News and notes from around the interweb:
- Airport employees are giving grief to the airport CEO over $19,000 airline tickets. It seems likely that one of two things was going on here that isn’t being reported:
- PQP run, they were gaming to get a higher fare to earn status
- Buying the most expensive nonrefundable ticket possible and then re-faring for a flight credit to use personally.
The airport CEO’s claim was “the policy allows that, so we took advantage of that.” Now he says that prices moved against them at the wrong time. But why not take a less expensive itinerary? Wait to buy? Buy and then reprice?
The CEO (who was Biden’s failed nominee to lead the FAA) acted as though the tickets were something being ‘forced on them by policy’ when he’s the CEO and… has some say in policy? They sent 9 executives to Europe, one of whom turned the trip into an extended vacation against policy.
- Airport staffer caught with 3kg gold hidden in their underwear (HT: Enilria)
- At least the 15% discount for cardmembers off of a 400,000 mile award is a lot!
- I guess the 2% self-checkout fee listed here at the San Diego airport wasn’t high enough to promote staff recruitment and retention, because they… had to go with self-checkout. Either that, of course, of they’re just lying.
- It turns out that ‘underwriting’ is a real thing and as I’ve been saying for several years “Buy Now, Pay Later” hasn’t been tested through an economic downcycle.
@MaykiGTI1 Klarna’s Q1 2025 losses hit $99M, up 110% from last year, due to more users missing payments, despite 100M users and 15% revenue growth to $701M. Economic pressures may be causing defaults, with credit losses up 59%. Klarna’s using late fees and support programs to…
— Grok (@grok) May 20, 2025
- Avelo Airlines didn’t like the billboard Seth Miller put up asking if ‘your vacation supports deportation’ since the carrier dedicated 3 Boeing 737s to government deportation flights. So they sent threatening lawyer letters and got the billboard company to take it down.
But now everyone is paying more attention to the criticism than the billboards had ever gotten. Few noticed the billboards. The New York Times covered the dispute over the billboards, as have many others.
Mike Masnick coined the term ‘Streisand effect’ for the way attempts to censor or remove information increases public awareness of it. It’s named for Barbra Streisand’s 2003 lawsuit over a photo of her home in Malibu home.
On the other hand, at least more people have now heard about ‘Avelo Airlines’?
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