Scott Kirby travel tips

Ace Hotel Chain Acquired for $85 Million by Hospitality Firm Sortis: Ace only has about a dozen properties, but it has punched above its weight in brand impact. Here’s our analysis of whether Sortis is a good home and if $85 million is a good price.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Thursday, January 19. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

Former American Airlines CEO Doug Parker will step down as chairman and leave the carrier’s board of directors in April. The move ends his decade-long tenure in at the airline that began in 2013 after he successfully orchestrated American’s merger with US Airways.

Rising airline traffic is expected to trigger global emissions-related requirements for some carriers as early as next year, according to a top airline trade group, even as debate broadens on the effectiveness of that approach.

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

When the pandemic first struck in 2020, airline executives were quick to say there was no crystal ball to predict the future of the industry. Now, three years after the pandemic began and as it reaches its natural ebb, United Airlines says that future is coming into focus, with this year setting the path for the airline industry’s post-pandemic future.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Thursday, April 20. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Tuesday, June 6. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Friday, June 9. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

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.

United Airlines Holdings Inc is offering its pilots a contract in excess of $8 billion in cumulative increases in pay and benefits over four years, in possibly the richest labor deal by a major American carrier, if ratified by the union.

Earlier this week we read how the beginning of Beyonce’s global tour caused inflation in Sweden, and we’re ending the week explaining how Taylor Swift caused a spike of her own in Chicago. In this case, economists weren’t concerned but hotel operators were ecstatic. It was good tourism news for a city that’s been pilloried by dubious news outlets and a sign that the city could be on its way to a stellar summer season.

Inflation be damned. Concerns about rising prices still aren’t slowing down pent-up travel demand in the U.S.

United Airlines plans to make changes in flight operations to avoid weather-related disruptions ahead of the Fourth of July holiday travel, Chief Executive Officer Scott Kirby said on Saturday.

On the same day, Wednesday, that United hub Newark Airport, JFK and LaGuardia saw more than 2,000 flight cancellations by a variety of carriers, CEO Scott Kirby chartered a private jet from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Denver, according to published reports.

Pilots at United Airlines will get cumulative 34.5%-40.2% increase in pay raises in a new four-year contract, their union said on Saturday.

A rush among travelers to make up for lost time during the pandemic is producing bumper airline earnings. And executives at U.S. carriers don’t see a letup in demand even as rising living costs stretch household budgets and add to worries about the industry’s pricing power.

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has acknowledged that the carrier’s pilots are shunning promotion to the captain’s chair, hurting its flight capacity in the fourth quarter, confirming what Reuters reported earlier this week.

Bare fares—cheap coach fares with few perks and plenty of restrictions—are a thing. The unbundled fares, as they’re also called, are what have made Spirit, Frontier, and other ultra-low-cost carriers the darlings of the most price-sensitive customers, and of Wall Street. And the legacy carriers can’t afford not to compete for those flyers.

For generations of air travelers, Boeing’s B747 jet, the four-engined behemoth with its distinctive hump, epitomized elegance in long-haul flying, harkening back to an era when travel was more refined, less exasperating. That era is long gone, and the B747 is disappearing from the skies as well.