Travel Industry Archive

It’s been a disappointing week for those in the hospitality industry with several big players announcing financial difficulties and losses. Harrah’s Entertainment, although announcing no layoffs, announced it will no longer contribute to employee 401ks and will cut management salaries by 5 percent. The struggling company is also is seeking its last $740 million from its $2 billion...

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Yesterday, Barbara Hernandez posted a piece here on BNET that had some harsh words for Sir Richard Branson and Virgin America in regards to the airline’s ownership structure. Though I have often been critical of Virgin America’s business model, I find myself compelled to defend the airline in this particular instance. Virgin America has proven itself to be compliant with federal...

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Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Scott Carson says his company could trim production rates next year, but far less than what some observers are saying. Speaking earlier this week at an investor conference carried on the Web, Carson said cuts could be in the 10 percent range for 2010. In all likelihood, they won’t be nearly as great as those recently predicted by Steve Udvar-Hazy, the CEO...

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This week, Southwest rolled out an airplane with an enormous decal of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition cover model Bar Refaeli lying down along the fuselage. They thought this would be an excellent promotion for the airline, but it appears that it may have backfired. It all started earlier this week when Southwest said it would be offering riddles on Twitter for people to be able to...

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Is Virgin America under foreign control? That’s what Virgin America competitor Alaska Airlines would like the U.S. Department of Transportation to find out. The federal agency, which requires all domestic airlines to be 75 percent American-owned, was asked by Alaska to go over Virgin America’s recent business dealings. According to an article last month in the Financial Times,...

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When I visited with LiveTV in November, I wrote about the problems they were having in building a business case for inflight internet. We now have some new data out from Virgin America which may change some of the expectations for how inflight internet can perform. The big problem for LiveTV was figuring out a business model to make installing inflight internet a profitable venture. The low...

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Alaska Airlines demands inquiry into Virgin America’s U.S. ownership — Alaska Airlines petitioned the U.S. Department of Transportation raising concerns about whether Virgin America was 75-percent-owned by American citizens, a federal rule for domestic carriers. The petition also inquires about the carrier’s ownership by two hedge funds, Black Canyon Air Partners and...

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After years of fighting, Los Angeles International Airport and United have finally agreed to resolve their differences. The result finally opens up more gates at LAX and has the potential to improve the passenger experience all around. For a long time, LAX has had a problem with squatters. Some airlines lease their own terminals at the airport, and they’ve severely underutilized gates...

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AirTran has decided to continue its growth in Milwaukee by announcing an increase in flights at the airport by 40 percent. That may sound like a lot, but in reality it’s only an increase from 21 daily flights to 30. Still, it’s a very telling move. The big players in Milwaukee have long been Midwest and Northwest. Midwest has slowly been shrinking toward irrelevance after turning...

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Call it a corallary to the AIG Effect – Congressional attacks on business jets as a symbol of Wall Street greed may be exacerbating a decline in aerospace manufacturing in the American heartland. Last week, two Wichita-based corporate jet builders — Cessna and Hawker Beechcraft — announced workforce cutbacks. Cessna, which had already said it’s cutting 4,600 people,...

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