Hello everyone! I hope all of you are not crazed today. It’s that time of year. It’s a good time. But it can also be very stressful. So try to concentrate, leave those cookies alone and get your work done so you can push all the papers aside later in the week and just breathe. And enjoy.
And eat chocolate.
This week’s two-for-one issue of PlaneBusiness Banter is now posted. I told subscribers last week that I was going to delay the publishing of our last issue for the year by a week — so that I could talk about my trip to New York last week.
But that was not the only reason to wait until this week to write.
Delta Air Lines took Manhattan last week. And Brooklyn. And Queens. And the Bronx. And Staten Island.
In addition to the airline’s new route announcements out of LaGuardia, the airline also held its investor conference in New York last week.
We let you know what the airline had to say.
Meanwhile, yours truly presented at the Business Travel News Group’s Corporate Travel Management 2012 Conference in New York last week along with Kevin Crissey, airline analyst for UBS.
It was a packed house and I’ll give you one piece of intel from our session. When surveyed, the group of top corporate buyers overwhelmingly said they see increased spending on air travel in 2012.
I also attended the BTN Travel Hall of Fame dinner later that evening. What a rollicking event that turned out to be, as some of the other inductees decided to turn it into a roast of former AMR Chairman and CEO Robert Crandall.
Meanwhile, while all of this was going on, airline stocks enjoyed a second week of strong gains. Big winners included JetBlue and US Airways.
But Pinnacle Airlines was not as lucky. The airline warned the week before last that it was attempting to restructure contracts with vendors, customers, and employee contracts.
The stock is now trading at about a buck.
It’s a jam-packed issue this week including our yearly column in which we divulge what airline CEOs are asking for from Santa, we look at the October DOT operational numbers, and much, much more.
Subscribers can access this week’s issue — the last issue for 2011– here!