I was off by a couple of days…Silverjet shut down operations today blaming the usual mix of fuel and blah blah blah.  They’ve been doomed for a while, and when a recently announced bit of financing fell through it was all over.  If you’re booked on them, give your credit card company a call.
In only [...]

In an age of fees for everything, American has actually eliminated one:  The airline has decided to drop its $2 fee for skycaps at all its airports.  Even better, it’s ended its ludicrous standoff with the skycaps and is permitting passengers to tip them again in Boston (if you missed it, AA was in a [...]

I thought it might be useful/depressing to pass along a quick overview of the horrible/annoying/depressing things we’ve seen happen since the fuel hike:
Northwest/Delta merger (less service + higher fares = unhappy flyers in Minot)
American’s $15 first bag fee
Everyone else’s $25 second bag fee
US Airways removes snacks from domestic flights
American cuts domestic capacity 12% and decimates [...]

(Via Travelzoo)
We haven’t seen one of these in a looooooong while: smarTours is offering an 8-night/10-day air & hotel package to Beijing and Shanghai for just $899 per person. Yes, that’s crazy. Prices include airfare from San Francisco, hotels, the flight between Beijing & Shanghai, and, perhaps most importantly nowadays, fuel surcharge. [...]

A headline on a Reuters story today says that American Airlines will discontinue their JFK-Stansted service “to manage costs.”  Um, I believe the costs they are managing are the costs of driving Eos out business.  Which they did.  Great job — keep up that fair competition.

I know that my readers will be interested in this:  Nevada’s Moonlite Bunny Ranch brothel has offered to reimburse its customers $15 to cover American Airlines’ fee to check a bag.  I’m not sure if they’ll give you cash or $15 in services rendered.

A customs officer at Tokyo’s Narita airport trying to test whether drug-sniffing dogs could find marijuana in a suitcase, forgot which piece of luggage he placed the drugs in and now someone is walking around Tokyo with about 1/3 of a pound of pot in the luggage.  Customs officials say that it is against regulations [...]

You can view all the details here, but if you move quickly you can get roundtrip flights from either Newark or Philadelphia to Honolulu or Lihue (Kauai) for between $270 and $290 round trip.  It’s good for midweek travel August – early November and the first 10 days of December (see the link for details).  [...]

(Thanks to IAH-PHX for passing along the best story of the week)
Frontier has updated their list of fees they charge for various things (checked bags, unaccompanied minors, antlers) and they…um…wait. Did I just write “antlers?” Yes I did. Those bastards at Frontier are going to charge me $100 to send my [...]

In a bit of bad news for my friend Corina (and everyone else who wants to fly to Romania), Delta will end their nonstop JFK-Bucharest service in October as part of a larger set of cutbacks they’ve been announcing. Posters on Airliners suggest that low business class loads are the culprit, and I’d buy [...]