Not a Fan of Spirit? These Airlines Have the Fewest Fees – Conde Nast Daily Traveler
There are a lot of people who don’t like fees and would rather pay a higher base fare that includes more. So here’s a guide showing which airlines you can fly to avoid fees.
Making the Brand – APEX experience
I put together a roundtable talking about branding with airlines and airports.
I have flown to Barcelona, Bucuresti, Rome, London, Heraklion and somewhere else this year, so far and have a few observations. First, the seats are getting tighter but I observed a greater tolerance in the face of adversity by the passengers. It was a very mutually helpful bunch on my last AA flight from London to Chicago.
The food is getting better on Delta and seemingly worse on AA. BA had the best in the cattle class. It was nice. Wine is still free, and they are happy to hand out a second and third bottle of the stuff. It is not quality wine, but it is wine and helps one find solace.
Boarding seems to go best on on BA, compared to AA and Delta. They seem more civil and give clearer PA instructions.
The overhead bins do not seem to be as full. Really. On almost all of my flights there seemed to be plenty of space.
Entertainment on AA is abysmal. Click on the in flight entertainment button, then go to music, then try CD, whatever that is. “Temporarily unavailable.” I clicked through the offerings and others showed the same message. I tried TV and there were precious few offerings compared to a veritable library on Delta. AA videos in some cases constantly broke up so and finally failed to show. “Temporarily unavailable” came up again. Most of the other “films” were second level offerings, nothing special, not a very broad selection, perhaps ten to 15 en toto. Delta, by comparison, seems to have a Carnegie Library available.
I laughed when AA Eagle called for volunteers to give up their seats on a ride only to allow me 40 minutes later to fly standby on the same plane. There were easily ten vacant seats. People didn’t show up, but their manifest showed overbooked, so they paid a few hundred bucks to each of two voluntary abandonees. Could this be why they have trouble making ends meet.
In the past year I have been late out of Fort Wayne three of four flights. I doubt 75 % late departure rate, but something is amiss. The destination in each case was Chicago and the problem each time was weather. We sat, each time, on the ground in FW waiting clearance to take off. We were told that there were just too many planes trying to get into Chicago.
Another time we arrived in Chicago only 30-minutes late, but could not proceed to the gate because another jet was being de-iced.
Once in FW we could not leave because they had to call someone in de-ice the plane…in February when one might expect inclement weather as the norm. Then, a part of the apparatus broke, so a mechanic had to be found…
Oh, and the AA app showed my plane was on-time even though we were one hour late in leaving.
For those of you who fly out of the sunny, drought-striken southwest life must be less complicated than those of us who have to put snow chains on the plane cause the stewardess is scraping the front windshield.