This Week At The Lounge: February 18, 2017

Hello from our new home in Mumbai where we have uninterrupted view of the city’s greenery (whatever is left of it!). We are still busy setting it up so it is a long project in itself. On that note, it reminds me that there has been lots of interesting airline news this week.

Here are the top stories we covered this week at the lounge.

Top Stories

Air India again topped the charts with the news that a London hotel wrote to the airline complaining about some crew packing up boxes for later consumption off the breakfast buffet. Having worked in the airline industry myself , I found this complaint quite stupid as crew with their super tight schedules sometimes don’t have the luxury of enjoying their breakfast.

Taj has been upping it’s game in various ways to compete with the large global hotel brands. Last year we saw a new alliance between Shangri-La Golden Circle and the Taj Epicure with the introduction of ‘Warmer Welcomes Program’, then followed the launch of ‘Tajness’ . Now in a strategic move to restructure the brand portfolio, Taj Hotels has announced that it be doing away with the Vivanta and the Gateway brands. This also means that they may be doing away with some of the hotels and reducing their portfolio size.

In the less than 6 month’s time, IHG Rewards Club is back with its 100% bonus points promotion where members had the opportunity to buy points at a 100% bonus. The sale ended yesterday and we made good use of. Let us know if like us you stashed away some extra IHG Rewards Club points.