News notes from around the interweb:
- Are status match offers beneficial to airlines?
- Four potential buyers short-listed to take over Virgin Australia for everyone’s sake I hope it’s not Bill Franke’s Indigo Partners that’s chosen. Franke is best known for America West, Frontier, and Wizz Air.
- Wasn’t it just last month I told you that pilots are still waging the United Airlines 1985 strike?
#UnionStrong https://t.co/6qLb7Zbea0
— ALPA (@WeAreALPA) May 17, 2020
- In March Air Tahiti Nui set a record for world’s longest commercial airline flight with a non-stop Papeete, Tahiti to Paris Charles de Gaulle. French Bee has beaten that record flying Papeete, Tahiti to Paris Orly which is 8 miles farther. These are both domestic flights!
- United will limit employee nonrev travel to prevent crowding on flights.
- Remember when Arne Sorenson said resort fees are good for you?
Everyone: “Las Vegas won’t be the same!”
Cosmopolitan: pic.twitter.com/F6G0pKXdYo— Vital Vegas (@VitalVegas) May 16, 2020
Why must hotels call it a resort fee? I don’t even mind that I have to pay extra, I do mind that it is dishonestly labeled.
Call the fee a ROOM RATE BASELINE.
Or an UP YOURS FEE.
“Resort fee” is lazy, offensive, and dishonest.
Wow! For the low, low resort fee of $45 they even throw in free local calls! If I ask nicely will they include 2 free fax pages/stay?
You could have done such a better headline than this! How about 35 years later United Pilots remember those that held the line for the piloting profession? Your title reads to me like it’s a bad thing that we still remember the true professional pilots that stood their ground and wouldn’t back stab their fellow pilot because they knew their sacrifice to better the profession would be worth the risk. As a United Pilot that was only 3 when the strike happened I have the utmost respect for those that proudly wear their Battlestar pin and thank them for making the career what it is today (well minus the Covid 19 disaster of course).
Disappointing article about status matches, full of conjecture and misses the key points completely. No way are 60% of status matches fraudulent. Perhaps 60% are status matching from unearned status (i.e. from credit cards), but that’s not fraud, like the photoshopping the article repeatedly mentions.
The more interesting point to me, and fairly unexplored in the article: Is status matching an effective tool to switch loyalties? I just don’t think it really moves the needle as much as they’d like to think. If someone was so disgruntled with AA as to want to shift 100% of their business to Delta, they’d probably do it regardless of getting a status match. In the end, status matches probably result in a very marginal increase in revenue, with significant costs that the article does do a good job going through.
@WR2 +1
If companies were serious about status matches, they’d ask for better proof of status. And check for Photoshopping. It’s not that hard.
Since that United strike was prior to you even flying, you don’t realize how awful that strike was. United thought, it could rebuild the airline with new hires. Ferris and the “scabs” were never, ever forgiven. I don’t personally blame the pilots or the flight attendants. Non-union supporters want all the benefits that others earn thru their sacrifices. Ferris thought he could get a better deal than AA got from their pilots. But Ferris pushed it even further, he wanted pilots to stay on the lower scale for 20 years. Then Ferris kicked in the teeth of the striking pilots, by advocating for special seniority for non-striking pilots. The whole thing damaged United and customers felt it. Ferris was canned less than 2 years later. He was such a power freak.
Just stating that there is still a battle, and not covering the whole situation, is really one-sided.
It’s because of a tax loophole, they pay less taxes as a resort fee than they would if they added it otherwise.
It’s a simple solution, fix the taxes. It could be made revenue neutral without giving this incentive to the hoteliers to unbundle.
@JohnB “Since that United strike was prior to you even flying” I was flying in the 70s.
Re: the long domestic flights, the ground distance between arrival airports may be 8 miles, but as the articles states, “French Bee was able to beat this record by operating a 16,129km journey on May 14 from Papeete to Paris-Orly Airport, beating TN by 414km” due to flight path differences.
Thanks, Gary, for pointing out these overpaid crybabies. There’s no reason you should get 400,000 a year for being a glorified bus driver. And workplace bullying against colleagues? Should’ve been thrown right out on their a** and served a civil lawsuit.