At the Travel Executive Summit luncheon during the Frequent Traveler Education Foundation series, a number of loyalty program managers spoke including:

Maya Leibman, President of AAdvantage Program, at American AirlinesJeff Foland, President of United Mileage PlusJeff Zidell, Vice President of Hyatt Gold PassportJeff Robertson, Vice President of Loyalty Programs, Delta Air LinesJoshua Berwitz, Vice President Membership Rewards, American Express

Randy ...

Right now - aa.com, united.com, delta.com and other travel sites are unavailable for many and slow for others.  This week has been difficult for many online properties with the denial of service attacks on Visa and Mastercard and the Gawker password compromise that Mark mentioned. When the sites do come back up, please follow Mark's advice and monitor your account balances and make sure you have strong passwords on all your accounts.

Update 1: United is always on top of things: "We are investigating reports of united.com issues" I guess it's better than American and others that have said nothing yet.

I can't keep up - but as of right now rueters is reporting that JAL is sticking with OneWorld and not joining Delta in Skyteam.

JAL's new chief executive officer, Kazuo Inamori, and officials of the ETIC have decided that switching alliances is too risky and could hinder their ability to turn around the airline quickly, the Asahi said on its website.

As expected there are too many hurdles for cash strapped JAL to overcome including anti trust challenges that were sure to arise. Long term I think this makes the most sense for JAL's growth as they have much bigger issues to deal with immediately. Obviously this is good news for OneWorld and American.

The only downside is what to do with the JAL content from this week's podcast that will go up later today? It seems outdated already ;)

 

Following on from Josh's post about old school airlines failing at new media customer service, Continental really dropped the ball. TV's Craig Ferguson had a funny monologue this week regarding "volunteering" for a bump. Let's just say he doesn't get as excited about bumps as Matthew does.