Monthly Archives for August 2023.
I’m back from several days at the Crockfords Las Vegas LXR property. It was recommended to me by Michael Trager of TravelZork. When I was looking for a long weekend in Vegas, Michael is the expert I knew would be able to answer what’s the best overall value in Las Vegas right now and this was his answer. He was correct.
On Wednesday police raided a hotel in Ho Chi Minh City and arrested the ringleader of a flight attendant sex ring. Officers there “found three active flight attendants in bed with different men.”
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
They say that most crimes are committed by a very small number of people. Crack down on the super-offenders and you make an outsized difference in quality of life.
If there’s one thing that differentiates Southwest Airlines from other carriers, besides bundling checked bags into the fare and not assigning seats prior to boarding, it’s that their employees don’t seem to hate their jobs. This comes out most clearly on board with flight attendant hijinks, whether it’s hiding inside of overhead bins, making crowns for passengers out of snacks, or offering a creative twist on safety announcements.
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
It doesn’t seem like the major challenge with transcon and long haul international flights from the airport is the airport’s name as port officials seem to suggest. And “East Bay Oakland International Airport” doesn’t seem like it would do much to change that. For political reasons it doesn’t seem like they’d consider “San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport.” But why not? European low cost carriers have long promoted Bratislava as Vienna even though it’s literally in another country!
Using unreviewable, secret and often arbitrary Minority Report-style pre-crime profiling as a basis for denying any kind of right is a huge departure for our system of justice. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is considering whether someone placed on a No Fly List as retaliation for not becoming an FBI informant, when there’s no suggestion they’ve done anything wrong, is a clearly-enough established violation of rights to justify damages. The Biden administration Justice Department says it is not.
TSA has put in writing in a letter to CLEAR that “it would require that a smaller proportion of Clear members undergo additional identity vetting.”
NTSB found that the captain, who hand-flew the takeoff, called for flaps to be reduced from 20 to 5. However the first officer “thought that he heard the captain announce flaps 15.”
The cause of the incident was attributed to “[t]he flight crew’s failure to manage the airplane’s vertical flightpath, airspeed, and pitch attitude following a miscommunication about the captain’s desired flap setting during the initial climb.”
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 »
