Monthly Archives for August 2024.
At the end of the day overhead bin space is first-come, first-served. The polite thing to do is to place your personal item under the seat in front of you. Flight attendants often announce this instruction. But there’s often little enforcement – and taking matters into your own hands often won’t end well.
When you unlock the door it will close without slamming. Now you leave your room quietly. Use this whenever you leave, if you don’t like the loud slam reverberating down the hall.
Once I started doing this a few years ago, I stopped waking my daughter up when I headed out for coffee.
United is really good about providing on board and in-airport milestone recognition. They’re trying to be better about saying thanks on board as well, even if it’s just words of encouragement for staff making that happen.
I find that things go wrong with my travel quite often. Airlines fail to ticket reservations. I get put on standby for an earlier flight with the wrong priority. Requests I make don’t get entered. Seat assignments disappear. Names get misspelled on tickets even when I have reservations agents spell them back to me.
These things go wrong and I’m supposed to know what I’m doing. So sometimes I wonder how the average traveler manages to get from one place to another at all. Maybe they don’t?
Pilots have been seeing record wages in new deals at the major carriers, in the face of paying too many to retire at the depths of Covid while not adding more to the pipeline, a recovery in air travel, and the time and cost to introduce new pilots as a result of government regulation lobbied for by the big pilot union ALPA. The tide may be about to turn.
Maestro Pizza in the Miami airport is going viral for being a terrible circle of regret rather than anything resembling food.
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.
Before airline deregulation, airline tickets were so expensive that most people couldn’t afford to fly. Now anyone who can buy a ticket is allowed on buses in the sky. There’s no decency requirement, and there shouldn’t be, but that doesn’t mean whatever y’all are doing up there as passengers is ok.
Equally frustrating to late departures – or maybe even more problematic – is departing early. It’s the Goldie Locks problem. You plan on the basis of the airline’s schedule, and departing early means you have less time than you though to make it to the airport and through security. You may miss your flight!
Ultimately I’d say that I got my money’s worth for the stay, if I simply pretended it wasn’t a Hyatt and accepted that service and program benefits just aren’t part of this hotel’s DNA. It’s a nice enough room in the heart of Waikiki easily walkable to the beach, and they have fish to lend you.
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 »
