I thought it was nice of L’Avion to send me an email on Monday (the day after Mother’s Day) offering me a "Mother’s Day Special."  The email continued, "For Mother’s Day, Surprise her with L’Avion’s promotional offer."  Yes, that would be a surprise.  On the plus side, two roundtrip tickets to Paris in business class [...]

(thanks to TravelNate for the heads up):
Air New Zealand won an award yesterday for its Pimp My Plane online campaign that allowed users to pimp a virtual airplane.  You can play with it here…kinda fun.

Delta has a launched a great business class sale to Europe, with fares that only about twice as much as the cheapest coach seats (frequently business class fares to Europe can run up to 20 times a coach ticket).  One-way ares from New York to Brussels start at $789 each way, Manchester (UK) $779, and [...]

Ryanair has been bashed repeatedly for being consumer unfriendly, but they announced a very consumer-happy move yesterday:  all of their advertised fares will now include taxes.  While this seems like a small deal, advertised fares can have upwards of $150 in taxes missing, so that $99 advertised fare to London actually works out to be [...]

I’m asked all the time about whether a given airline is safe.  The answer is virtually always, "yes."  Unless you were about to fly Pakistan’s Aero Asia International.  The government shut the carrier down for failing to meet safety standards.  The airline had 3 domestic and 3 international routes.

KLM is testing charging passengers 50 Euros (about $275,000 given how weak the dollar is) if they want to sit in exit rows on longhaul flights.  While you may say this is petty, I would GLADLY pay the $70 to guarantee myself the extra legroom.  The test is being conducted on flights to Singapore, Curacao, [...]

Back on February 19th, after JetBlue’s operational disaster, I wrote, "If Neeleman weren’t the founder, I would expect a board to oust him over this.  But they won’t…"
I was wrong.  The board fired JetBlue’s CEO and founder David Neeleman today, replacing him with former COO Dave Barger.  Who knows why it took 3 months (and [...]

A new documentary accuses Dutch carrier KLM of aiding Nazis to escape to South America after the second world war.  In a refreshingly candid response, a spokesman for the airline says:
"The checks we have done in our archive so far have not delivered any
specific information about this sort of transportation. But that does
not mean that [...]

Longtime OTR readers know I LOVE press releases about nothing.  AirTran has a good one today, breathlessly announcing that to celebrate its new flights to St. Louis, it will have Budweiser products on board that were produced THAT VERY SAME DAY!
On the down side, you have to drink Budweiser.

USA Today has a good overview of the revolutionary changes Air Canada has made since a post-9/11 financial disaster.  Specifically, they simplified their fare structure, made nearly every cost associated with travel transparent (ie, reserving seats, checking bags), introduced flight passes and flight subscriptions, put entertainment in regional jets, and sold off its frequent flyer [...]