You might now get this new business class seat from Singapore Air at a discount using United miles (Photo: Chris McGinnis)
AIRLINES
Here’s the part of the discounted award chart most appealing to North American flyers- rates are one way (United)
United discounts partner awards. Travelers may not be getting much of a break on airfare these days, but this week we saw some nice discounts pop up on United for award redemptions with partners. What’s nice about this is that it nearly always costs more miles to fly on United partners than it does to fly on United. What this latest sale does is bring partner award prices inline with United award prices. So for all the TravelSkills readers who complain about the state of United, here’s your chance to see what it’s like to live outside the United bubble for a while. Fly Aer Lingus’ new business class, try out Singapore Air’s new B777 between SFO and Hong Kong (if you are lucky), try ANA to Japan! To get the discounts, you must book by February 28, but you can travel anytime between now and the end of the year!
Delta SkyMiles award chart disappears. This week, Delta once again ticked off its most valuable customers by taking down its (admittedly broken) online award chart. That means there is no longer a baseline or standard for award prices….SkyMiles members can no longer quickly check the award chart to determine if you may (or may not) have enough SkyMiles for an award trip. Now, the only way to do that is to enter dates and destinations and see what the (admittedly broken) Delta award booking site presents on its calendar. Maybe this is the way Delta thinks it can reduce the bitter complaints that rates posted on the award chart don’t reflect reality? Who knows, but this just seems like another takeaway by Delta. Grrr. Thoughts please!
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Some interesting stats about the Delta Starbucks partnership… esp the one about serving 68 million cups of coffee this year!
Delta goes all-Starbucks. A couple of years ago, Delta introduced Starbucks as its in-flight coffee of choice on West Coast shuttle flights between Los Angeles and San Francisco as well as transcon flights to both cities from New York JFK. Passengers must have liked the brew, because Delta is now rolling out Starbucks systemwide. The specific varieties will be Starbucks Pike Place Roast and Starbucks VIA Ready Brew Italian Roast decaf. Have you ever had a “good” cup of coffee on a plane? Do you think Delta’s brew will taste much different now that it’s Starbuck vs Seattle’s Best, Delta’s previous purveyor (which ironically, is owned by Starbucks)?
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More seats in United 777s? The trade journal Aviation Daily reports that United Airlines is “considering” a refit of some 777s that would add nearly 100 seats to each aircraft by making its regular economy seating 10-across instead of the current nine. The nine-across configuration would be retained for Economy Plus, the report said, adding that it was unclear how many of the airline’s 74 777-200s might be affected if United decides to go ahead with the plan. Stay tuned…
Southwest ads challenge Delta in Atlanta. Now that it has fully absorbed AirTran’s routes and obliterated its identity, Southwest Airlines is seeking to boost its market share in the former AirTran hub market of Atlanta with a new ad campaign. Southwest also targeted Atlanta travelers with a fare sale through the middle of this month. One of the TV ads in Southwest’s new “Heartlanta” campaign assures business travelers that they’ll all get friendly treatment no matter what their status — “We don’t care if you’re diamond, platinum or pewter.”
American has collectible amenity kits. First class and business class flyers on American Airlines’ international and transcontinental flights will soon start seeing retro-themed collectible amenity kits that pay tribute to the various airlines that have become a part of American over the years, including AirCal, Allegheny, America West, Piedmont, PSA, Reno Air, TWA and US Airways. The amenities come in a felt case “sized specifically to be re-used as a mini-tablet computer case,” American said. Related on TravelSkills: Unusual collection of retro amenity kits!
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LAX-SFO private jets. BlackJet, a ride-sharing service of sorts for private jets, has started offering trips between Los Angeles and San Francisco for around $1,500 per seat each way, citing “strong demand” from its members for the route. Taking a page from the Uber playbook, BlackJet says it uses “proprietary technology to set flights and departure times according to customer demand instead of a rigid published preset schedule.” In addition to the fare, members must pay a $5,000 membership fee. Would you? Could you? Please leave your comments below.
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New Latin America routes. American Airlines will inaugurate several new Latin America routes during the first week of June, including daily service from Los Angeles to Guadalajara, Mexico and from Miami to Barranquilla, Colombia, as well as six flights a week from Miami to Monterrey, Mexico, all starting June 4; twice-weekly flights from LAX to Belize City, Belize, and once-a-week service from Dallas/Ft. Worth to Managua, Nicaragua and from DFW to Grand Cayman, all beginning June 6 … Aeromexico set a March 26 launch date for new daily service from Miami to Monterrey, and a June 1 start for Boston-Mexico City flights operating six days a week … On June 24, Copa Airlines will kick off new service from New Orleans to Panama City four times a week.
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Seattle’s Best scores 8 on scale of 1 to 10 whereas Starbuck’s shouldn’t even rate as high as a 1.
Now I know why everyone hates UA. I booked a flight on United to Europe (on its website) recently. The return flight was operated by Lufthansa and the UA website would not let me pick my seat on the Lufthansa leg (from Frankfurt to SFO) — If it would have allowed me to do so, I planned to choose an Economy Plus seat. Long story short, I can’t book the seat until 23 hours before departure and if I want to fly in Economy Plus, I will get charged a change fee of $300!! Lufthansa says that they will glady waive the fee, but they can’t because United issued the ticket. United won’t budge an inch. I even talked to a supervisor.
as a semi-frequent flier I’ll say we already had that in the travel industry… most recently 2008-2011, but also 2001-2003 if memory serves. didn’t really work, there were just more mergers which in the long run probably hurt customer service, rather than helped.
And I’m an unapologetic capitalist here, as you probably are yourself. Lack of competition clearly hurts and runs counter to a free market, just as in the cable industry.
Its also funny if you use the link to go to United’s page, try the “book now” button, and its broken.
Then try “report issue”, its also broken.
United is broken.
I avoid Uniteds 777 to Hawaii even if I could get 1st class because its too crowded. Now they want to make it worse. So I’ll just avoid all their 777’s. Welcome American Airlines.
Curious about the reduced transparency at Delta about award travel (e.g., not publishing award charts, no longer specifying the number of miles required for awards, etc.) I wrote and asked. Below is the answer I received. From these answers, I note that they are confirming a reduction in transparency, have eliminated the benefit of enhanced availability for Medallion members (so much for “better serve our best customers”), and claim that the 2015 award charts they published recently are still in effect even though no longer published. I give them credit for an honest and timely response.
“Thank you for contacting Delta Air Lines.
We will no longer publish award charts.
Yes we will still offer more award seats at the lowest price levels. Medallion Member Enhanced Availability is no longer offered effective January 1, 2015. The award costs for 2015 that were previously published are still the same.
Award travel within the Continental U.S., Alaska and Canada starts as low as 25,000 (plus taxes and fees) for a round trip ticket. You can easily find out how many miles are needed for your specific travel needs by going to Delta.com or contacting Delta Reservations at any time.
As a reminder, the price for award travel can vary depending on the route, cabin, and travel time. The exact price will be known once you select all the flights in your itinerary.”
I’m discouraged and disappointed with Delta. I had hoped to book a nonstop to Amsterdam for 60000 miles buy I only found one flight for 60000. The others were 77000 and up. Their website is hard to navigate because they have insert an excessive number of links that you have to click to get to, for example, the Award travel page. The Northwest site was far, far easier to navigate. With the acquisition of Northwest, Delta has reached an unwieldy size. Bigger is not always better.
Don’t understand how Delta can eliminate their charts. Particularly, given that they already published their “new and improved” charts for 2015.
United needs to bring back starbucks, since the merger they have crap for coffee………..
Former Delta Platinum who has been flying Southwest for 4 months now. I would rather have a Southwest seat with happy friendly flight attendants than a Delta First Class seat where the flight attendant is forcing her smile because you have the miles and the food is simply inedible.
Amex just renewed their commitment to delta to the tune if $2 billion, with a b. Lets hope southwest makes massive in-roads against delta in Atlanta. Seems like that is our only hope.
Have to love United. Those bean counters in Chicago that get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to figure out how to make a buffalo nickel squeal have come up with another brilliant plan to make all us frequent flyers just hope to keep the status Que.
They are doing it not by making Economy plus better by possibly eliminating that one seat across, no they are doing it by punishing people even more by adding a another seat across in economy so that we have to thank our lucky stars for having a crappy economy plus seat in futue and forcing folks to pay for those seats.
The big problem, we have no choice. With consolidated of airlines allowed by our government, we have to sit back and take it. Guess we can try a fly another airline which in most cases would be a foreign airline, but again United does another action to make the flying experience even worst.
Maybe when people die, yes you put too many folks crammed in a tight row on a long flight older folks will die, maybe then people will start protesting United.
So what do we do, we can’t send letters to United because they don’t give a hoot, guess we have to start looking at other airlines to fly. That is the only way United will understand that they can’t make things worst, they have to try and make the experience worth while, not hell at 39,000 feet.
Anybody else feel as mad as me???
Hope this website starts making people aware of this and printing some of these letters and peoples thoughts. As I have said for years, United is the worst and getting worser. Instead of the slogan “fly the friendly skies” that slogan will be “fly the hellos skies of United”.
Delta and the “missing” award chart because it was broken? Please. You believe that crap? Even that management team of sociopaths didn’t have the balls to admit what they were doing. They just did it. It’s like they have the politician’s playbook: lie, stay dead quiet, spin BS, then wait for the storm to pass. Look…Delta is a short sighted, bottom line, all business company that sells a commodity. I don’t mind that. I’m fine with it. It’s their BS that they “have my back” even when they pull their infinite stream of benefit cuts that is patronizing and offensive. They lure you in, slide in the fine print, then change the rules. I am tempted to applaud their obsessive quest to eliminate loopholes. They must spend all day thinking about this. The software has taken over the humans over there. Since they work in an oligopoly they will get away with it.
Like Brian Williams is learning this weekend, people have a breaking point on being constantly bullshitted. You have to hand it to Delta…the Clinton’s don’t have much on them. They are professionals. If I was American Express I would pull their plug pronto because my Skymiles Amex just took a huge hit in value…and image. Amex stopped their miles transfer cap…bet they didn’t see this one coming.
I am a Delta four million miler…hello Southwest, American and United.
I understand margins as I am a business owner myself BUT, and I hate to say it, is we need a downturn or something for airlines to understand you can’t continute to screw your customer base.
FYI – your link to United is working, but when you click on the ‘Book Now’ button on the United page you get the Broken Link webpage. I submitted the link error to United
Hopefully they fix the link. Looks like a great deal!
BTW folks, Gary is a master at finding program wrinkles like this and has a very helpful service that can help you book complicated awards. See http://bookyouraward.com/
Okay. Thanks. I’ll insert “if you are lucky” 😉
For long haul, and certainly US routes… impossible. At least for now, and absent a glitch (I booked SQ SFO-HKG-SIN-DPS and return using United miles in July 2012…).
Thanks, Gary! So does that mean that it’s impossible to get Singapore biz class using United miles… or just improbable? –chris
Hey Chris, United proactively removed Singapore Airlines awards from its website (because it didn’t really want members booking them). And Singapore only releases premium cabin availability to most of its partners like United for regional and short haul routes. So United folks have to call to book, and likely won’t get the new seat when they do. 🙁