Airfare Deals tips

The whole unhappy story about the doctor hauled off a United flight raises the question of what to do if you’re ever caught in a similar situation. Here’s what you need to know about involuntary bumping.

The quick answer is that fares won’t change a lot between now and November, but you can figure fares are likely to be lowest September, October, and early November.

JetBlue today announced an amendment to its existing purchase agreement with Airbus to increase the number of Mint-configured A321s, and add the option to acquire A321LRs (“LR” for long range) beginning in 2019.

At this week’s J.P. Morgan Aviation, Transportation and Industrials Conference, American Airlines chief Doug Parker spent a full 40 minutes detailing his vision for American’s future and expressing full confidence that his airline would come to be regarded as “best in class.” Implicit in his remarks, however, was the recognition that the airline currently falls well short of that goal, and that a key impediment to the company’s success is its strained relations with workers.

Virgin America thinks its new “Flights with Bennies” campaign is cheeky. In name, perhaps. But really, it’s just another refer-a-friend bonus promotion. Which isn’t a bad thing.

Is this the “golden age of flying”? I’m in daily contact with many travelers, journalists, and industry analysts, and I don’t know anyone who would consider such an assertion to be anything but ludicrous. So my answer is an unqualified “No.”

For years, Southwest, which already flies more domestic passengers than American, Delta, or United, has been known to have aspirations to fly to Hawaii. Last night, the company made those intentions official.

Shark Week is coming, and Southwest Airlines is all in.

Depending on your point of view, busier airports are either a blessing or a curse. For the Airports Council International, which just released its ACI World Airport Traffic Report, busy airports are a sign of economic vitality and consumer vigor.

If the results of a new study of mice by scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and the University of Bristol in England prove to be extendable to humans, the end of jet lag may be in sight.

Got an AAdvantage credit card issued by Citibank or Barclays? Then you may be entitled to book American award flights for fewer miles.

Most elite members of Delta ‘s SkyMiles program probably didn’t pore over the airline’s recent Investor Day presentation. And of those that did, only a handful got as far as Slide 37 in the 56-slide deck. For their perseverance, they were rewarded with an ugly truth: First-class upgrades, already in scarce supply, are set to become scarcer still.

Enter the WGBH “Downton Abbey” sweepstakes by March 15, 2016, for a chance to win the grand prize: a six-day trip for two to Great Britain, including air, hotel, some meals, rail passes, and tours of Downton Abbey filming sites.

Pilots from Southwest and American Airlines are rallied at the White House today in the hopes of blocking Norwegian Air’s planned expansion in the U.S., reports the Dallas Business Journal.

Consolidation is the enemy of competition. That’s an axiom of economic theory. And it’s a truth known to any kid who was forced to cut the price of his lemonade when the neighbor opened another lemonade stand across the street.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the Big Three legacy airlines have changed their pricing policy for multi-city trips. And yes, you guessed it: The new policy makes such trips more expensive. In some cases, much more expensive.

Two months ago, when Alaska Airlines bought Virgin America for $4 billion, the consensus prediction was that San Francisco-based Virgin would be slowly integrated into Alaska until it was nothing more than a historical footnote. In other words, what customers love about Virgin would be lost in transition.

What is likely to become the new era of airport security began this week at Atlanta and Denver airports, where the Transportation Security Administration is real-world testing a new way to confirm travelers’ identities.

In what will likely be one of its final major moves under the current Obama administration, the Department of Transportation this week revealed a new set of rules governing various aspects of airline behavior. Here’s how DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx described the new rules:

It was only a handful of months ago that we were posting headline after headline bemoaning the seemingly sudden onslaught of schedule-and soul-crushing lines at TSA security checkpoints. Back in May it seemed as if travelers might be in for a prolonged quagmire of unknown duration at the country’s airports.

When it comes to lie-flat luxury on planes, transatlantic long-haul airlines like Emirates, Qatar, and Virgin Atlantic dominate the market. But now JetBlue is upping its flatbed seat count on short-haul flights, raising the question: Could the airline be readying for its own transatlantic routes?