Travel Industry Archive

Delta threatens to leave Atlanta hub over higher fees – Delta Air Lines is threatening to leave Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport if airport officials won’t lower operating costs before it signs a new 30-year lease. If negotiations fail the airline has suggested moving its flights to either Memphis or Detroit. Delta is the airport’s biggest airline...

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The November on-time report is out, and instead of repeating the stats that you’ve seen posted elsewhere (including the Air Travel Consumer Report itself), I thought I’d look at some of the outliers. This month, that means Delta. Once again, November was a great month for on-time performance. Just wait until the December report comes out - that’s gonna be an ugly one. But...

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One of the most-important issues of the year — aside from the question of what Michelle Obama will wear to tonight’s Inaugural Ball — could get settled next week when Boeing announces its fourth-quarter earnings and discusses its outlook for 2009. We already know that Airbus out-sold and outdelivered Boeing in 2008. The broader economic question will be whether the...

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I know I’ve already posted December traffic, but now let’s look back at the full year 2008 traffic just in time for the first fourth quarter financial results this week.  As you can see, the tremendous capacity drop we saw in the fourth quarter really doesn’t show that much since traffic grew earlier in the year.  My guess is that 2009 will be a very different story.  ...

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While departing President George W. Bush took a parting shot at Fidel Castro’s Cuba, the new president, Barack Obama, seems a lot more likely to lift sanctions on the island nation. Hillary Clinton said, during her U.S. Senate confirmation hearing, that she echoed the sentiments of the new administration  by wanting to lift family travel and money restrictions for Cuban-Americans....

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Aviation Safety Action Programs (ASAPs) are excellent programs. The idea behind them is to create a friendly, penalty-free place where front line employees can report safety-related information without retribution. This of course results in free-flowing information that can only improve safety in the future. So why is it that pilot groups have been pulling out lately? That’s the...

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Tropicana plans Las Vegas separation in bankruptcy reorganization — Tropicana Entertainment LLC gave its reorganization plans to a federal bankruptcy court in Delaware which call for converting $2.74 billion of debt to stock and splitting the company into two separate entities — Tropicana Las Vegas and the company’s 10 other properties. In May 2008, Tropicana Entertainment...

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If you’re Richard Branson, you have to be getting nervous right about now. According to the Financial Times, Virgin Group has hired Lazard to find new investors for Virgin America with the belief that the existing US-based investors may cash out. This is an extremely serious problem for the airline, to say the least. The original investors, Black Canyon and Cyrus Capital Partners, were...

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Two passengers sue Continental Airlines and pilots in Denver runway crash — Two passengers on a Continental Airlines flight that veered off a Denver International Airport runway and crash-landed in a ravine last month, filed a lawsuit against the carrier. Melissa Craft, 25, and Emily Pellegrini, 21, both of Texas, allege the flight’s pilot “negligently aborted” the...

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You might think that an airline that released a fourth quarter financial report this week was on the early side, but that’s not the case with Mesa Air Group. On the Mesa fiscal calendar, fourth quarter results are from the quarter ending September 30, 2008, so they’re very, very late. And that’s just one of many problems Mesa has faced lately. Their results for the quarter...

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