Airline Execs Hold Emergency Meeting as Key Airline Blogger Turns to RVsBy Yitzy S.Executives from at least five airlines participated in a hastily-organized meeting aimed at saving the bleeding industry as a leading airline blogging celebrity shares details of his RV-central vacation.
"
Follow Me On An RV Trip Out West!" travel and deal blogger Daniel Eleff, who founded Dans Deals in 2008, wrote in the headline of a post on his site.
"4 DDF (DansDeals Forums) members have been driving an RV from NYC to San Francisco this week on a Photo [meeting] organized by [a member]," Eleff wrote in the post. Eleff's post created a stir in the travel world, and a
thread was created on his forum site, forums.dansdeals.com, discussing the trip. The growing interest in RV travel, fueled by the open embracing of such trips by travel celebrities like Eleff, have driven airline bigwigs into a frenzy.
"Such rhetoric can be the death knell of a volatile industry," United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby reportedly said at the meeting, which took place via Zoom video conference. "We can pay for huge billboards with images of glistening airplanes, but all that will be meaningless when vacationers see pictures of the beauty of the Grand Canyon through the window of a motor home."
"Making the notion of RV vacations viable will only bring trouble to the airline industry," Kirby's counterpart at American Airlines, Doug Parker, allegedly added. "This, coming from Dan Eleff, is a most formidable threat."
Eleff's site has been ranked as the number 1 travel blog site by USA Today, and he has more than 88,000 followers on Twitter. The site's Facebook page has nearly 40,000 members as well.
Delta Airlines COE Ed Bastian, who seemingly also took part in the meeting, indicated that the group would seek sanctions against the blogging site.
"We all know that Congress is in our pockets," a voice sounding like Bastian's says, in an audio clip leaked to us. "How hard would it be to just shut the [expletive] down?!" the voice said, with notable aggression.
Spokespeople for the airlines we contacted refused to comment, and we are still waiting for a response from Dans Deals.