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News and notes from around the interweb:
- Uber, but for selling the elite free checked baggage allowance you aren’t using
- All business class airline La Compagnie is dropping its New York – London route not ‘because of Brexit’ as they claim but because “[t]heir big problem was the wrong airport, poor marketing and a failure to offer a daily service.”
- Blogger buys miles from a broker, emails the airline to tell them about it and try as he might he can’t get his frequent flyer account shut down. Don’t try this at home, kids. I suspect that the email customer service and fraud departments aren’t communicating well here, and most airlines will take a dimmer view.
- Perspectives on flying – and life – from a London-based 747 pilot (HT: @spencerformiles)
- San Jose Airport wants to keep people from stowing away on planes
- Following the British Airways system glitch I was asked whether this is ‘the new normal’ for Forbes.
“In the US we’ve seen major failures from Delta, United, Southwest and American over the past 14 months. Each airline operates literally hundreds of systems, with new processes built on legacy ones,” explains Gary Leff, founder of industry website, The View From the Wing. “While there are redundancies, the priority is safety over smooth operation, so occasionally glitches occur.”
Leff continues that newer carriers and those investing in new systems are less likely to have these issues. However, he points to United Airlines, a company that he says was prone to frequent outages between 2012 and 2015, but now they have seemed to get a ”handle on their IT and it’s remarkable how rare it is this occurs.”
- Free trip Around the World with Radisson Blu
“RUBBISH!” Why are British people so nearsighted about Brexit? Their currency lost 10% of its purchasing power overnight.
Just to tack on, when your economy goes south it’s the worst ideas that fail first. So, yes, of course it failed for all those other reasons.
Appreciate the Grabr story but the headline is pure clickbait. There’s a big difference between selling your luggage space (as some of us “Couriers” did in the ’90s) and essentially becoming a personal shopper for rather minimal compensation.
Personally I would be delighted to sell my checked luggage space to a licensed courier service, but I think I’ll pass on using my limited time to packing food and electronics for $15,
I agree with reporter from Torygraph… La Compagnie chose (again) a tried and failed airport for the Buz Market! What is it with somr entrepreneurs? Several airlines flunked at these far flung smaller London airports .. Coupled with non flat flat bed (see Air France debacle over those babies) all coupled to few planes (ie no backups) and a poor schedule… As I’ve said before it suited the Gin Swingers (early retirees and aspirationals on holiday) but hard core Biz travellers it was never going to suit.
And how does make sure drugs are not pushed. I hope their ceo is willing to get caned instead of the innocent passenger that unknowingly pushes drug into an Asian or middle eastern country.