Great new for those who want to follow me on the CNTraveler website. You can now subscribe to an RSS feed of my posts alone.

American Airlines About to Make a lot of People Much Happier – Conde Nast Daily Traveler
Great news from American this week as it followed in Continental’s footsteps and added “incoming flight” information to its flight status. This is great news.

Delta’s Bag Tracking App: Game Changer? – Conde Nast Daily Traveler
Delta has rolled out a nifty little bag tracking app on the iPhone which builds on the website. Tracking your bag like FedEx is awesome.

In the Trenches: How to Treat the Media – Intuit Small Business Blog
We had a blogger use Cranky Concierge for a trip, and that left us thinking about if we should treat him any differently. (We didn’t.)

It’s getting close. My wife is due in just about 3 weeks, and that means I’m going to need to take a little Cranky break once it happens. I don’t plan on being gone for long, but it does mean that it’s time for one of those rare opportunities for guest posting on the blog. If you have any interest in writing a post, send me a note at cf@crankyflier.com with your idea. Here’s what you need to keep in mind:

1. Your post has to be airline/aviation related. I’m looking for commercial air travel posts here. If you read the blog, you know what kind of stuff will work.
2. The topic has to be “evergreen.” In other words, it has to be something that could run a month from now since I’ll need to get these prepared in advance and ready to go. The exact posting date isn’t known, so it can’t be something like, oh, that Alec Baldwin post I wrote earlier this week. That would look pretty dumb a month from now.
3. No product or service promotions are allowed. If you have something interesting to write about, you’ll get a link with a byline at the bottom of the post, but the post itself can’t promote something you’re selling.
4. It should be between 500 and 800 words. Anything over 1,000 words I won’t even consider.
5. You have to be able to provide an image to use in the post that you have rights to use. I won’t have time to go digging around looking for good images.
6. The post has to be approved by me first. Don’t just write something up and send it over. Make sure I’ve given you the go-ahead.
7. Proper grammar is very important, and so is correct spelling. I can’t spend a lot of time editing these.

I’ll probably pick 5 or 6 that I can have in the hopper, ready to go when I need to be doing other things. Send me your ideas.

It’s been a tough few weeks for American without question. After filing for bankruptcy, it’s probably not a surprise that we see airlines trying to take advantage of the situation by moving in on American’s turf. There were three moves last week in particular that seemed to single out American. I say “seemed” to, because in reality I don’t imagine that any of these were made specifically because American filed for bankruptcy. In fact, I’d argue that one isn’t even targeted at American at all, though it will have an impact. Let’s look at each one.

Spirit Grows Dallas/Ft Worth
Spirit has has now refocused on domestic flying, and DFW is getting a big new spot on the map. This expansion will see one flight per day to Atlanta, Boston, New York/La Guardia, and Orlando. It also announced a day later that it was going to add a daily flight to Mesa (outside of Phoenix) as well.

Let’s be clear on this one: this doesn’t hurt American much. Sure, it has the potential to siphon off some seriously price sensitive travelers on to Spirit, but American shouldn’t be targeting those people anyway. The flight times here aren’t very good with a redeye on the DFW-Boston and Mesa-DFW flights and some mid-day runs on the others. This isn’t going to pull off business travelers in any way, and I can’t imagine Spirit wants to do that. Just as it has tried to do in Chicago and in Vegas, Spirit sees an opportunity to go with super low fares and skim traffic off the bottom.

For Spirit, the timing was perfect. Spirit thrives on using outrageous slogans or promos to get free press. So when Spirit saw American file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, it was too good to ignore. The press release makes that clear with references to a “new chapter in Dallas/Fort Worth’s history” along with $11 fares. You have to love an opportunistic airline. Spirit is like a parasite that lives off the misfortune of others – it’s brilliant.

This really shouldn’t be viewed as much of an assault on American, but many will draw the parallel. And American, like most legacy airlines, has nothing against irrational response so we’ll see where this goes. But American isn’t the only one that’s thinking about these moves. . . .

JetBlue Starts Boston to DFW
Another move that would seem to be more alarming to American is JetBlue’s decision to fly Boston to DFW three times daily. JetBlue has avoided DFW so far, and it has a strong relationship with American, so this might seem curious. Why is JetBlue doing this? I think it’s more about Spirit than American.

Is JetBlue trying to make a move on American’s turf? Well, it is doing that, but I don’t think it’s particularly targeting American. JetBlue stands to benefit through greater cooperation with American after the bankruptcy process wraps up, and it wants to be a strong partner. That makes this seem like an odd move.

And that’s why I think this is more about Spirit. JetBlue has previously been VERY aggressive at tackling ultra low cost carriers. When Allegiant announced it would begin flying from Long Beach to Las Vegas, JetBlue ramped up to offer 5 daily flights in the market and launched the additional flights with a $19 each way sale. Overkill? Yeah, probably. But then again, Allegiant pulled out.

JetBlue has tried a similar move with Spirit. Less than a week after Spirit announced it would do a daily flight from Chicago to Boston, JetBlue added a fourth flight on that route. While JetBlue doesn’t care about competing on Boston to Myrtle Beach and it probably accepts Spirit flying to its home base in Ft Lauderdale, it’s not going to be willing to sit there while Spirit moves in on other destinations. That’s why I think we’re seeing this move.

Delta Steals Gol from American
In a completely unrelated blow to American, Delta signed an “exclusive” deal with Brazil’s Gol to be the only US partner with the airline. That means that American’s current partnership with the airline is going to disappear. Delta paid a pretty hefty price to get in on this – it had to invest $100 million in Gol and now has a seat on the Board of Directors.

While I can’t imagine this has anything to do with American’s bankruptcy (this kind of agreement had to be be in the works long before), I do think it was more about Delta feeling a little desperate about Latin America. Avianca/TACA and COPA will all be in Star Alliance. Though I don’t think it’s been announced, the combined LAN and TAM have to pick an alliance, and the scuttlebutt is that they’re leaning toward oneworld (as they should). That leaves Delta with a messy Aerolineas Argentinas and absolutely no presence in the increasingly important Brazilian market. This was an effort to buy a place in that market, and it’s a place that American likely won’t need assuming LAN brings TAM into oneworld.

So, lots of moves that impact American recently, but it’s not a direct hit, as the title of this post says.

[Original surfer photo via Flickr user The Pug Father/CC 2.0]

I’ve received a few notes lately saying that comments had been posted but they weren’t showing up on the site. Are they being blocked? The answer is no, well, not on purpose.

I use Akismet to help block spam, and this is a good thing. The amount of spam thrown at my site is absurd. Just since yesterday when the last post went live, there have been more than 600 spam comments posted and Akismet has caught them. Unfortunately, some legitimate comments have been caught in there as well. It’s been worse lately for some reason, and that has me going in once or twice a day to clear out the legitimate comments. I just cleared a big batch this morning.

The best way to get your comment live, however, is to email me if you have a problem. Send me a note at cf@crankyflier.com and I’ll go in and clear it as soon as I have a chance. I’m hoping this is just a temporary problem, because comments are what make this whole thing fun for me.

It’s amazing how much coverage this whole Alec Baldwin vs. American Airlines thing has received over the last few days. Alec keeps pushing further and further while American sits mostly still. In my eyes, this would be a fantastic opportunity for American’s “new” management team to start re-building the shattered relationship between the airline and its people. American should tell Alec Baldwin to f*** off, and it can have some real fun with this.

Ok, so maybe that exact reaction would be a little strong, but the point is that American should publicly tell Alec Baldwin that he’s not welcome on the silver birds again until he apologizes to the crew involved.

Why go to such extremes? Had it just ended last week after the incident played out, then I’d say it’s best to just let it go. But Alec continues to egg American on every day. First, he “apologized” on the Huffington Post. But it wasn’t an apology to the airline and its crew – only to the passengers who were delayed.

Then he went on to Saturday Night Live posing as the captain on the flight (with only 3 stripes on his “captain” uniform, harrumph), and just rubbed it in the airline’s face. It was pretty funny. See for yourself.

American should strike back, but not for PR reasons. American should do it for its employees.

What exactly happened on that airplane? I have no idea, but it doesn’t matter. My guess is that it was the same struggle that happens every day. He wouldn’t turn off his phone even though it was time to go, and then an argument ensued. It got heated enough that they threw him off the flight. Keep in mind, American isn’t doing this for fun. It has to enforce that policy thanks to federal regulations. So, he can complain all he wants about how an electronic device won’t bring an airplane down, but that’s not American’s problem. Maybe the employee was overzealous in trying to get him to shut it off, but that doesn’t matter here. The path forward should be clear.

With Alec taunting American on a daily basis, the employees are getting angry. American should jump on board and support them.

Tom Horton took over the CEO job just a couple weeks ago when the airline filed for bankruptcy protection. This is a chance for him to leave his mark, showing that he’s going to support his people. It’s a small gesture that would show a very different American Airlines. It should come directly from the top, and it should show a different kind of tone. If Tom can do impressions, I’d say they should throw him in front of a camera pretending to be Alec Baldwin. If he’s what we come to expect of American management, then we’ll need to find someone else with comedic timing. There are a lot of creative people at American that could put something good together, all with Tom taking the lead as the face of the response.

Though people love to hate airlines, people would support American here. Take a look at the sampling of the nearly 2,500 comments on American’s Facebook post about the incident. Sure, some support Alec, but there is a lot of support for American here. (And yes, some are employees, but still.)

And, though I hate touching on politics here, since Alec Baldwin is trotted out as a stereotypical Hollywood liberal time and time again, the right would love to see him put in his place. And the left, well, they aren’t going to care.

Will the studio be mad? I doubt it. This just generates more publicity for Alec, and this wouldn’t be really bad publicity.

But the point is that the employees of the airline would love it. They’d love to see their new management team taking a bold stand to support them. And if the airline used some humor in the response, it would really show a different kind of American Airlines. That’s exactly what Tom Horton needs to do now. He needs people to forget the Gerard Arpey era and move on to something new.

So, come on Tom. Put together something fun here and take a stand to support your people. The exact details of the incident don’t matter, but the fact that Alec keeps rubbing it in your face should be enough to get you out there.

[Original photo from Team America: World Police]