News and notes from around the interweb:
- Air India: please confirm in writing your that you’ll deal with a non-working tray table. No compensation offered. Is there a worse, or least consistent, business class product flying long haul from the U.S. today?
Business class 19hr flight? Please eat on your lap
byu/AdamInstagram inairindia - “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”
Fun fact of the day:
Next summer you can fly from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia to Glasgow, Scotland exclusively on United Airlines 737s pic.twitter.com/Kghyp67eMc
— Jakes in Iceland (@jakesonaplane_) October 16, 2025
- Right now Rakuten has its best-ever new member offer. First-time Rakuten shopping portal users get $50 (or 5,000 Amex points) for spending $50 at any of its merchants.
The easy, quick win is just to go to GiftCards.com through the portal and buy a $50 gift card for Uber, DoorDash, Southwest Airlines or Delta. You get $50 or equivalent points back, making this a free $50 (or better, since the Amex points are worth more than $50).
- Biden’s antitrust crusade protected the big guys they said they wanted to promote competition but they caused less of it.
- Pretty standard actually. Of course they didn’t used to be expected to pretend to work while traveling.
On the morning Amtrak from New York to DC. The entire car is coastal elites pretending to work their laptop jobs, sending emails, keeping the Microsoft Teams circle green
— cold (@coldhealing) October 16, 2025
- Something that Emirates does well is log preferences of premium passengers and carry those preferences across to future flights. Many airlines have talked about this for decades, but knowing that you like a customization – like a different bottled water – and delivering on that is small but super meaningful.
Hyatt experimented with something like that around 8 years ago. That’s a hotel chain on the ground and it should be easier for them? And as far as I’m aware they gave up on the effort. (I liked having extra bottles of water in my room, and a coffee setup with real milk if there was an in-room refrigerator, during that test.)
“exclusively on United Airlines 737s”… eww.
It would certainly be more surprising if the Amtrak from NY to DC was filled with folks from Mongolia and Glasgow who arrived at EWR on a United 737. Shocking that on a Thursday it is filled with people that live on the very East Coast that the train runs along whom are all obviously “pretending to work” by sending emails (because no one ever sends emails for work). It’s not like this was a Friday where folks were traveling for personal reasons but “working from the train”, an October 17 post would have a lot more credibility.
But hey, it’s easy to bash “coastal elites” so… uh, nice job @coldhealing? Nice avocado half in your displayed username? Must be an account from one of those avocado toast eating millennials who hangs out in coffee shops all day drinking $7 cold brew while fiddling on their laptop pretending to work (see what I did there?).
Well, when we were flying the Island Hopper 11.5 years ago [GASP] – as you highlighted in a post a few months ago – though most of us flew on the 767 for the EWR-HNL segment (since the fare was really an EWR-HKG fare with liberal routing rules), The Honorable Seth Miller a.k.a. The Wandering Aramean, chose to fly an all-737 route via LAX. Back then, for the sheer challenge of it, I could picture myself doing such a “stupid human trick” like Ulaanbataar to Glasgow (and I bet Seth would STILL do it). That Island Hopper was really a MegaDo by any other name (with the bonus of the Kwajalein stop, and also upon descent into Majuro – the hop before KWA – where the pilots happily put in an ACARS request on our behalf for the fish sandwiches crew had recommended to us). So it’s not beyond reason to think that a few other denizens of ‘The FT Box’ would have also joined on a crazy KWA to GLA all-737 routing.
@Peter — Someday… Acela will get those next generation new cars/cabins, but still, best they can do is 80-120 mph. That ain’t a Shinkansen…
@ Gary — Rakuten stopped giving credit for my hotel stays, so I stopped using them. They suck just like the rest of these bs cashback sites.
I wonder if I have enough points for that route plus the ORD – EWR – GLA leg I’d need to fly to start the trip. I like flying on the superior 737 compared to the Eurotrash so many foolish airlines use. It incorporates the Island Hopper and I’d like to go to Guam again. If you pooh-pooh this trip because of the plane, you’re human garbage.