Month: December 2025

My airline plan in 2026

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My airline plan in 2026

I find airline status most helpful when it comes to irregular operations (IRROPS) and try to keep status on at least one U.S. based airline. I have lifetime Gold status on United and it’s helpful but only somewhat. I qualified for Alaska Titanium status in 2025 and will have that status through 2026.

I’ve been trying to decide if I should pursue status in 2026 and if so, on which carrier. Part of me likes the idea of the long game, getting lifetime 1K status on United at 3 million miles. My current lifetime mileage is a bit over 1.7 million miles, so I need to fly another 1.3 million. That is a lot of miles but if I dedicate my flying to United I could probably get it done in 5-6 years.

On the flip side, I love having quite a few non-stop options on Alaska out of Portland and the flexibility that allows. Alaska’s IT and app aren’t great and some of the partner integration isn’t thought out, but I do like OneWorld’s reach around the globe. I booked a ticket on British Airways for January and the whole process for upgrading and getting my frequent flyer number was extremely cumbersome. This is where United excels in my opinion, their integrations with partners is so much simpler. United also has a lot more reach on their metal and much more straightforward pricing on partners. Alaska’s lack of participation in the British Airways/American Airlines joint-venture across the Atlantic and the Japan Airlines/American Airlines joint-venture across the Pacific, which allows revenue sharing between the airlines, makes pricing a number of itineraries on Alaska very unattractive. Alaska only has access to some of the highest fares on British Airways and some itineraries aren’t even bookable on their website.

It’s a tough call, non-stop domestic flights and a less than stellar partner experience or more domestic connections but really amazing partner integrations plus the ability to get a really high lifetime status. What would you do?

United appears to end Dakar-Dulles service early

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United appears to end Dakar-Dulles service early

There was an announcement in November that United will end Dakar, Senegal service on March 5, 2026. I wanted to try and get on the flight before it went away and started searching in February for a potential trip but was unable to find availability. I even looked on the flight’s originally scheduled final date, and found no availability. It turns out, the furthest out date I could find was January 31, 2026.

United seems to be quietly ending this flight earlier than they originally announced. This is a disappointing development and I’m sure a bit of a shock to folks who were looking to book the flight into early March.

United flying Dakar-Dulles on January 31, 2026
No United availability on Dakar-Dulles on March 5, 2026.

Update: I have spoken to a few people who had reservations to Dakar on United in February and those reservations have been updated to remove the non-stop and show partner connecting flights instead.

The user experience is awful

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The user experience is awful

I can sum up this post in a sentence: The overall experience for customers has degraded over time and is, in my opinion, the worst it has ever been.

Need to talk to an airline representative during a delay or cancellation? Good luck. They will direct you to use their app’s chat feature that uses “AI” and 45-minutes later your issue still won’t be solved and you will be asking to speak to an actual person.

Have a question about your healthcare bill? Go through ten different phone trees to finally get a human who tells you you’re talking to the wrong department. After you are finally talking to the correct person they realize that you were billed incorrectly and it will take months for a new bill to be generated and in the meantime your current bill won’t be properly voided and instead sent to collections. You will be sorting this out for months.

Visiting the grocery store and have a full basket? The store will attempt to force you to use self-checkout where inevitably some of the items refuse to scan and require an employee to come over anyway, making the entire checkout process take longer. It also seems like this isn’t always a hiring problem but a cost issue; Grocery store margins aren’t amazing, so anything a store can do to lower costs, they’ll do. You the customer pay the price with your time (and sanity).

I could list more examples and I’m sure you could share your own, the point is the same, the overall customer and user experience for the interactions we need to have on a daily basis continue to be awful. And it isn’t that the interactions are necessarily bad, it’s that there are so many friction points. Some of it feels intentional, put you in what feels like an endless queue, hoping you drop, while other parts feel like no one has actually thought about it being a problem.

The sad part is, I don’t know that the experience gets better in my lifetime. It feels like we’ve just been so conditioned to put up with these annoyances that they aren’t going to be clawed back, we will just put up with them, complain about them, and move on (see this post).