Skift CEO Rafat Ali takes the ITB Asia stage on October 18th for a Skift Forum Asia preview session. He'll be joined by leaders from Intrepid Travel, Pegasus Lodges, Anywhr, and more. You can get a ticket for only $65 when you use exclusive discount code TV-Skift50!

Air Baltic treats its customers better than Ryanair and Wizz Air treat theirs. This is mostly out of necessity: Air Baltic has higher costs, and it can only make a profit if it commands a revenue premium. But Air Baltic's CEO, Martin Gauss, told me he believes in David Neeleman's strategy of treating customers well. "If you are not making the customers happy, sooner or later you're not going to be successful," Gauss said.

Maybe airline re-accommodation agreements are relics of the past, but as a frequent flyer, I love them. If I'm flying on a U.S. legacy carrier and my flight is delayed or canceled, I'll often ask the airline to put me on a competitor. The answer is almost always yes, and I get home or to my meeting a lot sooner than I would otherwise. American will still take care of its best customers under its new policy, but average coach passengers are going to have a much harder time persuading an agent to rebook them on Delta or United.

Skift distribution guru Sean O'Neill, who doubles as the travel tech editor, explains in great detail how American's distribution strategy has evolved in the past eight years. As O'Neill says: "American Airlines has moved away from its earlier belligerence to navigate a cooperative path with distribution middlemen."

Skift acquired Airline Weekly last month, and now we're putting its managing partner, Seth Kaplan, to work. Seth and I will play host to a free conference call Friday in which we'll discuss some of the challenges faced by low-cost airlines. We all know about the success stories, such as Ryanair, EasyJet, and Air Asia, but not every discounter fares so well. This post explains more about what we plan to discuss.

Flyers want convenience, and many are willing to trade their personal information for a more seamless air travel experience. That's according to a new survey of travelers from IATA, the global trade group. Andrew Sheivachman, who covers business travel for Skift, explains the significance of IATA's findings in this story.

Hopper last week announced it has raised even more money, saying it would use the funding to expand internationally. O'Neill reports, "The startup is also now overpriced, based on its funding, for most potential acquirers — except maybe for Airbnb." Read the full story for his take on the company's future.

U.S. and European airlines love premium economy. Why? Because it's highly profitable! The seats take up a little more room than the average coach seat, and yet airlines often sell them (on average, at least) for about 1.7 times the economy class fare. As Airline Weekly's Kaplan put it in this Bloomberg story by Justin Bachman, "Anytime you can get paid double for something that doesn't cost you double to produce, that's a pretty good place to be for any company."

Los Angeles Times columnist David Lazarus argues against unbundling, saying what passengers prefer is an all-in experience like what they get from Netflix. It's an interesting analogy, but I'm not sure it holds. Passengers have shown repeatedly that they just want the cheapest price. Many don't seem to have interest in paying for a premium product.

This is an in-house story produced by Hawaiian Airlines, so take that for what it's worth. But Brent Overbeek, Hawaiian's senior vice president for revenue management and network planning, explains in impressive detail why the airline is launching Boston-Honolulu, the longest U.S. domestic flight. The airline spent three years calculating the economics of it. "After years of research, out of all the markets in the East Coast (i.e. Washington D.C., Baltimore, Atlanta, Toronto), Boston checked all our boxes," he writes.