News and Notes from Around the Interweb: Hyatt Gold Passport’s Jeff Zidell spends the day with the Freddie Awards that his program has won in the past. He and those awards are BFFs. And he’d like to win more of them. Live and Let’s Fly’s Matthew Klint was kicked off a United flight for taking a single photograph. It’s always hard to be objective when writing about an incident you were involved in yourself, but I do trust Matthew’s rendition of events. Another blogger was on the flight and watched it go down as well. AAdvantageGeek reports that within the next few weeks American first class napkins will again have button holes. Customers passionately pleaded for the return of the button hole after American removed them last year. I like them myself, in a restaurant…
Monthly Archives
Monthly Archives for February 2013.
Hilton’s Dramatic Devaluation Comes March 28: Time to Unload My HHonors Points
Hilton devaluation: It is, apparently, hotel loyalty program devaluation season. Since the first of the year Priority Club introduced a new 9-tier reward chart, Starwood raised the price of cash and points awards, Marriott introduced a new more expensive award tier and a points price increase for 36% of their properties. Just this morning I shared news that we’ll get a new devalued Wyndham Rewards chart on March 14. And in the coming days we should expect the annual category changes from Starwood. I would expect a whole lot more hotels to go up in category (and thus cost more points to redeem) than down, because their categories are tied to each hotel’s average room rates and prices have been on the rise. That makes Hyatt’s changes — more hotels getting less expensive than more…
New Devalued Wyndham Rewards Award Chart Coming March 14
Wyndham has shared some details of changes to their award chart coming March 16th. They are positioning it as a reduction in the number of points for award nights, and the elimination of the highest point categories as well. Here’s the details they’ve spelled out: Our lowest tier is decreasing from 6,000 to 5,500 points! We are adding a new 8,000 point tier between 5,500 and 10,000 points so you can stay at hotels for FREE more quickly Our highest point tier will be 30,000 points. The 35,000 and 45,000 point tiers are being eliminated. Properties within the current point level may move into different point levels. This means that point levels for individual hotels may increase or decrease beginning March 14. You’ll be able to see the new point levels on March 14. They…
W South Beach: Not Just for Stalinists Anymore!
The W South Beach has taken down a piece of art inspired by the image of Ernesto “Che” Guevara after it upset some in the Cuban exile community. The work by British artist Gavin Turk was taken down from the W South Beach on Tuesday. It featured Turk’s own face but with the scraggly beard, beret and revolutionary garb worn by Guevara in a now iconic 1960 photograph by Alberto Korda. W Hotels want to be cool, and for some reason I’ve never quite managed to fathom (probably because I’m decidedly uncool), Che Guevara is ‘it’ with the trendy set. A year ago Mercedes-Benz was associating itself with Guevara, too. Che Guevara: Helped set up Cuba’s secret police and forced labor camps Was responsible for the execution of thousands of political prisoners Tortured prisoners (this…
With Apologies to My Seatmate: What Science Says About Passing Gas on a Plane
Flying does produce gas. The study concluded that anecdotal evidence that flying increases flatulence is not hot air, finding that changes in air pressure at altitude result in the gut producing more gas. …The result was an in-depth review of scientific literature on flatulence, looking at issues such as whether women’s farts smell worse than men’s (yes), what causes the odour (sulphur) and how often the average person passes wind every day (10). The authors note that pilots in particular shouldn’t distract themselves by trying to hold it in — though they run the risk of distracting their colleagues in the cockpit which isn’t ideal, either. Interestingly, the effects of flatulence are worse in first class on airlines that still use leather seats than they are in economy. They did, however, note that the textile…
US Airways Mastercard Signup Bonus Changes (For The Worse, But How You Can Still Benefit)
Just off a long haul flight and recovering from jetlag, I read that the US Airways Mastercard ‘standard’ offer (that I have a referral link for) has changed from offering 40,000 miles after first purchase to only offering 30,000 miles after first purchase. I didn’t get any notice of the change, and when you go to the offer you might even think you were still getting the previously offered 40,000 miles. I only post the link so you can see detail on this yourself, and while I do think it’s worth getting the US Airways Mastercard I do not think you should use this link. In order to get the full 40,000 miles with this offer you would have to do a balance transfer and at a cost that is absolutely not worth it. Instead,…
Another Bucket List Sale: New York to the Galapagos in Business Class for $1338
The Points Guy blogged about a current business class deal from Dallas to Buenos Aires and from New York JFK to Guayaquil for a hair under $1000. Both excellent buys compared to usual pricing, both available on a combination of American Airlines and LAN. While I should probably have a greater appreciation for the largest city in Ecuador, Guayaquil as such doesn’t hold much interest for me. But I started playing around and found that you can include an add-on to Baltra Island (the Galapagos) as part of the ticket. Those segments are all-economy, and it’s basically just buying the Guayaquil special fare plus a regular ticket to and from Baltra, but much more convenient for connecting straight through than separate tickets. And that makes this deal really attractive, to me at least. So after…
Buy a Netbook for $31 ‘Net’
Reader John T. passes along this deal on the Acer C7 Google Chrombook. It’s a very basic stripped down netbook that costs $199. This seems a fair review. But they give you (12) Gogo wireless internet day passes which sell for $14 each. So if you would be buying inflight internet day passes anway, you’re effectively buying this netbook for $31 plus shipping. Surely it has to be worth that price, or could be eBayed for more. Or it might be a good deal if you were keeping the Acer C7 and unloading the gogo wireless internet pass codes. Thus this deal may be useful to some. And of course my Staples sells Google Play gift cards. So one could earn 5 points per dollar buying this to boot..! Update: Readers in the comments suggest…
How to Deal With Crying Children on an Airplane
I’ve stirred up some controversy in the past complaining about ill-behaved children on airplanes. But my position is simple. I don’t complain about babies and small children. I complain about parents who are clearing abdicating responsibility for those children. I’m not talking about sometimes it’s just hard, and parents getting frustrated while trying. I’ve written about incidents where children run into first class from coach and take electronics away from other passengers (strangers)… and the parents coming up and simply watching the child play somebody else’s video games while saying and doing nothing. And I’ve written about parents seated in different rows sending their children running between them through the aisles, with the child’s screams getting louder with each trip (I understand the desire to tire the child out, but reeaallly?) My frustrations are with…
Operational Excellence at Delta
Delta’s blog features an infographic (that you need to be logged into Google to see it seems) that they call ‘the anatomy of the 99.5%’ — their operation completed 99.5% of flights and nearly an 87% on-time rating. That’s real operational excellence across nearly 1.9 million flights transporting over 160 million passengers in 2012. I give a tremendous amount of grief to the Delta Skymiles program — from the usability of miles, to their upgrade policies, to a general air of deception and disingenuousness. But as an airline they run a pretty good operation, with more inflight internet than any other carrier and good seatback entertainment. Their infographic tells the story of that operation in 2012. (HT: TravelBloggerBuzz)
