NowBoarding, your daily travel news in 7 minutes or less. This is your host, Ed Pizza, bringing you the latest travel deals and travel news you need to know Monday through Friday. No more worrying about missing out on the best deals. Give us a couple of minutes every day and we’ll give you what’s going on in the world of travel.

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First up is news on the fast-moving partnership with Delta Airlines and South America’s LATAM. LATAM was long a partner of American Airlines but jumped ship recently. We now appear to have a date as to when the relationship with American Airlines will end. LATAM has announced that all tickets purchased via LATAM for American Airlines flights up until January 31, 2020 will have the same conditions irrespective of the flight date. That seems to indicate the partnership will end that day on a go forward basis. It’s good to see that they’ll honor benefits on tickets sold for travel past that date.

Meanwhile, Delta and LATAM will start their codeshare agreement on February 1st. We still don’t have a solid date on when the two airlines will shared details like their loyalty partnership or lounge access, but we expect that to launch in 2020.

December 8th is an easy day to score free cash at Target stores. For the past handful of years they’ve had one day where they sell discounted Target gift cards. December 8th is this year’s version. Details aren’t 100% firm, but it seems you’ll be able to buy 3 Target gift cards at a discount of 10%. In previous years, this has been limited to one card up to $300, so we’ll have to wait just a bit longer to get the exact details. But, this is essentially free money, especially if you haven’t finished your Christmas shopping yet.

AirFrance-KLM’s Flying Blue has announced their Promo Rewards for December, which are valid for travel in February and March. There are 50% discounts on award flights to Europe in Economy and Premium Economy as well as 25% discounts on Business Class. If you tune into NowBoarding or the Miles To Go podcast on a regular basis you may have heard us cover the recent transfer bonuses for AirFrance from both Chase and Capital One. If you add these two together it can make for a very cheap vacation.

United Airlines has rolled out their new PlusPoints system for elite upgrades. The interface actually looks really user-friendly. Check the link in the show notes to see the screen shots. Early reports are that upgrade inventory on high demand routes is still very hard to find. In the end, PlusPoints may be little more than a slicker interface to watch your upgrades go unused.

Finally, the big news of the day after we published the news yesterday was United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz stepping down in 2020 and passing the torch to Scott Kirby. Scott Kirby is very adept at squeezing every last penny of profit out of an airline and their customers. He’s not been famous for positive relationships with the unions at a number of his previous stops. It’ll be interesting to see if the airline continues Oscar’s mantra. Each time I’ve heard Oscar speak he had one phrase which summed up what United was trying to do. “Proof, not promises.”

That’s a full wrap on today’s travel news. If you’ve got a piece of travel news that you think I should feature on NowBoarding, you can e-mail me at ed@pizzainmotion.com, or find me on social media, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And, you can find me blogging daily at pizzainmotion.com.

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