Ed Bastian travel tips

Good morning from Skift. It’s Friday, December 30, and here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

In hindsight, we should have known the mess that was air travel in 2022 was coming. Airlines kicked off the year canceling tens of thousands of flights amid the surge in Omicron variant cases that kept crews at home, and travelers — unfortunately — on the ground.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Monday, January 16. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

A group of more than 120 U.S. lawmakers told the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) its computer outage on Wednesday that disrupted 11,000 flights was “completely unacceptable” and demanded the agency explain how it will avoid future incidents.

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby came out swinging with a stinging critique of the U.S. aviation system on Wednesday. Despite what he views as profound structural changes during the past four years, other players are in “denial” and failing to accept these changes — to the detriment of travelers and the entire industry.

Travelers surged back to planes last year in numbers unseen since the beginning of the pandemic. That was good news for airlines that, facing a myriad of challenges, were unable to resume flights quite as fast, which drove up fares — and revenues too. It also, however, brought an unwelcome surge in costs. 

Delta Air Lines will give its non-union staff, including flight attendants but not pilots, a 5 percent pay raise this April. The move, as CEO Ed Bastian put it in a memo Tuesday, was “well earned” by staff after a challenging 2022.

On Wednesday, we published a deep dive into Chinese outbound tourism by Asia Editor Peden Doma Bhutia. The spark of the story came from a discussion she had in December with Trip.com Chief Operating Officer Schubert Lou at Skift Global Forum East. “The article is an attempt to cut the clutter and talk about how the Chinese tourist has changed and how destinations should approach this change,” Bhutia told me this week. “Also, call it perfect timing, the deep dive came out the day China removed its final Covid-induced hurdle for travel and resumed issuing tourist visas.”

It’s like that bunny in the old Energizer battery commercials: Still going.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers on Wednesday will make a new push for legislation to bar passengers fined or convicted of serious physical violence from commercial flights after a series of recent high-profile incidents.

Delta Air Lines is doubling down on more profitable premium travel as it looks to shore up its defenses against an economic downturn.

United Airlines’ Scott Kirby traded spots with Delta Air Lines chief Ed Bastian to become the highest-paid U.S. airline CEO in 2022, both in terms of his total pay package and a new methodology for calculating executive salaries. Kirby took the top spot in a year that United turned a full-year net profit of $737 million — its first since 2019.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Wednesday, June 14. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

A little more than three years and a global pandemic after becoming the largest shareholder in Wheels Up, Delta Air Lines and its highly regarded CEO Ed Bastian will now be tasked with turning around the fortunes of the nation’s third-largest private jet flight provider.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian has a bold idea: Perhaps the future of his airline’s success lies less in low fares and more in steadily improving service, amenities, and reliability. Delta has made inroads with high-paying business travelers through improved business-class service, but the AP’s Scott Mayerowitz reports that Bastian has no plans to hang the main cabin out to dry.

Things are getting back to normal for Delta, but the damage, as they say, is done. The airline is reeling from a crippling systems outage that affected flights across the globe and led to thousands of cancellations and delays. Now begins the process of fixing what went wrong and, just as importantly, making good with customers.

Yesterday’s big travel story was Delta’s announcement that the airline’s CEO, Richard Anderson, will retire on May 2, and be succeeded by Ed Bastian, currently Delta’s president.

While the Thanksgiving travel period was mostly uneventful, thankfully, at least one plane-full of holiday flyers got more than their fair share of inflight drama.

A negative COVID-19 test is now required for international flights into the U.S., but are domestic flights next? In an interview with Axios on HBO, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that there is currently an “active conversation” between the Biden administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on requiring coronavirus testing for domestic flights, that is being guided “by data, by science, by medicine, and by the input of the people who are actually going to have to carry this out.”

For the last few months, Delta has been the lone U.S. airline holding out and leaving middle seats empty, but that’s about to change. Delta CEO Ed Bastian just announced that the airline will be unblocking the middle seat and booking flights to full capacity starting May 1.

Delta Air Lines will begin offering free Wi-Fi on most domestic flights starting February 1.