strange story of Air Force One on 9/11
Copyright: icholakov / 123RF Stock Photo - Only a-holes recline their seats, the middle seat gets both armrests and wait for your gate checked bag against the opposite wall in an orderly line
- Earn Delta SkyMiles when you overpay for domain name registration (HT: laptop travel)
- Loyalty pioneer Hal Brierley who went from the launch of American AAdvantage to Vice President of Marketing at Pan Am and Senior Vice President of Marketing at Continental, and who also launched e-Rewards, is donating $10 million to support courses in customer engagement at Southern Methodist University business school. One tidbit about the current course there of note:
American Airlines gives [SMU] MBA students access to 10,000 anonymous AAdvantage members. The students trace every transaction and flight taken in the previous 36 months and analyze the activity against revenue and cost data.
At the end of the course, the students present their recommendations to AAdvantage executives.
- Ultra low cost carriers keep costs low by forcing passengers to behave in ways that are best for the airline rather than offering services most convenient to passengers. Whenever European low cost carrier Ryanair falls out of the news they talk about charging passengers to use the lavatory. Now they’re talking about requiring all passengers to download their mobile app.
- “British passenger who forced BA flight from London to Orlando to make an emergency landing in Boston had downed a DOZEN miniature bottles of wine” Hmm.. should airlines stop serving alcohol?
- Delta would’t let Olympic star Mo Farah’s family cut in front of coach passengers to board, when they hadn’t already boarded with first class passengers. And his wife went ballistic with a NSFW rant.
Why can’t American make the anonymized data available to everyone?
A lot of people doing data science projects. Frankly I trust an engineer more than a business suit.
Gary? I really have to ask you, what the **** is it with you and alcohol? Seriously. You post a link to an article about a man downing TWELVE bottles of wine in a seriously short period of time — part way into a trans-Atlantic flight — and then a link to your own blog post from three months ago. Why?
The article does not state what size these bottles were. You quote the article as saying it was a “dozen miniature bottles,” so I presume they were 125ml. Twelve of those equals a full LITER of wine. How often does ANYONE drink a full bottle of wine by themselves? Clearly that’s enough to render anyone completely inebriated, and a bottle contains only 750ml! The individual in question consumed one-third more PLUS distilled liquor — who is responsible for this? Again, I will tell you that in both the US and the UK (it was a British Airways flight), and in most other nations in the world, it is ILLEGAL to serve alcohol to someone who is inebriated. Period. Even fellow passengers know that (“I was sitting three seats from him and he drank 12 to 14 small bottles of wine and one vodka – all given to him by cabin crew in the first three-and-a-half hours of the flight. While the gentleman was totally out of order and a danger to staff and customers around him, BA should shoulder most of the blame.”)
The solution to this is NOT to punish the millions of airline passengers who occasionally have an alcoholic beverage while in the air because of a relatively small number of passengers who abuse the privilege, but rather by preventing that abuse of privilege in the first place!
Would the cabin crew serve a 12-year old a glass of Chardonnay, a Scotch on the rocks, or a can of Guinness? No? Why not, Gary? Because it’s illegal? Well it’s also illegal to serve alcohol to someone who is inebriated. Airlines need to re-enforce the training flight crews get re: the service of alcohol. This incident NEVER would have happened if the BA cabin crew followed their training and the Law, rather than passing the buck and leaving it to the captain to declare an emergency and divert the flight.