Travel Industry Archive

Last week, I noted that the always-reliable FlightBlogger was reporting that Boeing would buy Vought’s 787 operation. His reliability streak continues. Boeing made the announcement today. The transaction actually involves Boeing purchasing Vought’s South Carolina operation. That is where the 787 work is done. According to Vought’s CEO, “the financial demands of this...

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Over the weekend, an electrical fire at a Seattle data center shut down several Web sites including Microsoft Corp.’s much-hyped travel search engine, Bing Travel. The fire started Thursday night in Fisher Plaza, an area that houses studios and servers for Web sites and television.  While Bing Travel was offline, Microsoft diverted users to Orbitz, another of its partners, a...

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As usual, Continental came out with its June unit revenue predictions as soon as the month closed and US Airways came out with theirs a few days later. While Continental’s numbers didn’t look much different than previous months, US Airways saw further erosion in unit revenue. In May, Continental saw unit revenue decline 19.9 percent. That falls squarely within the June prediction...

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The rumor mill has been swirling the last couple of days with the news that Air Jamaica is being bought by Spirit. Too bad that’s not true. While it has yet to be confirmed, it appears that the OWNERS of Spirit, Indigo Partners and Oaktree Capital, are trying to buy Air Jamaica. Indigo also has stakes in Wizz Air, Tiger Airways, and it’s now been rumored that they are looking at...

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Electrical fire shuts down Bing Travel — An electrical fire in Seattle shut down Bing Travel, Microsoft Corp.’s new search engine, for 36 hours over Independence Day weekend. The fire started Thursday night in Fisher Plaza, an area that houses studios and servers for Web sites and television.  While Bing Travel was offline, Microsoft diverted users to Orbitz, another of its...

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Delta has long had a small subfleet of MD-90s lurking around. The 16 MD-90s were supposed to be the beginning of a much larger fleet. In fact, the MD-90 was supposed to be the 727 replacement, but when McDonnell Douglas was bought by Boeing, Delta abandoned the rest of its MD-90s and instead went with the Boeing 737-800. Now it appears that Delta will be upping its fleet of MD-90s by 3, and...

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The always-reliable FlightBlogger is reporting that Boeing has decided to buy the 787 operations of one of its suppliers, Vought. This would appear to again highlight the difficulty that Boeing has encountered with its much-touted global supply chain. It wasn’t long ago that Boeing was crowing about how the 787 would be built in a completely different way. Pieces of the airplane were to...

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If no one believed my previous posts about Las Vegas being clobbered by the recession, they can now see it at one of Sin City’s hotels offering rooms for less than $20 a night. I can’t vouch for the look or ambiance of each place, but at least it’s cheap. According to the Dallas Morning News, here’s the list of dirt-cheap hotels:    Binion’s Boulder Station...

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All this talk about Republic buying Frontier has masked something important. We haven’t looked at how Frontier is doing lately. You know what? They’re making money. Go figure. Republic may have picked itself up a nice little asset for a song. Frontier made $5.6 million in May net of special items. With those special items included, it would have made $1.1 million. Special...

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Las Vegas Sands lays off almost 200 – Las Vegas Sands Corp.  reported it laid off nearly 200 employees in its Las Vegas operations. A spokesman said the the 194 layoffs from several departments were a response to the current economy. Las Vegas Sands, which owns the Venetian and Palazzo hotel-casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, also owns resorts in Macao and Bethlehem, Penn....

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