United Airlines fulfilled its promise this week by finally allowing one-way mileage awards on its partners in the global Star Alliance. More importantly, it showed that its Mileage Plus program is truly an industry leader — it didn’t follow American Airlines in taking away stopovers on award tickets, which will save travelers many frequent-flier miles.
Mileage Plus has become one of the most customer-friendly loyalty programs in the world. As odd as it sounds, offering one-way awards is a rather progressive step, given how rare it is in the industry — for no good reason. United has been offering one-way awards on its own flights since February.
Stopovers on international awards are incredibly useful — they are usually not permitted on domestic tickets. I don’t use them all the time, but I do often enough to mourn their loss on United. They are partly responsible for my visits to 82 countries.
When American banned stopovers last year, its justification was that the introduction of one-way awards eliminated the need for stopovers — one can now visit two cities or countries by booking three one-way segments. The problem for customers was that such an award now costs many more miles.
It would have been easy for United to copy American’s move. After all, taking stopovers away would have taken more miles off its books and decrease its liabilities. United has historically matched various practices initiated by its arch rival, but this time it made its own decision. Mileage Plus members should be grateful — preserving stopovers will save them tens of thousands of miles per trip.
I must admit, I was a bit confused about the stopover policy, and an earlier version of this column said United was doing away with them. I was misled by a reservations agent last weekend, and by a sentence on United’s website, saying “That means no stopovers.” It appears that only applies to one-way awards.
I received a comment from a reader who had seen a thread about the column on FlyerTalk.com, which prompted me to speak with a supervisor at Mileage Plus. He checked his resources and assured me that stopover are still permitted on round trips.
I’ve been praising Mileage Plus repeatedly since Graham Atkinson became president two years ago. In February, I wrote about all the right things Atkinson did — one negative thing he couldn’t change was the infamous StarNet award blocking. At the time, he told me that no decision had been made about stopovers.
Atkinson left United in September, as part of the management changes resulting from the merger with Continental, but I’m glad to see that his approach to customer loyalty lives on.
By the way, don’t forget the 24-hour international connection rule, which lets us do a mini-stop en route, so look for those day-long layovers if you want to sample a new country on the cheap.
Continue reading about United keeps free stopovers on awards
If anyone had any doubts that putting together the European Union’s new diplomatic service would be an utterly messy task, that is now an undisputed fact. A high-profile ambassadorial list released this week provoked publicly aired quarrels rather uncharacteristic of diplomats, and it raised questions about the future effectiveness of the EU corps.
The long-anticipated list, unveiled by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton in Brussels, was apparently based not on merit, but on what Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski called “esoteric considerations.”
What are those? A quick look at the list shows that the most important ambassadorships are going to diplomats from the oldest EU members in the West — China was given to the Germans, Japan to the Austrians and South Africa to the Dutch. What about less important but plush posts? Of those, the Spanish got Argentina and Singapore went to Luxembourg.
So the considerations Sikorski referred to had more to do with where the diplomats come from, rather than what they can accomplish in their respective positions. “Appointments should be made on merit,” he said. “We in the new member-countries have people who speak the languages of the former Soviet Union, we have expertise there.”
Four posts out of 29 went to diplomats from Central and Eastern Europe. Despite Sikorski’s protest, Poland did better than any other former communist country, winning South Korea and Jordan. The Bulgarians got Georgia, and Afghanistan had gone to the Lithuanians earlier.
“I have appointed the best people for the right jobs,” said Ashton, whose official title is EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, as well as vice president of the European Commission, the EU’s executive body. She was also criticized for choosing only eight women.
“We have made a start to address the important issues of geographical and gender balance,” Ashton said in an apparent admission that those problems are not yet resolved.
The nominees, who have to be approved by the European Parliament, may be the “best people” for the jobs from their country, but it’s questionable whether they are the best from any EU state. It’s not clear, either, that the top criteria during the selection process were actually skills, qualifications and experience.
“We are deeply disappointed,” said Slovenian Foreign Minister Samuel Zbogar. “We expected more transparent decisions and that geographic balance would be taken into account, in particular for those states, like Slovenia, which have no presence at all in the EU’s foreign institutions.”
Creating the European External Action Service — the diplomatic corps’ official name — is a daunting task, and Ashton has an impossible job. She won’t be able to please everyone even if she really wants to. But more consultation with Eastern European members would go a long way.
If there is hostility among diplomats from different countries even before the foreign service’s launch, which is expected in December, it will likely affect trust and their ability to work together at the dozens of missions they are setting up around the world.
Here is the full list released by Ashton’s office on Wednesday:
China — Markus Ederer (Germany)
Japan — Hans Dietmar Schweisgut (Austria)
South Africa — Roeland van de Geer (Netherlands)
Afghanistan — Vygaudas Usackas (Lithuania)
Albania — Ettore Sequi (Italy)
Argentina — Alfonso Diez Torres (Spain)
Macedonia — Peter Sorensen (Denmark)
Bangladesh — William Hanna (Ireland)
Jordan — Joanna Wronecka (Poland)
Uganda — Roberto Ridolfi (Italy)
Senegal — Dominique Dellicour (Belgium)
Angola — Javier Puyol Pinuela (Spain)
Botswana — Gerard McGovern (Ireland)
Burundi — Stephane de Loecker (Belgium)
South Korea — Tomasz Kozlowski (Poland)
Gabon — Cristina Martins Barreira (Portugal)
Georgia — Philip Dimitrov (Bulgaria)
Guinea-Bissau — Joaquin Gonzalez-Ducay (Spain)
Haiti — Lut Fabert-Goossens (Luxembourg)
Lebanon — Angelina Eichhorst (Netherlands)
Mozambique — Paul Malin (Ireland)
Namibia — Raúl Fuentes Milani (Spain)
Pakistan — Lars-Gunnar Wigemark (Sweden)
Philippines — Guy Ledoux (France)
Singapore — Marc Ungeheuer (Luxembourg)
Chad — Helene Cave (France)
Zambia — Gilles Hervio (France)
China (Deputy) — Carmen Cano de Lasala (Spain)
Papua New Guinea — Martin Dihm (Germany)
Related stories:
Political ambassadorships hold at 30%
U.S., EU face off over travel, again
Career diplomats protest Obama appointments
Continue reading about EU diplo corps gets messy before launch
The State Department plans to create seven new senior positions to ensure that a public-diplomacy perspective is always “incorporated” in policy-making around the world, as well as to respond quickly to negative coverage of the United States in foreign media.
In an ambitious strategy that goes beyond any previous efforts to reach out to other countries, the Obama administration “seeks to become woven into the fabric of the daily lives of people” there, its top public-diplomacy official said Wednesday.
“We must do a better job of listening, learn how people in other countries and cultures listen to us, understand their desires and aspirations, and provide them with information and services of value to them,” said Judith A. McHale, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs…
Continue reading about State plans new public diplomacy posts
Have you been accused by airline agents of trying to “game the system” by asking if they could open up for mileage redemption seats they obviously won’t sell for cash? Now a top airline executive is encouraging fliers to alert agents when the system fails in its predictability, so it can be “tweaked.”
Before you do that, however, make sure you know what you are talking about — learn all booking codes used by the respective carrier, if you haven’t already, and be able to access and understand its inventory data. Just because there are dozens of open business-class seats months before a flight doesn’t mean you are entitled to an upgrade or an “award” ticket.
Still, many frequent fliers have enough knowledge and experience to sense when the yield-management system — the computer software airlines use to predict how a flight will sell — is not working properly. The problem is that most agents are unreceptive when a customer points that out, saying they don’t tell inventory management what to do, because it knows best.
Continue reading about ‘Tweaking’ airlines’ yield management
American carriers can relax — their freedom to fly anywhere in the European Union is no longer threatened by Washington’s refusal to allow foreign control of U.S. airlines. That was the biggest news from last week’s agreement to expand the 2007 U.S.-EU Open Skies accord.
When the deal was first negotiated, carriers from both sides of the Atlantic were permitted to fly between any two cities without the previous government restrictions. However, those rights could have been lost next year, unless European companies could own controlling shares in U.S. airlines. Although that hasn’t happened, the EU agreed on Thursday to extend Open Skies indefinitely.
“It’s a big win for us,” said John R. Byerly, the top U.S. negotiator and deputy assistant secretary of state for transportation affairs. “There was a cloud hanging over the stability in the trans-Atlantic market, and now it’s gone. It was not an easy agreement. It took us eight rounds, beginning in the late spring of 2008″…
Continue reading about U.S. has ‘no desire’ to ease airline ownership rules
