Nothing Can Bring Full Return To Office As Airlines Exaggerate Return Of Corporate Travel [Roundup] – View from the Wing

News and notes from around the interweb:

• A victim of ALPA’s cronyist 1,500 hour rule man rented his house on Airbnb to afford to become a pilot. The tenant wouldn’t pay, wouldn’t leave, and re-lists the place on Airbnb. So the deadbeat tenant is generating income from the property, has a free lawyer appointed to defend him, and it’ll be at least four more months for an eviction hearing.
• Business travel expense management company Expensify gives up on back to office and shutters its bar. There’s be more travel, different travel, but business travel is forever changed. Claims about managed corporate travel having returned 75% or 85% are disingenuous, those aren’t adjusted for inflation…
  

  The company purchased a legit liquor license for a quarter million dollars, installed a proper U-shaped bar where laptops were welcome, and hired a full-time concierge/barista/mixologist to man the bar. And in a theatrical flourish, every workday ended with the sabering of a Champagne bottle, and bubbles all around for anyone who wanted some.

  …he focus, when it comes to team building, will be on trips that the company takes and encourages — like an all-hands trip to Spain last year, and its much-ballyhooed Offshore program, which the Chronicle wrote about in 2022, in which employees can take expenses-paid trips together to wherever they want, just to get work done.

  Barrett makes some bold statements this week about the general push to repopulate offices, after noting that even a free cocktail bar and drinks and cappuccinos delivered to desks wasn’t really enough to lure people back in any significant way.

• Los Angeles will vote in March to require all hotels with empty rooms to use those to house the homeless. It’s being pushed by a union representing housekeepers, whom I’m normally quite sympathetic too. They have a tough job, and I want to see hotels offering daily housekeeping.

  This is a very bad idea, because the problem of homelessness isn’t just about giving people hotel rooms and making them move from hotel to hotel every day (among other reasons!). And it seems like it could even be bad for hotel workers (those same housekeepers). The union supporting the measure still has the power to withdraw it from the ballot.

• Passenger hides pot in their diaper to go through TSA.
• The Latin America O/D market has been one where in-person ticket sales was still a thing.

  

• One way to get your airline complaint heard is to set it to music (though, statistically, complaining about United and saying that with American you know your bag will be there is a bit rich).
  

  . @united Airlines lost my bags, United strikes again!!! pic.twitter.com/U4K0wUkgmw

  — Kyle Hollingsworth (@KyleOnKeys) October 27, 2023

• Although, in fairness, I don’t actually find United to do a good job delivering checked bags timely and efficiently.
  

  Crazy situation at Toronto Pearson airport right now. Passengers from SFO to YYZ United Airlines flight are waiting here more than 2 hours to get their baggage because the carousel is stuck and no one is responding!@TorontoPearson @united pic.twitter.com/mKoiVhtrHp

  — Arash the Archer (@arash_archerr) October 27, 2023

• But it’s not like Delta is actually premium, that’s mostly marketing (it kinda was real before the pandemic). Their employees are marginally friendlier, and their operations marginally better.
  

  @Delta we gotta talk . The tape insane pic.twitter.com/6BDnewhAoJ

  — Jeffontheboards (@jeffontheboards) October 27, 2023

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