This is an odd one:
A United Airlines pilot on a flight from Salt Lake City last week told passengers that he was too angry too fly after a heated discussion just before he boarded the aircraft. I won’t bother to get into the details here (because I can’t be bothered) but it involved him possibly [...]
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 [...]
United has now joined American in charging $15 for the first checked bag. Look for the other dominos to fall this week.
In other fee news, the guys at FareCompare (who are even more nuts about the minutia of the airline industry that you and I are), have created a full list of every fee the [...]
The Wall St. Journal has an interesting article looking at how much it’s costing airlines to fly you from here to there - you may be surprised to hear that upwards of 70% of your fare may be going just to pay the fuel bill. For example, American’s fuel bill for a roundtrip flight [...]
Read the Rest of the Story: How Much Does the Fuel Cost for Your Next Flight?2 separate bits of news & rumor I’m putting in 1 post:
Spirit sent a letter to employees saying that they may have to lay off 60 percent of flight attendants and 45% of pilots. In the letter they mention that they may have to close their LaGuardia base for flight attendants. This [...]
A friend just wrote to tell me that he was planning on flying a same-day round trip with United today. He got a call last night canceling the flight. Here’s a rough transcript of the ensuing conversion:
Friend: OK, please change the day of my trip to next Wednesday.
United: No problem. That will be $150 for [...]
What was shaping up to be the summer of the airline merger is now dead. US Airways and United announced that they have decided that now is not a great time to merge. Surprisingly (at least to me, and what do I know?) United was the company to call off further discussions. It looks like [...]
Read the Rest of the Story: The Summer of Mergers is Now DeadA legitimate reason to switch to United: The airline now sells upgrades to Economy Plus at the time you book your flight. One-way upgrades that get you about 5 inches more legroom start at $14 for short-haul and go up to $104 each way for LAX-Tokyo (a steal). After you sit 15 hours in Continental’s [...]
Read the Rest of the Story: United (Finally) Sells Economy Plus Upgrades(Thanks to Sean for the heads up…)
Silverjet, which many predicted would be shutting down shortly, says that they have signed an agreement for a $100 million investment ($25 million now, $75 million later) from an unnamed source in the United Arab Emirates (the UAE is so flush with cash that people there think it’s a [...]
You’ll read about this elsewhere, but United just raised their ticket change fee on domestic flights to $150 from $100. Expect other majors to follow. Remember that JetBlue only charges $40 for a change, and Southwest doesn’t charge anything.
Read the Rest of the Story: United Raises Change Fee to $150