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Posted Jan 22, 2010
UAL Corp. chairman and CEO Glenn Tilton spoke at the airline industry's Wings Club in New York Thursday, and focused his prepared comments on familiar topics: taxes are excessive, infrastructure is inadequate, regulation is outdated and industry behavior is dysfunctional. He talked about possible industry consolidation, but was reluctant to answer analysts' and reporters' questions about the JAL saga beyond saying he hopes it continues to be a distraction for his two primary competitors. Tilton also answered a few questions of mine on corporate accounts and information technology.
Posted Oct 13, 2009
United just announced that they will allow unlimited complimentary upgrades for all Mileage Plus elite members. Not only that, but in an email from United, they make the elite benefits of the Mileage Plus program pretty clear vs. the competition. We haven't seen this aggressive of competitive positioning (by name, no less) from an airline in a long time - remember the Shuttle wars?
Posted Aug 11, 2009
The slow painful lack of progress with the Air Canada reservations project known as Polaris has come to a dead stop with AC writing off C$67 million. More importantly, the depth of the work left to do was an astonishing C$40 million. This clearly indicates that the project was no where near done. Even if you discount a large amount of money for implementation, there is a clear indication that this project had some significant hills to climb to reach an "implementable" solution. Sadly, ITA Software is left without its anchor customer for what is a significant amount of their future revenue expectation. And the big winner in all this?
Posted Jul 27, 2009
Today, United Airlines announced they were dropping last-minute fees for Mileage Plus frequent- flyer award ticket redemption. Yes, this is not a misprint but a case of an airline actually dropping an irksome fee. Currently, non-elite Mileage Plus members are charged $100 to redeem within six days of travel and $75 within seven to twenty days.
Posted Jul 22, 2009
Another day, another round of airline earnings reports--and yet another notice from Standard & Poor's that another airline is now on credit watch, with further rating downgrades a distinct possibility.
Posted Jul 21, 2009
On the first of a three-day onslaught of earnings that can only be described as "earnings hell," Southwest, Continental, and United Airlines all reported their second quarter numbers today.
Posted Jul 21, 2009
Here are some comments by UAL Corp. executives, from their second-quarter financial conference call this afternoon, about distribution and risk ...
Posted Jul 21, 2009
The only thing that surprises me about all this is that anybody is surprised. This has been a nailed-on certainty for the past few years and ties in neatly with other significant costs which many airlines have passed on via their intermediaries. In fact, this is the greatest value agents give airlines at the moment--the ability to transfer cost indirectly. Except, finally, they have gone for a big one that is visibly less stealthy than the others!
Posted Jul 20, 2009
The now big political spat over credit card fees that UAL want the agents to shoulder has everyone weighing in.
As Richard Eastman noted many weeks ago this has significant potential implications. However, as I have noted, this is not something for everyone to get their noses bent out of shape on. We do have many other issues that are perhaps more important.
Posted Jul 18, 2009
Here's the full text of United's response to members of Congress, dated July 17 and signed by senior vice president of worldwide sales and distribution Jeff Foland ...
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