“Dude, Where’s My Upgrade?” Why More Fliers with Miles and Status Get Stuck in Coach
by Janice Hough
www.ConsumerTraveler.com
While airlines like to promote free tickets with their mileage programs, the award that many even semi-regular clients want is an upgrade. These are the very awards that are getting harder to get.
At a time when flying has increasingly become an ordeal, an upgrade can often make the difference between a very pleasant and a miserable, cramped experience. Personally, give me a good book and an occasional glass of wine and I find flying in business class a mini-vacation.
Over the years, I’ve often had to waitlist upgrades for clients at the time of booking; generally, with enough advance notice, they clear. At least they used to.
These days, I have had clients waitlist 10 months in advance with no luck. Even elite fliers with 100,000 mile a year haven’t been upgraded on flights with over 40 business class seats left at the time of booking. Especially on transatlantic and transpacific flights.
Now this doesn’t mean upgrades never happen. But they’re a lot harder to count on getting. So what’s happened?
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Report Card: Major Airlines Flunk Customer Care
by Charlie Leocha
www.ConsumerTraveler.com
Kate Hanni’s FlyersRights.org issued their 2009 Real Air Travel consumer Report Card yesterday at the Press Club in Washington DC. If I came home with a report card like this when I was a kid, I’d get a spanking.
The 2009 report card for tarmac delays of more than three hours gave all of the major airlines a “F” for their performance. The major legacy airlines themselves — American, Continental, Delta, United and US Airways — were graded as failing; their grades were lower when they were combined with their codeshare regional airline partners.
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Airlines: Who’s Doing What for Haiti
The earthquake in Haiti that decimated the island nation’s largest city and much of the surrounding area, continues to be an extremely challenging set of disaster relief problems and human needs, rivaled only by the 2004 tsunami in lower Asia in which more than 500,000 people perished.
The official death toll as of January 28 is 170,000+ dead. Estimates for the total number of dead, which includes those not yet accounted for, exceed 250,000. Over half of Port-au-Prince’s population of 2 million people is in need of emergency shelter; almost all are currently dependent on outside aid groups and transport providers for food, water, medical care, and basic subsistence.
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Remembering 9/11, Eight Years On
September 11, 2001 … September 11, 2001 … 9/11.
Just a mention of a date is enough to reopen and expose many tragic and unnecessary memories.
Yes … of course you remember where you were and what you were doing when you heard. I was at a neighborhood restaurant in Elgin, Illinois having breakfast with the woman who would become my wife exactly one week later. I remember the waitress, trying to both refill our drinks (with shaking hands) and tell us what the sharply escalating buzz was about. She knocked a glass of water all over me, but seemed not to notice; her thoughts were elsewhere. The queue grew rapidly at the cash register as people left half-eaten meals to rush home to their TVs and Internet connections.
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Tale of the Tagues: An Airline Story, Part 2
[Read first » Tale of the Tagues: An Airline Story, Part 1]
After his first departure from ATA, John Tague and two partners started The Pointe Group, an airline consulting firm with presence in both New York and suburban Washington, D.C. Tague’s only two consulting engagements as an ex-ATA executive were short, almost simultaneous, and quite unusual. At the request of a west coast investment bank, he became the consulting CEO for two ailing regional airlines: Air South, based in Columbia, South Carolina and, a few months later, Vanguard Airlines, based in Kansas City, Missouri.
It wasn’t clear to industry observers at the time how a single CEO was going to simultaneously nurse back to health two struggling airlines that were located 850 miles apart. One analyst, George Hamlin of Global Aviation Systems in Washington, D.C., likened the airlines’ plight to “two drunks staggering down the street trying to hold each other up.”
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