“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?
Read the rest of the story »
Voice of the Customer, part 2: At Southwest Airlines, a Different Kind of Leadership
In my first installment of this two-parter (Voice of the Customer: Newsweek Blog Scopes Out Readers on Best, Worst Airlines) I peeled back the onion of a Newsweek Budget Travel blog-survey to reveal customer perceptions of two American airlines that are polar opposites of each other.
What drives such extreme differences in customer perceptions of Southwest and United?
Read more
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.”
Read more
