Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Oh, no, Mr. Bill! Delta and American end their interline agreement!
I was buying a plane ticket recently, and a notice popped up saying that as of yesterday, Delta and American Airlines were terminating their interline agreement. It was in big red letters, so it seemed like a big deal. I had a lot of questions, the first one being "What is an interline agreement?"
Fortunately, there was an excellent explanation of the whole thing offered by the good people at the Cranky Flyer blog. I heartily recommend you check it out.
It turns out that an interline agreement is the contract by which airlines can shift luggage and passengers to one another, and then compensate the servicing airline. For example, I have often had an American flight cancelled out of MSP (they are like that, unfortunately), and they put me on a Delta flight. That won't happen anymore.
Apparently, Delta has become much better at operations than the other two remaining legacy carriers, United and American. If you haven't been following along, in the past ten years Delta merged with Northwest, United gobbled up Continental, and American most recently has merged with USAir. Delta struggled for a while after the merger but has been much improved, American is so-so (and still in the middle of the merge), and United is a steaming load of mess.
Because Delta has become better as, well, being an airline, it cancels far fewer flights than American and United. That means that the passenger-shifting has become lopsided, and American and United send far more passengers to Delta than vice-versa. In fact, it was about a 5-1 imbalance between American and Delta earlier this year.
Delta then bumped up its rates for flying the people sent over by United and American. United agreed to pay the higher rate, but American did not.
Which sucks for me. :(
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I am convinced that the Federal investigation of United will prove what I have been saying fro years.. the airline is run by squirrels. There's no other explanation for its system wide ineptitude.
My brother Bob and my daughter Miri inherited my mother's natural curly hair. I did not. from about 1974-1982 mine was simply unkempt.
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