News and notes from around the interweb:
- Amazon’s Fire Phone Failure
- Vanilla gift cards, including OneVanilla, can no longer be used effectively at Walmart. A good reminder to limit your risk. So What’s next?
- Why you should pick a low hotel floor, keep your phone ready to voice record, and buy your upgrades onboard. Contra the article, British Airways used to offer onboard paid upgrades and is rumored to be bringing it back (and if they do I would expect the same from joint business venture partner American).
- British Airways is cutting legroom in intra-European business class to offer no more than coach. It’s also already just a blocked middle seat for width. (HT: The Tactical Traveler)
BA has told me in the past they lose money on their intra-European business class service, but need to offer it in order to selling connecting premium cabin tickets to and from other European destinations. Which tells me they’re just allocation costs wrong…
- 40% Off Accor Hotels sale.
- How Secret Partners Expand NSA Surveillance Dragnet and NSA Turned Germany Into its Largest Listening Post in Europe. (HT: Bruce Schneier)
- You can join the 40,000+ people who see these deals and analysis every day — sign up to receive posts by email (just one e-mail per day) or subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s free. You can also follow me on Twitter for the latest deals. Don’t miss out!
- You can join the 40,000+ people who see these deals and analysis every day — sign up to receive posts by email (just one e-mail per day) or subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s free. You can also follow me on Twitter for the latest deals. Don’t miss out!
Lol, the “why choose lower floor” article was refering to Element Time Square West and is quite to the point. As a plat an early check in assigned me to an upgrade to 6th floor studio, which i had been a little indifferent with but latter found out to be huge advantage… I wished i could be assigned to 3rd or 4th floor so that makes the walk even easier. As a matter of fact, you either better off at the highest floors (empty elevator to start with) or the lowest (just use the stairs) with such a hotel.
Thanks for the link, Gary! If something can’t go on forever, it won’t. Walmart has clearly been trying to tighten up its Moneycenter operations for some time, so I can’t say this was “unexpected.”
I recently flew LH first class connecting to intra-Europe first. The latter had worse seating than transatlantic coach: lawn chair seats with tight, tight pitch.
BA is probably just keeping pace with competitors as they devalue the product.
Gary,
I read your blog regularly because it is a great source of information and tips regarding travel and points. You do yourself and your readers a disservice when you veer off into non-germane discussions (or hints of discussions) on other topics (e.g., NSA). If you want to discuss such issues, I suggest you start another blog or contriubute to a blog on these issues. There plenty of forums to voice your opinions on other subjects, but your readers come to View from the Wing for your expert travel and points advice.
@Nick due respect but for what it’s worth I write about what I’m interested in, in this case I simply link to a couple of articles I found interesting.
Hopefully folks find it interesting, to see what I’m thinking and reading, and if they do that’s great. But this blog has always been – from the beginning — my thoughts including about subjects like this. Just look to my archives from 2002-2003! 🙂
Joe Brancatelli’s advice on recording conversations could get you into serious civil or criminal trouble in about a dozen states where it’s illegal to record a conversation without the consent of all parties. States with this rule include MD, PA, MA, WA, FL, CA & MI.
Gary, has anyone coined a term for traffic spikes caused by your links (as in Instapundit’s “Instalanche”)? If not, I would like to register the “Garylanche” trademark: http://thepointsninja.blogspot.com/2014/06/garylanche.html
🙂