News and notes from around the interweb:
- American Airlines wants to be nice but doesn’t know how
At Delta, flight attendants are more enthusiastic about doing their jobs than at American,” says Gary Leff, who writes the View From the Wing blog about the travel industry and rewards programs.
For two years running, Delta has made it onto Fortune magazine’s “Best Places to Work” list, the only airline to do so in over a decade. Delta leverages employee satisfaction with pay and benefits — American isn’t the only airline where compensation has risen sharply with the industry’s improving financial fortunes in recent years — to reinforce a culture where employees feel they are on what Leff describes as “a mission to do something bigger than themselves.”
…“There is a clear vision, even if not an entirely passenger-friendly vision, at United,” says Leff. “It’s less clear what the vision at American is.”
- Honeymooning couple got drunk and purchased their hotel
- Emotional support squirrel got passenger kicked off a Frontier flight. Frontier bans all rodents from their aircraft, which apparently would even include anthropomorphic flying squirrels.
- Cathay Pacific is testing paid access to business class lounges starting with Manila, Vancouver, and Melbourne and pricing ~ US$75.
Cathay Pacific Business Class Lounge, Singapore - Canada’s WestJet introduces a new Platinum top elite tier and bans employees in ‘safety sensitive’ roles from using marijuana even though it becomes legal in Canada starting October 17.
- Santorini bans overweight tourists from riding donkeys
- Boeing starts reducing is 737 delivery backlog
I guessing firing the production manager for Boeing worked, maybe AA and United will take a hint and fire Parker and Kirby.
Gary, what exactly is United’s vision? Because with Scott Kirby managing anything more than the janitor’s closet at United, their vision seems to be copy AA but make it worse. As a UA gold I’d love it if I could be an AA plat instead but that’s not a great choice flying out of IAH. United would be a great airline if they immediately fired Scott Kirby and undid everything he was responsible for.
As an example, United is the only airline that doesn’t offer a free carry on, doesn’t earn elite credit, and doesn’t earn lifetime miles on basic economy. It’s basically been turned into the Spirit Airlines of the big 3 by Scott Kirby, who really should be fired so that he can go work for Spirit where he belongs. That man has done so much to ruin United in the past 3 years.
USAIR used to have a Passenger friendly attityde, what happend to that when they took over AA?! Get back to your USAIR attitude and focus!! Don’t let the AA arrogant attitude dominante your new airline! You know what happend to the old AA?! Good luck.