ANA

ANA has today announced its list of route postponements and suspensions for the summer 2021 season and with little sign that the world is getting the pandemic under control and with the United States contemplating mandatory quarantine requirements for all international travelers, it's no surprise to see ANA cutting back on its US operations.

ANA has been doing a lot of work on its routes to/from Honolulu (on which it now operates Airbus A380 aircraft) and on the services it offers passengers in Honolulu with the opening of two new lounge spaces in the main terminal earlier this year. Now ANA is going a step further as it looks to improve the arrival process for its most premium customers - a new dedicated immigration lane is opening at Honolulu International Airport.

All Nippon Airways (ANA) has said that it will be implementing "a series of comprehensive enhancements designed to improve passenger comfort and satisfaction on all international routes" throughout 2019.

I'm still not sure I like the idea of driverless vehicles on our roads as I'm not convinced we're even close to developing the technology required for them to co-exist happily with everyday traffic and pedestrians. However, when it comes to heavily controlled areas I have fewer reservations and that's why I was interested to read that ANA has embarked on the second stage of testing for its autonomous, driverless bus at Tokyo's Haneda airport.

ANA has announced that it will finally launch A380 service between Tokyo and Honolulu in May 2019 and will become the first (and probably only) airline to operate its A380 aircraft fleet purely on a leisure route. From 24 May 2019 ANA will offer a thrice weekly A380 service between Tokyo Narita and Honolulu and that frequency will quickly rise to 10x/week in June 2019 after the airline takes delivery of its second (of three) A380s.

ANA first started to introduce a Premium Economy cabin to its fleet in 2015 and the cabin is now fitted to 59 of its aircraft flying 30 international routes. Up until now it hasn't been possible to book Premium Economy awards on ANA (a bit like the situation we currently face with American Airlines) but the airline is looking to change that in 2019.

In preparation for the launch of its A380 service between Tokyo and Honolulu ANA is building a new lounge space in Honolulu and the airline has now released details of what travellers can expect.

American Express has been offering a 30% bonus on all Membership Rewards transfers to Virgin Atlantic’s Flying Club for a few weeks now but the offer expires on 30 November so there isn't much time left to make the most of this.

While I’m up a mountain and with almost no internet access I’m having to catch up with the news on a less regular basis than I’d ideally like to…..but news is news so here are some of the stories that have appeared over the past few days that you may or may not have seen.

Last week Virgin Atlantic announced quite a big shake up in how it calculates the miles and tier points flyers will earn when flying on Delta and crediting their trips to the airline's Flying Club program. On top of that Virgin also changed the number of miles needed to book awards on Delta with Economy Class awards generally decreasing in cost but some Business Class award increasing in cost by over 70%. Award costs and earnings on Delta had long been out of step with earnings and award costs for flights taken on Virgin Atlantic so it was only a matter of time before Virgin put through the changes needed to align the two - that's what last week's announcement was all about.