Here’s a list of free things airlines are giving to customers-By Brittany Jones-Cooper

For the first time in a long time, airfare is actually reasonable. The low-cost of fuel has led airlines to lower the price of a ticket (though it’s still not enough if you ask us). Hopper is predicting that the average price of a domestic roundtrip airfare will be $249 this June — about 9.2% lower than last year, and 17% cheaper than two summers ago. And many airlines have started use that money to improve the customer experience.
Carriers are buying new planes, updating existing cabins, and sprucing up their airport lounges. Even better, some have started to bring back perks stripped from travelers during the recession years. From food to entertainment to fees, here are some complimentary services now available at airlines.
Delta
Starting July 1, Delta (DAL) will offer its onboard entertainment options for free. This means movies, TV, music and live satellite (on select aircraft) will be available on 90% of its fleet. (Previously, passengers in the domestic cabin would have to purchase premium movies and channels.) Nothing softens the blow of a $50 baggage fee like a free in-flight movie.
Delta is also giving customers a break on fees. In April the airline announced it was dropping the $25 fee for reservations made by phone. The company also did away with the $35 fee applied to reservations made at the airport ticket counter.
United
In 2014, United (UAL) launched a streaming service on several aircraft. Over the next few weeks the airline will finish the rollout by installing the service on its remaining 90 aircraft. This means travelers will be able to stream movies and TV for free on their personal devices instead of the TVs installed on the back of the seat.

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This month the airline also announced that coach passengers on flights from the US to Europe will now receive a warm croissant, jam and yogurt cup as a mid-flight snack in addition to a complimentary full hot meal. Back in February, United brought back free snacks in the form of Stroopwafel — a toasted caramel waffle treat. They also now offer a savory snack mix.
And finally, last November United dropped its $50 processing fee for tickets refunded to customers experiencing a hardship like death, illness or jury duty. While customer-friendly, dropping the fee wasn’t groundbreaking. Delta, American Airlines, and Southwest never had a similar fee.
American Airlines
In February, economy passengers on transcontinental flights started to receive free Biscoff cookies or bags of mini pretzels on domestic flights. American Airlines (AAL) made the snacks a feature on all flights in April.
And just last month the airline announced that complimentary meal service will be available in the Main Cabin on all flights between Hawaii and Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.
American is also expanding its complimentary entertainment on domestic flights equipped with in-seat entertainment. Customers can now choose from up to 40 movies, 60 TV shows and 300 music albums.
Ryanair
This low-cost airline offers cheap tickets for flights in Europe. However, with fees for everything from bags to food, the final price tag quickly adds up. That’s why Ryanair just announced a drastic cut to the cost of checking a bag, in some cases by 50%. The cost of checking a 33-pound bag on a domestic flight lasting less than two hours went from 30 euros ($34 USD) down to 15 euros ($17 USD). Similarly, a 44-pound bag on the same flight used to cost 40 euros ($45 USD) and now costs 25 euros ($28 USD).
JetBlue
JetBlue (JBLU) never stopped offering free snacks and already offers free wireless Internet to all customers on most of its planes.
Southwest

The one airline that hasn’t made many recent changes is Southwest Airlines (LUV), which is  famous for having no change fees and no baggage fees. The airline also honors its most loyal fliers, A-List members, with free Wi-Fi on any equipped aircraft.

Culled from yahoo

The No. 1 hiring challenge cited by US small-business owners-By Minyoung Park

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Small-business owners say it's hard to find qualified applicants to interview.

America’s small-business owners have gotten slightly more optimistic recently but still have a number of business worries, according to a new report from a small-business trade group.

High on their list of concerns is difficulty finding qualified applicants, according to that report from the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB). Another recently released report, this one from Babson College, a private business school in Wellesley, Mass., found the No. 1 challenge business owners face when hiring qualified applicants is finding employees with the appropriate skills.

The Babson survey looked at a pool of 1,800 small business owners across the US, which included owners from the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program and a comparative random sample of businesses, and found the so-called skills gap was their biggest hiring challenge.

Meanwhile, the NFIB report analyzed 700 responses from small-business owners, 48% of whom said they could find few or even no qualified applicants for the jobs they were trying to fill.

The skills gap is one of the paradoxes of post-recession America, as Jordyn Holman noted on “Marketplace” back in April. While businesses might have laid people off during the recession, now many say they can’t find any good people to hire. However, some economists say businesses can’t find workers with the right skills because they’re simply not offering enough money, as Jonathan House noted in the Wall Street Journal last year.

One small-business owner who spoke with Yahoo Finance said qualified applicants are out there but that small businesses don’t have the resources to recruit them.
“The qualified and talented candidates are out there but the noise makes it hard for us to find them and for them to find us,” Shawn Askinosie, founder & CEO of Askinosie Chocolate, a small chocolate manufacturer and one of Forbes’ America’s top small companies.

Askinosie added: “In other words, the battle for attention on most social media channels (including job boards) is so overwhelming that it's a significant challenge to be seen and heard by great candidates. The only way over the noise is money and we don't have the budget to turn up the volume on our search objectives."

In the Babson report, almost half of the respondents said hiring and keeping good employees is one of their top two growth challenges. That report also found that 72% of the respondents had difficulty hiring qualified employees in the last two years. Owners of companies that provide construction services and transportation cited the most difficulty hiring qualified workers.

It’s not surprising that construction businesses have such a hard time hiring skilled employees. Chris Terrill, the CEO of HomeAdvisor, recently wrote in Fortune that a “skills gap is hobbling construction.”

“Without skilled workers to replenish a diminishing skilled labor workforce, housing prices will continue to rise, housing inventories will continue to fall,” Terrill wrote, “and we’ll pay a growing premium for even the smallest home repairs (until there’s nobody left who knows how to complete them).”

Culled from yahoo finance

MSCI says domestic China shares still not ready for its global benchmark Reuters By Michelle Price

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An investor looks at an electronic screen showing stock information at a brokerage house in Nanjing, …

By Michelle Price

HONG KONG (Reuters) - China has failed again to convince U.S. index provider MSCI Inc to add local Chinese shares to its key emerging market index, and the company could not say when it was likely to give the green light, as global investors raised fresh objections.
The index company said on Tuesday that China still had to do more to make its markets accessible to foreign investors.
That is a blow for Chinese policymakers who have rushed to address MSCI's concerns over the past six months in the hope that inclusion in the Emerging Markets Index, tracked by $1.5 trillion in global assets, could draw up to $400 billion into China's stocks over the next decade.
Chinese shares seemed to shrug off the news, however, rising more than 1 percent in morning trade.
Market-watchers and analysts said the surprise decision, the third year running it has said no, highlighted reservations among global institutional investors about yuan-denominated assets and Beijing's commitment and ability to implement capital markets reform.
China's markets have had a turbulent 12 months, with a 40 percent crash in stocks, followed by heavy state intervention and an unprecedented exodus of capital that has put pressure on the Chinese currency.
"The decision highlights a much bigger issue, which is the resistance among global investors to allocate into yuan assets, despite the fact China is home to the world's second-largest equity market and third-largest bond market," said Peter Alexander, CEO of investment consultancy Z-Ben Advisors in Shanghai.
He added that the decision put global investors "on the wrong side of history".
China's securities regulator said on Wednesday any global benchmark index that doesn't include China A shares is incomplete, but the decision wouldn't affect reforms to open its markets.
Remy Briand, MSCI global head of research, told reporters on Wednesday that China's reform programme was moving in the right direction but investors had concerns over the process for allocating investment quotas and monthly limits on repatriating capital.
He said investors also needed more time to assess if new share suspension rules would be effective in preventing a repeat of last summer, when more than half of China's listed companies halted trading in their stocks to sit out the crash.
"There have been a lot of significant improvements made recently by the Chinese authorities to improve accessibility for global investors; however, some of them are relatively recent, so we need a little bit of time to assess the effectiveness of these measures," Briand said.
NEW OBJECTIONS
MSCI this year raised new objections to a rule that requires foreign investors to seek approval from the country's stock exchanges before launching products based on A shares, which MSCI says could reduce investors' ability to hedge exposure.
"This is a very big problem for investors, and the removal of these requirements is necessary for inclusion," Briand said.
He added that the company could not commit to a timeline for inclusion and could not rule out the possibility that new issues may arise as discussions continued.
Under an industry consultation re-launched in April, MSCI had proposed adding 5 percent of the free float value of 421 A shares, which would have accounted for 1.1 percent of its benchmark index. If the decision had gone China's way, the change would have taken effect in June 2017.
Expectations that MSCI would say yes this time climbed after Chinese authorities rushed through a series of fixes over the past five months, including relaxing the country's quota-based foreign investment scheme, clarifying foreign ownership rights, and tightening up share suspension rules.
"Recent developments over the past weeks definitely skewed the decision closer to the favorable side in our view, so we are slightly surprised by this negative outcome," said Caroline Yu Maurer, head of Greater China equities at BNP Paribas Investment Partners in Hong Kong.
Many analysts had put the chances of inclusion at 50 percent or higher, with Goldman Sachs raising the odds to 70 percent last month. In a note published on Wednesday, HSBC said it had "under-estimated the resistance from the global investment community".
Tuesday's outcome highlighted growing divisions among global investors, with local China managers saying the decision process appeared to be driven by the concerns of MSCI's U.S. client base, though the index is tracked globally.
Francois Perrin, portfolio manager, greater China markets, at East Capital, said MSCI put too much emphasis on the remaining problems with the QFII scheme and the product pre-approval issue.
"It seems that many of these objections are coming from passive managers, based out of the United States."
MSCI said investors beyond Asia do tend to have more reservations, but it takes into account a range of investor feedback.
BlackRock, the world’s largest passive manager, said: “As a long-term investor, we would welcome further progress in facilitating broader participation in the nation’s domestic stock markets for international investors.”
(Reporting by Michelle Price and Saikat Chatterjee; Editing by Will Waterman)

Culled from Reuters

Alibaba expects to nearly double transactions volume to more than $900 billion by 2020

A sign of Alibaba Group is seen at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) Asia 2016 in Shanghai, China, May …

REUTERS - Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd said on Tuesday it expects to nearly double its transaction volumes by 2020, signalling it still expects rampant growth as Executive Chairman Jack Ma pledged to intensify a crackdown on fake goods.

At an investor conference at its headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, Alibaba said it expects to record 6 trillion yuan ($912 billion) in gross merchandise volume (GMV) in fiscal 2020, nearly double 3.09 trillion yuan in fiscal 2016.

Echoing that growth, Ma said Alibaba expects to have 2 billion consumers on its books by 2036, up from 423 million active buyers in 2016.

Addressing concerns about the company's efforts to remove counterfeit products from its online platforms, Ma said Alibaba will do "anything to stop the fake products". The company has been dogged for years by accusations that its shopping platforms were conduits for counterfeiters.

"I promise you guys that counterfeits, fake products, and intellectual property theft - we are more and more confident than ever that we can solve the problem," Ma said.

($1 = 6.5823 Chinese yuan renminbi)

(Reporting by Yimou Lee in HONG KONG; Writing by Anne Marie Roantree; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell)

Culled from  Reuters