Taking a page from the SkyEurope playbook, Spirit Airlines is offering a deal where they’ll pay you up to $4 to fly (you’ll have to pay taxes and fees).  Only a handful of dates are available for each city pair, but you can construct round trip flights where you’ll just pay taxes minus $8.  Cute [...]

An American Airlines flight from San Diego to Chicago was delayed after a (dumb ass) passenger complained to security that several other passengers were speaking Arabic to each other.  After a thorough investigation, it was determined that the passengers were speaking Arabic because they were Iraqis who were in San Diego training Marines about the [...]

(Self Promotion Alert):
I’ll be on Bloomberg Radio representing the OTR on Friday morning at 11:37 am Eastern Time chatting about the travel industry.
Be there or be square.

Spirit’s CEO has gotten a bit of a black eye when this story came out, which features him sending a nasty(ish) response to a couple of disgruntled passengers who had written to him asking for compensation for a flight delay.  What they had asked for was ridiculous, but the CEO, who meant to only send [...]

16 passengers were injured when their Air Mauritius flight to Hong Kong encountered turbulence, sending people flying inside the plane. 
I’ve mentioned a few of these types of stories before, and I’ll keep mentioning them because for all of the things people worry about when they fly (terrorism, whether a plane is "safe") the reality [...]

Passengers flying on the Vatican’s new charter flights are being told to leave their holy water at home (basically).  Officials France’s Tarbes-Lourdes Airport told a passenger who was carrying 8 Madonna-shaped bottles filled with holy water that she couldn’t take them on the plane because they were a security threat.  They said this with a [...]

The worst summer for air travel in recent memory is wrapping up, and we can only hope that the problems that have seemingly plagued every other flight will abate a bit.  I feel that every work related gathering includes tales of flights gone awry.  My wife had another flight canceled last Thursday — every one [...]

The OTR offices are closed for a late-August vacation.  We’ll be back on Tuesday.  See you then!

Since Spirit has invaded American’s south Florida turf, AA has launched a number of fare sales designed to annoy them.  They announced another yesterday, including these fares:
Fort Lauderdale or Miami to:
Nassau, Bahamas: $34Port-Au-Prince, Haiti: $69San Pedro Sula, Honduras: $59Managua, Nicaragua & San Jose, Costa Rica: $69
Fares are good midweek through December (for the most part).
To [...]

You’ll can certainly read more about this elsewhere, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Delta has named former Northwest CEO Richard Anderson as their new chief executive.  Anderson is known for making tough but fair decisions, though Northwest lost a nice chunk o’ change under his leadership.  Although I’m not expecting a [...]