Shanghai Pudong PVG airport a new Delta hub? (Photo: Matt_Weibo / Flickr)
Delta eyes Shanghai hub. Delta said last week it will relocate its operations at Shanghai Pudong Airport from Terminal 2 to Terminal 1 on April 13 in order to be close to its codeshare partners China Eastern Airlines and Shanghai Airlines, and Delta CEO Richard Anderson suggested in a message to employees that Shanghai could be Delta’s next hub as it builds up the China-U.S. market with its partners. He compared it to the existing link between Delta and partner KLM at Amsterdam Schiphol. Delta currently flies to Shanghai from Seattle, Detroit and Tokyo Narita, and if it wins government approval, will add Los Angeles-Shanghai 
service in July, giving it a total of 28 flights a week from the U.S. The code-sharing pacts with China Eastern and Shanghai Airlines give Delta access to 30 destinations beyond Shanghai. And Delta’s customers will have access to a new SkyTeam Lounge that China Eastern plans to open in the airport’s Terminal 1 later this year.
AA accelerates elite points. Members of American Airlines’ AAdvantage program can get on the fast track to elite status by buying pricey premium cabin tickets this year. The company said members who buy full-fare first and business class tickets (fare categories J and F) from now through December will earn 3.0 elite-qualifying points per mile — the usual 1.5 per mile plus a new bonus of an additional 1.5. For discount first and business fares (R, D, A, I, P), the regular 1.5 points per mile is supplemented with an extra 0.5 points for total of 2.0. The bonus applies for travel on American, US Airways, British Airways, Iberia, Finnair, Qantas and Japan Airlines. Hmm. That’s starting to sound like a revenue-based frequent flyer program to us…
Lufthansa’s new lie-flat seat (Lufthansa)
Lufthansa lies flat. Thankfully Lufthansa is rapidly shedding its old-school angled lie flat seats, and they will be completely gone in a few months. A Lufthansa spokesperson confirmed that, for example, the carrier’s A380s between Frankfurt and SFO now feature the new business class product. “The Business Class retrofit process of the entire Lufthansa long-haul fleet will be completed in the second quarter of this year,” he said.
Related: Business class on sale for summer!
A mesmerizing look at a Delta jet from a window of ATL’s Concourse E (Photo: AP Gouge Photography)
Delta mileage sale. Delta, which recently changed its SkyMiles rules to make some domestic/Latin America/Caribbean award flights available starting at 10,000 miles one-way, is greatly expanding the number of markets in that deal in a new promotion for spring travel (April 30-June 20). The purchase deadline is April 23. Sample markets include Atlanta-New Orleans, New York LGA-Orlando, Seattle-Phoenix, New York JFK-Bermuda, Atlanta-Nassau and Los Angeles-Mazatlan. among others.
American’s merger milestone. Although they’ve been operating under common management for some time, American and US Airways were technically separate airlines — until last week, when the FAA finally granted the company a single operating certificate for the two carriers, a step that American called “a major milestone” in the merger process. Although that makes a difference to air traffic controllers (all flights will now go by the AA call sign “American”), the change will be transparent to passengers, who will still check in at aa.com or usairways.com or their respective check-in counters. American recently started merging the frequent flyer accounts of the two carriers into a single AAdvantage program, but it still has to combine the two airlines’ reservations systems — a big job that has caused problems for some earlier airline mergers.
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New routes: Southwest, Delta, JetBlue. Southwest Airlines last week kicked off the latest expansion of its growing network out of Dallas Love Field, adding daily non-stop service to Columbus, Indianapolis, Memphis, Milwaukee, Panama City Beach (Fla.), Portland, Sacramento, San Jose and Seattle. On April 11, Southwest will add Saturday-only service from DAL to Charleston, S.C. Southwest also started new daily service last week between Kansas City and New York LaGuardia … Delta said it will add two new South American spokes from its Atlanta hub on December 19, including daily service to Medellin, Colombia and three flights a week to Cartagena, Colombia … JetBlue plans a December 10 start for new flights from Albany, N.Y. to Ft. Lauderdale and Orlando, with one daily roundtrip in each market.
SAS using Google’s Street View technology to show off it’s new cabins (SAS)
SAS ‘Street View’. SAS is using Google Street View’s technology to give customers a look at the interiors of its newly upgraded long-haul A330/340 aircraft. Users can navigate their way through the plane to look at the features of SAS Go, Plus and Business classes, checking out the entertainment systems, the seats and even the bathrooms. You can try it out here. But it will be a while before you can actually sit in the new seats. A spokesperson told TravelSkills, “We are upgrading a total of four 340s and the upgrade is should commence just after the summer.”
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Here we are at the end of Q2 … and Lufthansa still has more than a dozen aircraft flying with the old business class. Not sure why their PR department couldn’t get this right – it was perfectly obvious in April they weren’t going to be done right away with the retrofit.
An update on this – LH has a page for checking whether a flight will be operated with the new business class on a given day (http://www.lufthansa.com/de/en/Business-Class-Product). It’s available for flights 8 weeks out so I plugged in a few 747-400 routes for the farthest-out date available (July 2, already in Q3) and most still show old business class.
Hey O: Here’s the response from LH spokesperson on Frankfurt: “It is correct that the Business Class retrofit process of the entire Lufthansa long-haul fleet will be finished in the second quarter of 2015. Once the retrofit process is finished, all of our long-haul aircraft will feature the new Business Class product.”
thanks! I will double check with my source at Lufthansa.
One possibility is that there’s a mix-up here with their retrofit of first class. That process is indeed nearly complete (none of the 747-400s will have first class going forward anyway) so that could conceivably be done this quarter. But no way will business class be done in the next few months unless Lufthansa suddenly drops something like 25% of their long-haul flying.
The Lufthansa bit doesn’t seem right – we’ve got about two and a half months to go in the second quarter of this year, but they still have to retrofit dozens more long-haul aircraft, including almost half of the A340-600’s and almost all the 747-400s (the ones that aren’t being retired, anyway), plus a few more A330’s and A380’s. Given how long they’ve taken so far (almost three years) and that we’re now in the summer schedule (when there’s more flying than in the winter schedule, when most of the retrofit work has been done), it seems extremely unlikely they’ll be done in June.