Continental became just another airline today when they announced that non-Elite members will be paying $15 to check their first bag.  Don’t worry, Elite members, you’ll also be pissed off when you hear that they’re eliminating the 500-mile minimum and have reduced Platinum mileage bonus from 125% to 100%, plus they’re lowering the Silver bonus [...]

Whenever there’s a story about Southwest Airlines’ much-publicized fuel hedging strategy, there are lots of questions about why other airlines don’t do it.  The answer?  It can be risky.  The example?  This Houston Chronicle report notes that Continental’s most recent fuel hedges have a price floor of about $121 – around $8 higher than the [...]

A follow up on one of my favorite stories from 2005:
You may remember that preacher Joel Osteen’s wife was involved in some sort of altercation with a Continental flight attendant prior to takeoff on a flight from Houston to Vail.  Mrs. Osteen found liquid on her first class seat, asked the flight attendant to clean [...]

Continental has changed its standby policies to give passengers a bit more flexibility (for a price).  For a $50 fee ($25 if you’re gold or platinum), you can change your flight to any other flight that is scheduled for within 12 hours of your original flight, provided you do it within 24 hours of your [...]

According to this thread on Flyertalk, Continental is eliminating its beloved sundaes in business class on transcon flights.
Now, I enjoyed the Continental sundaes as much as anyone (frankly, if Osama Bin Laden gave me a sundae I’d probably enjoy it).  I think we can all agree that sundaes, as a rule, are a good thing.
By [...]

I was away when the Continental/United tie-up was announced and everyone else has already commented on this already.  I won’t bore you with a long blah blah blah about it, I’ll bore you with a short point:
- We’re at least a year from this being implemented.
- Many of the details haven’t been decided, so it’s [...]

Continental joins American and United in announcing significant job cuts and capacity reductions in the coming year.  The airline said that it will cut about 3,000 jobs, and reduce mainline departures by 16% in the 4th quarter of this year (that represents about 11% of the available seat miles).  Most of that will come from [...]

Continental is rolling out an interesting program called Million Miler for long-time frequent flyers: if you’ve flown 1 million miles with the airline they will grant you and a companion lifetime Silver Elite status. 2 million miles gets you Gold; 4 million gets Platinum. Sure, 1 million flown miles is a ton [...]

Continental Airlines gets all the credit in the world for their announcement yesterday that they will not continue their merger talks with United Airlines, instead they will persue some sort of vague alliance involving American Airlines and British Airways.  Until that’s a done deal, it’s not really worth speculating about (you can find that elsewhere), [...]

British newspaper The Guardian has a report (via USA Today) saying that Continental’s 757s flying trans-Atlantic routes have “run low on fuel” on 96 occasions last year (Continental flies more 757s trans-Atlantic than anyone else).  They suggest that these planes are not meant to fly such distances and that the five-fold increase in “minimum [...]