Air France has a new ‘super chic’ safety video. I’ve not been keen to fly them in recent times (mostly because of how long it’s taken for them to start rolling out a lie flat business class), but I kind of like this video. My first five thoughts watching it: I wish Air France crews were this smiley. I usually can’t get more than a tiny glass of water from them, and it always feels like I’m hassling them when I ask for more. They’re not even, like, showing safety features inside a plane. There’s sort of a plane-ish background. I think it works, but it’s strange. Most Air France crew – and passengers – do not look like that. Passengers have books and binders with “France is in the Air” written on the front.…
Monthly Archives
Monthly Archives for March 2015.
My Ultimate Relaxation Trip Report: Etihad and Emirates First Class, Food in Sri Lanka and Returning the Maldives
I’m beginning to write up the report of my most recent trip to the Maldives, and this is a basic preview and outline of the trip I’ll be sharing. Regular readers know that I love the Maldives. It’s not for everyone and I hope to give you a sense both of why I like it so much and also reasons why not everyone will. For me the distance is a feature, not a bug, I need to be that far away to really disconnect and the time zone difference helps too because I’m getting up in the morning when the business day ends on the US East Coast and I have the entire day ahead of me undisturbed. I’ve now gone back to the Park Hyatt Hadahaa Maldives four consecutive years. I love it there,…
When You Can Throw Away Segments of Your Airline Tickets–And Why You Want to
Reader Paradocs asked, If I book a trip as two one ways and skip the final destination on the outbound is my return affected? Thanks for your help Gary! As long as you’re only skipping the final segment of the ticket you’re not going to cause problems for your return. What Paradocs is asking about is throwaway ticketing (not using the last flight coupon of a ticket). If you skip any other segment, you risk having the rest of the unflown segments on your ticket cancelled. This is useful, most of the time, with paid tickets (although I’ve also explained how to use this to get lower award prices and also to save on fuel surcharges on award tickets). With paid tickets you’re using ‘point beyond ticketing’ where you’ll fly from your start city through…
A New Star Alliance Frequent Flyer Program is Now Online, Here’s What You Need to Know.
The new Star Alliance frequent flyer program — CopaAirlines ConnectMiles — is now online. 1000 Free Miles to Start Enrollment will start in May, and the program will be live in July. If you subscribe now for email updated with the same address you register with later, you’ll get 1000 miles. Full Mileage Earning! They advertise one mile earned per one mile flown, and 500 mile minimums, plus class of service bonuses. So far they’ve only posted earning charts for Copa flights and not for Star Alliance partners. But they promise 1 mile = 1 mile “never less.”
Send Money Free With a PIN-enabled Gift Card, Emirates Denying Lounge Access on Awards and EPA to Monitor Your Shower Use?
News and notes from around the interweb: The story about the EPA wanting to monitor how much water you use in the shower is really just a $15,000 grant to the University of Tulsa. Considering most universities take nearly half of grant money off the top for overhead, that doesn’t leave a whole lot to sneak a peak at your morning water-wasting routines. More concerning are low flow toilets that clog and low flow shower heads that won’t give a decent shower… (HT: Alan H.) @SamFromQueens tweets that he was denied lounge access in New York when flying Emirates because he was on an Alaska-issued award ticket. Agents in Dubai were unsure whether I should have access to the first class lounge there on an Alaska ticket a few weeks ago, looked it up, and…
US Airways Dividend Miles: Rest In Peace, No Longer Possible to Join
Last week I wrote that, as part of merging US Airways Dividend Miles into American AAdvantage within 30 days, we can expect Dividend Miles to start locking itself down. This is a major data migration project, it’s hard to imagine one larger. In advance of the integration — and as I would expect with a complex data migration project that will involve over 100 million separate database records once complete (!) — they’re going to begin to lock down their systems. They’re going to stop ‘linking’ accounts before the programs merge. This page says March 20. They’ll presumably stop allowing new enrollments in Dividend Miles before the date the programs actually combine. “Dividend Miles award bookings and mileage upgrade requests will be disabled a few days before we combine programs” They have to start locking…
American Express Launching New Coalition Points Currency ‘Plenti’
On Tuesday around late morning I posted some speculation about the launch of a new program by Plenti. Judging from the American Express trademark filings I guessed at an opportunity to earn and redeem Membership Rewards points across a variety of merchants. It turns out not to be Membership Rewards-related at all. Earn Points With a Variety of Retail Partners Plenti is a new ‘coalition rewards program’ where you can earn points across a variety of participating merchants. American Express already owns Payback which offers coalition rewards programs in Germany, Poland, India, Mexico, and Italy. Now they bring the model to the U.S. Inital sign-ons include:
Chef Announced for American Express Centurion Lounge Miami!
American Express has begun operating their own network of “Centurion lounges,” which are a step above what travelers have become accustomed to from US airline-operated lounges. I consider the American Express Centurion lounge in Dallas my favorite lounge in the U.S.. It’s one of the two lounges I visit most often. There’s a Centurion lounge already in Las Vegas and at New York LaGuardia as well and also San Francisco. There’s an additional known lounge in the pipeline for Miami, and a more modest lounge coming to Seattle. The Miami lounge will be most easily accessible to American Airlines passengers. The Miami lounge should be getting close to open especially because its celebrity chef pairing is now known:
The World’s Most Outrageous ‘Travel Hacker’… Evil, or Evil Genius?
Lucky at One Mile at a Time writes about Justin Ross Lee today, a character in frequent flyer circles who much amuses me. Lucky likes ‘JRL’, I know Justin Ross Lee pretty well, and while the “act” is no doubt pretty extreme, he’s actually a nice guy underneath it all. He genuinely gets enjoyment out of making people laugh & smile… I’ll concede that I’ve met him only once, at the first Frequent Traveler University event New York at the Sheraton LaGuardia in April 2011. So I don’t know him well enough to understand the man, I can only judge his public persona. I think he’s a smart guy who never grew up and who turned that into a persona for himself that isn’t who I would want to be. He’s a train wreck reality…
Weird Ideas I Continue to Believe
The End of Air Traffic Control. I’ve written about this going back at least 11 years. Allowing planes and pilots to operate in the skies much like cars, with technology and communications that allow them to direct themselves while coordinating with each other…offers some of the best hope for increasing the total capacity of the skies for air travel. I realize it’s so far afield from how we currently do things that it’s almost unimaginable. We’re already into the eleven figure range of spending on the FAA’s ‘NextGen’ air traffic control project, and have made only the smallest incremental improvements. Is a radical rethink possible? Will my thinking here have any more merit or traction in 20 years than it does today?
