News and notes from around the interweb:
- This is an amazing take on ever-perspicacious Brian Sumer‘s fantastic piece about how Allegiant buys new airplanes. They’re so cheap that instead of sending teams of executives to Airbus in Toulouse, they send a single PR manager. And the airline’s executives genuinely had no idea planes could be so complicated.
- Delta SkyMiles elites now receive complimentary upgrades at the gate on Aeromexico
- American’s new promo up to 10,000 miles for partner transactions
- Delta stranded a dead body last month. Now a mother is suing American for losing her daughter’s ashes.
- Why so many bad airline service videos come out around the same time. We’re just more sensitive to them. It’s like shark attack stories on the news (more people are electrocuted each year by Christmas tree lights), they aren’t featured because of the statistical frequency of attack but because people are interested in them and the amount of airplay influences our perception of how often the attacks occur.
- Delta considers delaying delivery of 10 Airbus A350s so they’ll keep flying “crap airplanes” a little longer.
When the Qatar CEO complains about Airbus delaying his planes, it comes as no surprise to me, of the Allegiant’s issues with its new airplanes. Everyone in the airline industry knows that planes are hugely different even at the same airline.
As far as Delta delaying A350, makes a lot of sense as the world economy is sliding into recession. With oil predicted to be lower cost for the foreseeable future, don’t buy what you don’t need yet.
Which piece has to do with painting planes?
@ian – the first one
Way to go. More misleading headlines. It’s not that allegiant “Can’t Figure Out How To Paint A Plane,” as you allege. It’s that Airbus and G4 disagreed on how best to do it, as G4 understandably wants it’s livery to be uniform in appearance. I understand that truth and facts don’t generate the same click volume as smug deception, but come on. If you want to bash G4 for being cheap, that’s fair. But to state that they don’t know how to paint a plane is simply misleading.
My knowledge of Allegiant is limited, but I completely disagree with the idea that Allegiant was in “over their heads” on the plane order. They’ve never much cared about their interiors, and there’s no real reason for them TO care. So when they needed to order new airplanes, they didn’t want to spend a lot of time and money outfitting their aircraft. Seems entirely reasonable and sensible to me. Heck, when Doug Parker took over AA, he’d didn’t really care what the paint job on the planes would look like and had the employees vote. If exteriors didn’t matter to AA, why would interiors be a big deal for Allegiant?
I’ll give Allegiant credit for one thing in that article – props for putting better row number signage on their order. As a 6’1″ flyer, Airbus narrowbodies consistently require me to bend over to see the numbers – super annoying.
More DL hate. Go ahead and criticize a profitable airline that has high customer service marks for delaying a, currently, bad idea purchase. I agree with @JohnB – why buy something that makes little sense?