Happy Sunday to all of our travel friends, both near and far! Here are some articles we’ve read from other bloggers (and other sources) that we think you may like, as well, so we’re passing them along.
- I’ve written my public service announcement telling people to stop hanging things from sprinklers in hotel rooms. Apparently not enough people saw it because Gary from View from the Wing shared a story of a high school senior who hung his JROTC jacket to keep it perfect and instead caused $690,000 worth of damage to the hotel. To make things worse, the hotel is now suing to get their money back.
- The Frequent Miler team of Greg, Nick and Stephen are having a friendly challenge called “40K to far away” to find out who can get the furthest by only spending 40,000 transferrable points and $400. To make things interesting, each one has picked a different bank. I love these challenges because they show what’s possible using points and miles if you put your mind to it and I’m going to be following to see who wins the friendly competition.
- There’s something Sharon and I love about sketchy theme parks. There’s the Disney rip-off in China, the Harry Potter rip-off in Vietnam and of course our visit to the now-closed Nara Dreamland in Japan. Shawn from Miles to Memories shares a tale from a different theme park in Vietnam which, besides having its own Disney ripoffs, an ice sculpture exhibit, and clones of other popular rides, had what might be the most terrifying theme park experience available anywhere.
- American Airlines announced the much-delayed retirement of their MD-80 planes from the fleet. They even let Mad Dog (the affectionate nickname given to these planes) take over their Twitter to announce the retirement date.
Brad from Travel Codex writes more about the MD-80 and the schedule leading up to the final flight, suitably numbered AA80. - I wrote in my post about our problems with United that I was going to cancel our United credit card. Apparently, I’m not the only one who isn’t using United co-brand credit cards anymore and they’re not happy about it so they’re blaming the only thing they can for the problem…Chase. Lucky from One Mile at a Time wrote about how United is blaming Chase for the underperformance of the card portfolio because they feel Chase’s own Sapphire Reserve card (who has United as a transfer partner) is too good in comparison. The nerve of Chase to offer such a lucrative card with better travel protections and point earning categories.
- Airlines seemingly have two ideas that they love trying over and over again. One of them is branching off a subsidiary and the other is attempting to market that “new” airline to a specific demographic (Remember TED and Song?). Since every company is currently trying to figure out what “Millennials” want, Air France launched Joon in 2017 and tried to sell the availability of organic, farm to market food for purchase and in-seat USB power ports as reasons to fly with them. Well, the experiment is over and Joon flew its last flight this week. Seth from Paxex.aero breaks down the failure of the brand and how marketing to millennials had nothing to do with it.
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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
2 comments
Thanks for linking to my discussion of Joon. Mildly ironic in that neither TED nor Song were targeting a demographic, just like Joon wasn’t. They were also all about cost-cutting. And, just like Joon, proved that the airline-within-an-airline model is very, very, very hard to successfully implement.
Yep, the airline inside an airline doesn’t work unless you totally separate the two and then it’s not a subset but it’s own entitiy. For instance, we flew both on Jetstar and Qantas in Australia and if you told me they are the same company I wouldn’t believe you.