APEX Editor's Blog

DUBAI: How does one go about making the world’s largest airliner, the Airbus A380, look small? Park it at the new Concourse A at Dubai International Airport, which was designed to handle the giant aircraft and all the high-end passengers who will fly in its premium cabins. Earlier this year Emirates and Dubai International Airport [...]

It’s a generally held belief that the majority of airline passengers who are exposed to inflight entertainment view the moving map at some point during their flight, making it the most popular show in the air. “Evidence [shows] that passengers get a great deal of comfort out of knowing where they are,” Airborne Interactive CEO [...]

Part of IATA’s charter – issued more than 60 years ago when the agency was founded – is to push forward with industry standards that ensure safe and efficient air travel. The association’s latest effort in that endeavour is its highly scrutinised New Distribution Capability (NDC), a complex undertaking that has garnered both praise and [...]

Will Southwest Airlines break from its resonating “Bags Fly Free” tagline and start charging for checked luggage? That was the underlying question during the carrier’s first quarter results briefing when CEO Gary Kelly discussed the carrier’s new ad campaign, which does not mention “Bags Fly Free”. Kelly was on the defensive that Southwest would not [...]

When airlines started rolling out inflight Wi-Fi at the end of the last decade, passengers had far different bandwidth requirements than in 2013. Armed with smart phones and tablets, today’s mobile, social, vocal passengers can’t seem to get enough bandwidth. They’re a seemingly insatiable bunch. So airlines and IFC service providers are re-adjusting their approaches to [...]

After unravelling their product offerings for the last few years to combat volatile fuel prices and build steady flows of ancillary revenues, many airlines are going back to the future by rebundling offerings in an effort to simplify the booking process for customers who have grown frustrated at having to navigate through the numerous add-ons [...]

PHOENIX: IATA’s effort to simplify the complex web of product distribution is failing to gain a ringing endorsement from airlines as sentiment grows that there is no single solution for carriers to offer more personalised products to customers as their merchandising programmes grow more sophisticated. Airlines are not openly throwing their support behind the association’s [...]

PHOENIX: US Airways could receive a small kickback from the sale of ‘red flower’ organic wellness products featured in the new amenity kit available for customers travelling in the carrier’s Envoy international business class beginning in July. Each kit will feature a romance card containing a code that passengers can use on the red flower [...]

IATA’s New Distribution Capability (NDC) initiative is attracting mixed views from airlines, global distribution systems (GDS) and aggregators. Airlines on the whole are keen to see a level of standardisation that will enable them to sell their ancillary products more effectively through indirect channels, but third party providers believe that many questions remain unanswered. NDC [...]

Cries from passengers for airlines to force people of size to buy a second seat are drowning out complaints about seat width, according to Michael Kotas, general manager cabin maintenance at Delta Air Lines. “We see all the complaints about what’s wrong with our configuration but we don’t see many about [seat] width,” said Kotas [...]