News and notes from around the interweb:
- The Department of Justice is asking for a stay in the American-US Airways merger anti-trust trial in light of the government shutdown. We do not know how long the shutdown will last. The Department of Justice wanted to push things off into the future anyway and this gives them probably their most persuasive reason to do so. I’ll be interested to see the airlines’ response and how the judge rules. (Update: The judge denied the request to stay the trial schedule.)
- There are some travel concerns that, as a man, never even occur to me.
- TAM will leave the Star Alliance March 30th and join oneworld on March 31. Getting premium cabin awards between the US and South America on TAM is nearly impossible, and intra-South America space tend to open up only in the months leading up to departure. Nonetheless, this is a good addition for oneworld which is already the leading alliance for US-South America travel, and a loss for Star.
- Frontier has been sold to Indigo Partners, a fund led by former America West head Bill Franke who has successfully invested in other low cost carriers. Online Travel Review explains what it means for Frontier’s customers.
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Regarding luggage tags and tracking delayed luggage, there are clearly a lot of improvements airlines could theoretically make in this area. Not sure why they don’t, that would be something they could meaningfully distinguish themselves with from competition.
My current pet peeve: rather than waste my time at the carousel and then filling out missing baggage report, why don’t they simply tell me, via SMS, email or phone call, that my bag didn’t make it on the flight, will arrive on a later flight and would I please contact them, via website or phone, with my delivery address and phone number. The whole experience would be so much smoother.