Must-read Earlier Installments: Singapore, Cathay, and Qantas First Class.. Some of the Best Meals of My Life, and a Tour of Hyatts in Bangkok, Singapore, and Sydney Inside the New Oneworld Lounge at LAX’s Tom Bradley International Terminal Cathay Pacific First Class, Los Angeles – Hong Kong Cathay Pacific “The Wing” First Class Lounge, Hong Kong Cathay Pacific Business Class, Hong Kong – Bangkok Grand Hyatt Bangkok: Suite, Club Lounge, and Facilities Thai Molecular Gastronomy at Sra Bua in Bangkok Getting Custom Tailored Suits Made in Bangkok at Empire Tailors Nahm at the Metropolitan: the Best Thai Food in Thailand? Thailand’s Iron Chef Cooks Ancient Recipes in a Deserted Top Notch Restaurant Eating The Best Local Thai Dishes in the Bangrak Neighborhood of Bangkok Louis Tavern CIP Lounge and Cathay Pacific Business Class, Bangkok-Singapore Grand…
Monthly Archives
Monthly Archives for January 2015.
Man Builds Flight Simulator For His 2 Year Old, and How to Become a Skyboss
News and notes from around the interweb: Virtuoso’s flutes destroyed by US customs What Ferran Adria is doing now. He closed El Bulli because of the ‘pressure’ of repeating himself. My framing, not his, is that it was the JohN Stuart Mill problem: when you’ve accomplished everything there is by a young age, what point is there in going on? (Fortunately neither Mill nor Adria killed themselves, though Mill at least contemplated it.) Marketing matters: The name of VietJet’s premium fare bundle alone makes me want to ‘buy up’ on my next Southeast Asian low cost carrier flight. They won’t have women in bikinis dancing down the aisles of every flight. But I can get priority airport services, including lounge access, as a skyboss. A Captain recalls piloting the last flight into Nicosia’s airport in…
The Numbers Prove Which Airline Runs the Best Operation, and It Isn’t the One You Think…
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics is a treasure trove of data, and their on-time performance statistics are one area of fascination for an aviation junkie. It’s conventional wisdom that Delta runs a good airline operation. And that’s true: Delta performs well as an on-time airline since 2011, 3 to 7 points better than industry average. Hawaiian Airlines shows up as a perennial leader, a function of being based in Hawaii which doesn’t have the same weather and air traffic issues that other airlines face in their home cities. An article of faith amongst several ex-Continental loyalists is that Continental was the better run airline and United a disaster when the two carriers merged. This isn’t borne out by the on-time performance data. In most years United and Continental had similar on-time performance. United was actually…
Review: Grand Hyatt Singapore
Must-read Earlier Installments: Singapore, Cathay, and Qantas First Class.. Some of the Best Meals of My Life, and a Tour of Hyatts in Bangkok, Singapore, and Sydney Inside the New Oneworld Lounge at LAX’s Tom Bradley International Terminal Cathay Pacific First Class, Los Angeles – Hong Kong Cathay Pacific “The Wing” First Class Lounge, Hong Kong Cathay Pacific Business Class, Hong Kong – Bangkok Grand Hyatt Bangkok: Suite, Club Lounge, and Facilities Thai Molecular Gastronomy at Sra Bua in Bangkok Getting Custom Tailored Suits Made in Bangkok at Empire Tailors Nahm at the Metropolitan: the Best Thai Food in Thailand? Thailand’s Iron Chef Cooks Ancient Recipes in a Deserted Top Notch Restaurant Eating The Best Local Thai Dishes in the Bangrak Neighborhood of Bangkok Louis Tavern CIP Lounge and Cathay Pacific Business Class, Bangkok-Singapore Check-in…
You Can Ask United to Give You Top Tier Revenue-Based Global Services Status!
At American and Delta, the top services aren’t part of the mileage program, a separate elite tier. At United, in contrast, their revenue-based status Global Services is actually a true top tier — Global Services members get their upgrades ahead of 100,000 mile flyers, and even trump the usual upgrade priority so that full fare elite passengers fall behind Global Services members (whereas a full fare Silver on a given trip will trump a mid-priced fare 1K in the upgrade queue). They don’t publish a criteria for earning Global Services status. It’s not based on mileage flown, but revenue for the most part. They give it not just based on your own revenue but also to significant travel influencers who drive the revenue of others (such as through major corporate contracts for which they’re the…
Avoiding the Worst Airport Germs, Prank Calling American Airlines, and a New Years Eve Uber Driver Tells All
News and notes from around the interweb: An UberX driver chronicles her New Years Eve. No one puked in her car, but she was propositioned with pizza.. Flat whites come to Starbucks January 6! I always order these at the Andaz 5th Avenue, and at a few other places in New York. It’s a coffee choice I picked up in Australia in the late 80s — microfoam poured over double espresso. Coffee is important. The Forward Cabin posts this three year old prank call that I hadn’t ever heard: recordings of Arnold Schwarzenegger prank calling the American Airlines automated voice system and then a reservations agent. Russia’s economic crisis leads to an airline bailout Confessions of a former TSA agent Contra this advice from George Bush Dana Carvey, you’re going to want to use paper…
How Do Normal People Ever Manage to Navigate Airline Bureaucracies? United Strands a New Mexico Monk Edition
Sometimes it amazes me that the public at large can successfully travel from one city to another without getting stymied by airline bureaucracies and ineptitude. Modern flight is truly miraculous. Modern airline technology, customer service, and business processes often are not. I run into frustrating situations with airlines all the time, and I do this all the time and – presumably – I even sort of know what I’m doing. Most people don’t. Delta agents don’t know who their partners are. American doesn’t publish its award redemption rules. United tickets on partners re-issue and cancel. United ticketing issues are especially problematic. For instance, How to Make Sure You Really Have a Ticket When You Redeem Your Miles When You Purchase a United Award Ticket That Doesn’t Mean You Actually Have a Ticket United Award Tickets…
Here’s the Best Travel Tips and Tricks You Shouldn’t Miss…
Here are the best travel tips and tricks, the highlights of View from the Wing posts from December. Last month I collated the best travel tips from November. Before that I summarized the very best travel posts from October, here’s the best travel posts from September, and from August. In July I offered the most useful and interesting developments from June as well. It turns out, surprisingly, that this feature is really popular, at least judging by the emails I get — people that don’t read the blog every day really appreciated the recap and not having to dig through all of the posts to find the most enduring ones. These are some that were my favorites from December. I hope you were happy with some of the posts and got something out of them…
What Are the World’s Busiest Airports? #7, 10, 16, and 23 Will Shock You!
Point Me to the Plane writes that Dubai has overtaken London Heathrow as the world’s busiest airport.. for international passengers. Full calendar year 2014 data isn’t in yet, but looking at 2013 data Dubai doesn’t actually come close to Heathrow in total passengers. Heathrow was the world’s third-busiest airport with 72 million passengers and Dubai number 7 at 66 million. It’s only by excluding UK domestic passengers from the totals that Emirates is able to squeak ahead. So while Dubai may claim the title for a subset of passengers, many will be surprised that it was only the seventh-busiest airport overall in 2013. And much of that is based on connecting traffic, Dubai is a gateway to India and the surrounding region as well as North Africa. While Dubai is indeed a financial center in…
Earning Big Miles for Checking and Investment Accounts
Earn miles for investment account funding and for your checking account. While BankDirect reduced mileage-earning for checking accounts that hold over $50,000, I’ve been a BankDirect checking account customer since July 2003, and I use it as a checking account. It is not an investment account that pays a rate of return in miles rather than money (and which doesn’t report earnings to the IRS). Well, in a world of low interest rates it is that. But it isn’t primarily that. BankDirect awards 100 American Airlines miles per every $1000 average balance every month. Depositing $50,000 at the bank generates 60,000 miles per year. If you value those miles at 1.5 cents apiece that’s a $900 return. If your rate of return on that cash would otherwise be somewhere less than 2.5% you’re probably coming…
