Reader Pamela wants to know, Which is your favorite airline for business class from the east coast to Europe? I have tons of points and miles for any alliance. To date we have preferred Lufthansa (but don’t even mention Air Berlin around me!). Any gateway is fine and any destination can work. I believe that business class is all about the seat. That’s the biggest thing, do you have personal space and can you sleep? Of course you need to eat, it’s nice when you get good service, and storage space makes things more convenient. See also: Business class is all about the seat These Are the World’s Best Business Class Airlines – You’ll Be Surprised Who Makes the List There’s no question that the single US-Europe flight is Singapore Airlines A380 between New York…
Yearly Archives
Yearly Archives for 2015.
Less Than $400 Roundtrip to Russia, Less Than $500 to Turkey, Act Quickly!
Here are the Turkey deals and here are the Russia deals. According to The Flight Deal, Delta is attacking United’s hubs with deep discount airfares priced at $1 plus taxes and fees. They report these fares to Moscow from San Francisco, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Houston, and Washington Dulles — all of United’s hubs (and in the case of Cleveland, an ex-hub) except Newark. This is for travel on Delta between January 12 and March 12, and between April 20 and May 14. Your outbound must be Sunday through Wednesday (no Thursday, Friday, or Saturday departures) and your return must be Monday through Thursday. There are $25 fares to Turkey, which total $400 – $500 depending on where you’re flying from and the routing. TFD reports: San Francisco – Istanbul $482 roundtrip Chicago – Istanbul $408…
Starwood’s Leaked First Quarter Promo is Now Live
Registration is now open for Starwood’s first quarter promotion that had apparently leaked early. Between January 5 and April 15 you can earn: Double points on stays of 2 or more nights 1000 bonus points for every 5 five nights stayed during the promotion period, up to 4000 bonus points. Registration is open through March 31. While this isn’t a huge offer that will cause me to move any stays, it’s better than no offer and remember: you should register for promotions when you first see them or else you’ll wind up forgetting to do so and forego points. Even if you don’t expect to have qualifying stays, sometimes they creep up on you and the bonus won’t be top of mind at that time. You can join the 40,000+ people who see these deals…
Inside the Exclusive Singapore Airline The Private Room First Class Lounge
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…
Reader Wants to Understand… US Airways Credit Card, American Status Buy Up, and What it Means for Upgrades
Reader John moratto asks, I have two US Airways Barclay elite world MasterCard. How could I get a credit cards that will give me companion coupons and Prefered elite miles just for purchases? Also if I buy up to platinum status will I receive 500 mile upgrades for platinum(50,000 miles) or only for the miles that I flew. Up through 2014, the US Airways Premier World MasterCard from Barclays bank offered 10,000 elite qualifying miles for spending $25,000 in a year on the card. That benefit is no longer available on the card. US Airways and American are merging frequent flyer programs The Barclays-issued US Airways card is becoming an American card The base-level American card issued by Citibank does not offer elite qualifying miles for spending. Citibank issues their ‘Executive’ card with a $450…
What Should an Airline Do When Its IT System Goes Down?
If you answered, “don’t send all of your passengers by bus to another airport over 160 miles away, only to have them turned away and sent back” then you’d be correct. Apparently, though, that wasn’t the answer given for a Pakistan International Airlines flight from Lahore to Riyadh. Administration of Allama Iqbal International Airport Lahore sent all its passengers to Islamabad by bus in the wake of a glitch that occurred in the IT system of the airport on Saturday. Boarding passes to the passengers of flight PK-755 headed to Riyadh from Lahore could not be issued due to a disruption in the IT system after which the relevant officials sent all the passengers to Islamabad by road. Passengers were told their flight was going to take off from Islamabad instead. So they went there,…
American Express Losing a Transfer Partner. And I Don’t Care.
Travel With Grant reports that American Express Membership Rewards will lose Frontier Airlines as a transfer partner on March 5. And all I can say is.. who cares? Even before Frontier became a true low cost carrier (there’s even a fee to use your miles within 6 months of travel, and they don’t publish their schedule much farther out than that), acquired by the folks behind Spirit and remade in the Spirit mode, the only thing I ever did with Frontier’s miles is transfer them to Starbucks gift cards and use their account signup bonuses to transfer to miles in other airline progams. Unquestionably there have been values in the Frontier award chart. But the best opportunity Early Returns members ever had was to become Wisconsin residents because that allowed them to transfer miles to…
Eating and Entertainment Like a Singapore Local
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…
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…
