Monthly Archives for November 2019.
If you’re traveling this week in the U.S., best of luck to you! Here is my nickel’s worth of free advice as you prepare to depart along with 40 million other Americans for the Thanksgiving holiday (fortunately they won’t all be flying).
Some of them will save you hassle, some will save you money, and some may just save your trip…
Richard Anderson, the former CEO of Delta Air Lines who now runs Amtrak, claims that in fiscal year 2019 passenger revenue covered 99% of operating costs and that Amtrak will be profitable in 2020 (for the first time ever).
Both of those statements are false.
Delta Air Lines is a fierce competitor. They play hard ball, whether it’s with politicians, with airlines they’d like to partner with, or with customers. I’ve said before that in a 50-50 deal, Delta takes the hyphen.
The Asahi Ryokan hotel in Fukuoka, Japan rents two of its rooms for just $1 each per night. The catch is that cameras live stream the rooms to YouTube. The hotel plans to make its money monetizing the video feed called “One Dollar Hotel.”
At this month’s American Airlines employee question and answer session with senior executives, the airline’s downward spiral in New York came up. The response to this was “We do love New York, I know it doesn’t seem like that with what we’ve done.”
By reducing flying out of New York, American becomes less relevant to New Yorkers and has fewer customers to support the flying that’s left.
Wayfarer Points is a new hotel booking site that promises deeply discounted bookings – they describe up to 50% (for their free membership) and up to 70% (for their $69 paid premium membership).
There are definitely some very good deals e.g. searching about four weeks out.
It is not the official position of any safety agency at this point, but regulators are discussing a whole different approach from Boeing’s software fixes as they consider what it will take to re-certify the 737 MAX.
The SimplyMiles program actually lets you add any Mastercard and not just AAdvantage co-brand Mastercards as annonced. And that lets you stack additional offers.
What was most interesting to me about the piece went entirely unmentioned in the text: the photo of Anderson at his desk. It’s a hero shot, of the CEO sitting behind his desk looking off pensively…
Behind him, though, is his white board listing out top 10 priorities.
There’s an incredible redemption opportunity at Calala Island which is an SLH Hotel property in Nicaragua. Through Hyatt’s alliance with SLH you can redeem 40,000 Hyatt points per night there.
That’s a lot of points, however it goes from $2300 and up per night with cash; it’s all-inclusive, including flight and boat to and from the Managua airport and not just meals but alcoholic beverages too; and there are just 4 rooms on the private island, 3 of which are redeemable with points.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
