United’s CEO is a card counter, Spirit’s time may be up, JetBlue sued over surveillance pricing, and how easy is it to get banned from an airline? (Saturday Selection)

Throughout the week, our team shares articles they’ve stumbled upon which may interest our readers, even if they might not otherwise merit a full post. Here are some of the posts we found interesting this week: United’s CEO is a card counter, Spirit’s time may be up, JetBlue sued over surveillance pricing, and how easy is it to get banned from an airline?

Hah: United Airlines’ CEO Is Banned From Casinos For Card Counting

United’s CEO Scott Kirby (whom we brought up last week, regarding comments about potentially acquiring assets) has a more interesting backstory than people may realize. In his pre-CEO life before he was ever part of the airline industry, (not to mention the CEO of a major airline), he was an avid gambler who’d taught himself how to count cards. This skill got him kicked out of a number of casinos, some of which he’s still banned from today. The Bellagio, for example, won’t let him play blackjack even now, ~15 years later. Is there any taboo behavior that doubles as a “flex” more than being so good at card counting you’re banned from Black Jack at the Bellagio?

Spirit Airlines Could Stop Flying Tonight As Government Bailout Talks Fail

On the one hand, the downfall of Spirit Airlines could be so near that this is old news by the time you read it, but on the other hand, it’s been two weeks since we shared circulating speculations about Spirit being “on the verge” of liquidation. This time, it appears the government bailout talks have failed, and we’ve now reached the approximate date Spirit has referenced as the end of their runway (no pun intended). It looks nearly certain that Spirit Airlines will shut down operations, likely by the time you read this Saturday evening.

JetBlue Faces Class-Action Lawsuit After Deleted X Post

It seems we can hardly talk about Spirit without JetBlue coming right on the heels with some kind of drama of its own. Luckily for JetBlue, the chatter isn’t about pending failure this time, but instead about a class-action lawsuit. The drama all started when someone noticed a sudden price hike just as they were looking into a flight for a funeral. They took to X to complain about the price hike, and a representative suggested they try clearing their browser cache and loading the flight search in a new incognito browser. This could suggest a practice called “surveillance pricing,” where the prices are not simply set by supply and demand, but variable based on a customer’s observed behavior online, with higher prices charged to customers who seem likely to pay more. JetBlue claims, of course, that they are not using tactics like these to price tickets variably. Was the representative just trying to offer a “turn it off and on again” kind of solution without any credible insights into whether or not technology in the background is applying user data for variable pricing? Either seems plausible to me.

How Little It Can Take to Get Banned From American Airlines

This is a really upsetting story about a seemingly innocuous interaction that somehow resulted in a business class passenger getting banned (without his knowledge, no less) from flying American Airlines. According to the man’s account of the “incident” (though, if true, it barely counts as an incident), a flight attendant told him to return his seat to the upright position before take off, but before he got to it himself, the flight attendant reached under his resting arm to attempt to press the buttons for him. This was startling, and he found himself moving the flight attendant’s arm and telling her he would adjust the seat himself. He had no idea this situation had resulted in any kind of penalty until years later, when he attempted to board an American Airlines flight and was denied boarding, without explanation. He believed the seat positioning incident may have been what got him banned, so he sued American Airlines over what he saw as a wrongful bar from their business. It may be worth noting that, eventually, the passenger dropped the suit. We don’t know why, of course. Even so, it’s troubling to imagine that it’s apparently so easy to ban a passenger from an airline that they might not even know it’s happened or why.

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