United MileagePlus Miles Could Soon Be Used To Fly Emirates, Shower In The Sky

News and notes from around the interweb:

  • I am quite certain there was not better food in coach.

  • TMZ? Secretary Pete laying the groundwork for his political future.

  • Seems totally legal though I’m really not sure what we think we’re doing with the policy at this point.

  • Dallas – Fort Worth airport is asking airlines for sign-off to move forward on their planned new terminal F. American Airlines received about a quarter billion dollars of federal bailout money meant for the airport passed through to it by DFW, so hopefully they’ll say yes…

  • A ‘make your own panini’ station would be an improvement in a United Club or American Airlines Admirals Club, to be honest.

    @kiki_on_tt Needless to say I got scammed hard. It’s dirty and the food is shit. #fyp #foryou #travel #qantas ♬ could you be loveddd – sophi ❤️❤️❤️

  • United and Emirates working on codesharing (The Air Current, gated) United and Emirates have codeshared before. This is a long way from claiming Emirates along with Emirates and Qatar (which is another ex-partner) should be banned from flying to the U.S. over ‘subsidies’. American of course partners with Qatar and Etihad. Could be very good for MileagePlus members assuming that reciprocal redemption is offered.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. UA could be facing the reality that India is not near as viable as it once was as long as Russian airspace is closed. EK has a large presence in India.
    I suspect that UA will regret cooperating w/ EK as soon as EK sees all of the customer data that is involved in a codeshare.

    As for DFW airport, it is really quite incredible that one of the US’ newest build from the ground up airport (50 years old but very few all-new airports have been built in the US) got it so wrong on terminal design.
    AA spends hundreds of millions more per year on labor to operate across such a massive and sprawling terminal complex and they still can’t operate all of the flights they want to operate because there just are not enough gates.
    I am sure that other airlines are happy to let AA spend the money on the terminal but they aren’t going to end up with what happened at MIA where all of the airlines got saddled with much higher costs because of AA’s massive terminal rebuild.

  2. How is it ‘incredible’ DFW was designed as it is? Pre de-regulation, no airline hub operations. Second airport in the city. Dallas was booming. It was designed for O&D pure and simple like a JFK – that seemed reasonable at the time.

    CLT, ATL are the true low cost to operate hubs in the country. CLT facility started small and expanded over time into a connecting a hub. ATL tore down a less than 20 year old facility to open the Delta / Eastern hub in 1980. Both are dreadful passenger experiences for domestic connecting passengers but great for airline costs.

    As a passenger I’ll take DFW over ATL – they sized the Admirals Clubs and Flagship Lounge appropriately, not the feeding frenzy lines out the door Sky Clubs at ATL.

  3. Greg,
    Delta and Eastern operated hubs at Atlanta long before deregulation of the airline industry in 1978. while they were tough competitors, they designed the ATL terminal complex before deregulation and built it into the most easy to use hub airports in the world. ATL is also the lowest cost of the big US large airports in the world and can accommodate the traffic that the airport handles – unlike CLT where regularly issues ATC holds to its own flights because the terminal simply can’t handle the number of aircraft even though it is heavily regional jets.
    The Sky Club wait issue – which I have only ever seen at the B concourse Sky Club – will ease when summer travel ends and when status runs out at the end of the year.
    In contrast, DFW still needs far more terminal space to handle the operation which AA wants to operate – again with a much higher percentage of regional jets than DL has at ATL.

    You are free to pick what you want but more people choose DL at ATL than AA at DFW and there are good reasons why that is not likely to change until AA is willing to spend billions of dollars to build a terminal that will be much more efficient and much less costly to operate that the massive complex that is DFW airport.

  4. I’ve wondered… do the Emirates showers use the same icky potable water tank where the water for coffee comes from?

  5. DFW is a good airport for travelers.
    I hope UA will upgrade catering if they are partnering with Emirates.

  6. Nothing beats DIA, sorry!! Best and NEWEST US AIRPORT. FORTRESS HUB FOR UNITED AIRLINES!!!

  7. @GPG – that’s a 27 year old facility. I went through it twice this summer while on a college tour, along with COS, BOS, ALB, YYZ, JFK, IAD, DCA, LAX, ONT, SFO and OAK. I’d rate it “marginally less crappy”. YYZ was complete chaos- got there 3 hours early, and barely made our flight. JFK Terminal 2 was awful.

    Now, Changi, that’s a nice airport. US airports can only be described along the various levels of Dante’s Inferno…

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