The new Four Seasons in Mumbai illustrates the difficulties in building a new hotel project in a developing country, via the Financial Times. [T]his week, after years of navigating red tape, the 202-room Four Seasons Mumbai became the first luxury hotel of its size to launch in the city’s south in about 20 years… …Bureaucracy and a shortage of skilled workers make building hotels difficult – the opening of the Four Seasons was delayed by at least two years. The hotel needed 165 government permits – including a special licence for the vegetable weighing scale in the kitchen and one for each of the bathroom scales put in guest rooms. In the end, the hotel cost $100m (€64.5m, £51m), or about $500,000 per room, and prices – which start at $500 per night rising to…
Monthly Archives
Monthly Archives for May 2008.
Whose Lounge / Premium Ground Experience is Best?
The Lufthansa First Class Terminal in Frankfurt is certainly a special idea, an entirely different building from the masses. You’re greeting by a staff member on entering the lounge and they become your designated personal assistant, who will be the one that will come to get you when it’s time to board your flight. To get to the plane you get a chauffeur-driven Porsche or Mercedes. There’s private security screening and passport control, a lovely restaurant with menu and buffet, a nice bar, a cigar lounge and showers and slumber room and… Well, it’s a truly great lounge. Transited there a couple times several weeks back. Some of the more snobbish set say the place is going down hill, but the conventional wisdom is that it’s the best lounge in the world. To me,…
Keeping Secrets from the State
Via TravelTech Talk, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has tips on securing your data from the prying eyes of U.S. Customs when crossing the border into the US. In short, unless you’re aware of a pending lawsuit or criminal investigation, you have no obligation to preserve data. And it’s perfectly fine to erase or encrypt it. They’ve got some links to help you, since the US government now claims the right to search your data based solely on your entering the country.
Amtrak Tightens the Screws On Points Transfers Even Further
Yesterday Gary from Free Frequent Flyer Miles dropped me a note, wondering why I hadn’t said anything about the recent change in the ability of transferring Amtrak Guest Rewards points out to other programs. I admit, I missed the recent change. Back in December I posted that Amtrak would only be allowing transfers out of its program for elite members and those holding their co-branded credit card. This program has been both useful (laundering Continental miles to United in large quantities) and infuriating (changing program rules and partners with no notice whatsoever) over the years. Finally I gave up on it as perhaps the least trustworthy rewards program I’ve ever dealt with in any extensive way. Changes in rules without notice and poor customer service can only be pushed so far. So when there was…
Roundup of United Visa Offers and a New 30,000 Bonus Mile Enticement
The United Visa used to be the easiest, most reliable churn there was. In other words, you could sign up for the card over and over (by some reports, as frequently as every 60 days) and grab the signup bonuses each time. Each member could net perhaps 200,000 miles a year that way with annual fees waived. Then a year or so back they shut down churning and started awarding bonus miles only for first-time cardmembers. Now there are mixed reports, some people say churning is back. I’m testing this myself. I applied for a new card last week just to see what would happen. I’ll report here when I learn the results. Even so, you can definitely have more than one United Visa at the same time, and more than one of the same…
United’s New Partner: Hawaiian Airlines
Via One Mile at a Time United has entered into a codesharing agreement with Hawaiian (now that former partner Aloha Airlines has ceased operations). Aloha offered both another avenue for redemptions to the Islands. Now there’s Hawaiian, which partners with just about everyone else in the US so I can’t imagine redemption seats are easy to come by, but perhaps the gap that they’ll fill for Mileage Plus members is the ability to use Mileage Plus miles for intra-island flights. I’m not yet aware of the details of the partnership, whether or how you’ll be able to combine say United across the ocean to Hawaii with Hawaiian’s intra-island flights on the same award… Or what the cost of standalone intra-island awards will be (Aloha was a great value at just 5000 miles). It doesn’t make…
A Movie I’ll Have to Watch
Jason Reitman’s next project is a film adaptation of Walter Kirn’s Up In the Air. The book’s corporate social commentary didn’t work for me when I read it back in 2001, but any novel ostensibly about a mileage maven’s quest for 1 million miles was something I had to pour through…. although in the novel the fictional airline allowed accumulation towards lifetime status through mileage earning from any source — which only American does, it isn’t hard or worthy of the stretch goals portrayed in the book. Well, maybe Walter Kirn didn’t really capture business travel, but in a good-enough-for-Hollywood way I’m hopeful that Reitman will.
Very Brief Window to Save on United Tickets
Rick Seaney says to go price your United tickets NOW: A short time ago, United REMOVED its fuel surcharges in approximately 18,000 of its markets. Most of those fuel surcharges added $130 to the price of their airline tickets. The fuel surcharge is now ZERO.UPDATE 4PM EASTERN: United Spokesperson Robin Urbanski described this as a “clerical error” and said the fuel charges would be reinstated at 8pm Eastern time. However, many of those “fixes” won’t be loaded until Midnight Eastern time, so you may have until then to get a very good deal. So buy your tickets NOW and save as much as $130, before United reinstates the fuel surcharges.
Offset Your Carbon and Fly More!
I love the concept of spending money to cleanse your soul of sin. So arguments about the logical fallacies of carbon offsets notwithstanding, the concept generates a certain aesthetic appeal to my inner postmodernist. But offering rewards for purchasing carbon offsets seems odd to me. And offering frequent flyer miles for the purchase of carbon offsets — giving customers free flights — seems downright paradoxical. My inner postmodernist approves!
United Ends 500 Mile Minimums on Short Flights
Much virtual ink is being spilled hand wringing over United’s announcement yesterday that they would be following USAirways’ lead in no longer awarding 500 miles as a minimum for short flights. They’ll be awarding actual miles flown instead, and this change applies to both base miles and elite qualifying miles. This means that those East Coast to California mileage runs can’t be supercharged with a few extra intra-California segments. What it also means – for me – is that whenever I have flights meaningfully less than 500 miles I won’t be crediting those segments to Mileage Plus or to Dividend Miles. Instead, I’ll likely be crediting another Star Alliance program (bmi Diamond Club, no doubt). It is possible, though admittedly a potential pain, to to credit more than one program on a single itinerary. I’ll…
