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H&M to stage first Paris Fashion Week show in eight years.Continue reading...

It hasn’t been easy for Air Canada in recent years with plenty of quarterly reports filled with losses. So what's an airline in the red to do? Launch a new sub-brand called "Rouge," of course.

Starting in July, Canadians can start using the new low-cost airline, which will initially fly out of Toronto and Montreal to such destinations as Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Costa Rica as well as Venice, Italy; Edinburgh, Scotland; and Athens. Consumers could start buying tickets Tuesday. 

Later next year, Rouge plans to add more Canadian cities to fly out of as well as international destinations – and not just the ones that Air Canada flies to. "The creation of this carrier is to assist us in serving many destinations that our existing model does not work on a competitive basis," said Ben Smith, Air Canada's chief commercial officer, to the CBC.

According to Yahoo! Finance, Air Canada plans to hire 200 people for Rouge, but those employees shouldn’t expect to be rolling in dough. “Cost savings are expected to come from paying lower wages,” the report notes, “and putting more seats in planes in a so-called new ‘multi-tier seating’ structure.” And we’re not talking just a few more seats. The CBC hears it could be as much as 20 percent more. Prepare to not only fasten your seatbelts but suck in your gut, Canada.Continue reading...

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Loyalty programs are pretty much everywhere now: your wine shop, your shoe store, your gas station. With all that loyalty out there, airlines need to shake things up on the rewards front they pioneered, just to keep customers interested.

It isn’t enough just to use your air miles to build up to a future ticket on the same airline. A new study from IdeaWorks chronicles just how far airlines are going to keep passengers aboard, the Montreal Gazette reports. Want a wine-of-the-month club membership? Fly Qantas. Want a leather vest autographed by George Clooney? Fly Air Canada. Want a galactic sub-orbital space flight? Fly Virgin (and amass 25 million points).

The Gazette notes that Virgin even has a Flying Without Fear class as a possible reward for those who have fly a lot but have got some issues that they have to deal with every time they do. Continue reading...

You’ve watched plenty of movies on it, sent countless emails on it, and gotten hundreds of thousands of Angry Birds points on it, but the iPad is about to become much more useful to the airline industry.

United Airlines is in the process of replacing the 40-pound flight bag each pilot has that contains “copies of charts and handbooks” they need for flying with the 1.5-pound iPad, according to the Denver Post.

Back in August, the airline became the first carrier to start doling out iPads to its pilots, as seen above. Well into its test, United now “estimates the savings will be about 326,000 gallons of jet fuel a year and 16 million sheets of paper.”Continue reading...

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Air Canada launches new regional brand to replace Jazz.

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