Signals

SAS revealed a new Copenhagen flagship lounge four days before launching its “Scandinavian as Standard” brand platform. Read together, the lounge is the first physical proof of the brand claim.

Southwest’s “Enter Airplane Mode” campaign turns screenshots of your phone notifications into Rapid Rewards points. It launched weeks after the same airline built a premium lounge network with Chase.

Ryanair’s record Milan winter schedule came with a pledge of 40 aircraft and 15,000 jobs if Italy scraps its municipal tax on air travel. The same figures, unchanged, were already on the table in February.

New research from McKinsey and Skift puts AI level with search engines as a source of trip inspiration. Hotels are restructuring their sites for AI discovery; airline booking pages score lowest of any travel vertical.

Qantas has confirmed nonstop Sydney–New York flights from mid-2028, completing a promise made in 2017. In a category that compresses every launch into a week, it has sold the same story for over a decade.

ITA Airways has made Sharon Stone the face of “Simply Italian”, a global brand platform rolling out from Italy to the US and Brazil. The campaign sells an adjective rather than a network, and the second flight will decide whether it holds.

Delta folded IT and digital product into a single role reporting to the CEO, and filled it from outside aviation. It is the fifth cross-industry hire for a marketing, loyalty or technology mandate in under a year.

United’s CEO dismissed one of the industry’s favourite AI use cases, arguing that AI trends towards the consensus view. He is betting on narrow, measurable applications while most of the industry bets the other way.

United’s largest-ever international expansion sends the A321XLR to Europe’s second-choice cities. It reads less like a routing decision than a choice about which traveller United wants to keep.