Personal Finance News: Air Travel Edition

Filed in archive Travel on July 21, 2008

© snappED_up

I happened to come across a treasure trove of news this week concerning air travel and its effect on your personal finance. As you might guess, most of the news is bad, but some is simply interesting.

1. Airlines hope credit cards will help bail them out of financial crisis - Interesting article on how more and more airlines are going to credit-only on board, and that the long-term goal is to sell you not only drinks on your card, but pretty much everything else under the sun. Hey, you want to fly cheap? You're going to have to start doing your Christmas shopping in flight.

2. Credit-card companies: An unlikely savior for frequent-flier programs? - Blog post says that while frequent flyer programs are getting more and more stingy, the only thing that may stop them from becoming altogether useless is the fact that so many credit card companies own miles that they give out in the form of credit card rewards, and it's in the card companies' interests to pressure airlines to not go too far in their devaluing of these miles.

3. This article offers some news on new frequent flyer fees you might not aware of:

Effective Aug. 15, Delta will assess $25 for an award trip within the United States and Canada and $50 for all other award trips. To prove, again, that in the airline business, no really bad idea remains uncopied, Northwest immediately followed with surcharges up to $100. Given how money-hungry the U.S. airlines have become, I expect other big lines to adopt fees of this sort fairly quickly - and I also wouldn't be surprised to see fees growing even higher.