After spending more than $200,000 and as many as 250 nights a year with Marriott, a longtime Ambassador finally walked away. Denied benefits, unchecked franchise abuse, and eroding standards forced a reset—now Hyatt comes first, IHG fills the gaps, and Marriott is points only.
Photos from Delta’s Sky Club in Atlanta Terminal F show a coffee dispenser/thermal server so grimy that “skip the coffee” feels like rational advice. Even if it’s just insulation foam in a non-food-contact cavity, it shouldn’t look like this in active service—and if seals fail, contamination risk gets real fast.
The bodycam “shoulder tap” arrest in Tampa made the rounds, but the story didn’t end there. A former Florida prosecutor tracked down the court record and the key filings, which show what happened to the case months later—and what doesn’t appear in the docket about any deal or diversion.
Denver’s city council just voted to deny an airport lease because it didn’t like the airline’s ICE deportation work — a move that looks like unjust discrimination under the FAA grant assurances tied to federal airport funding. The vote doesn’t kick the carrier out, but it creates an obvious opening for the Trump administration to intervene through the FAA compliance process and put Denver’s federal money at risk.
News and notes from around the interweb: The President of South Korea is demanding that all bags get manually searched at Seoul Incheon airport because people might hide money in books, and apparently the small amounts of cash that could be involved are a government priority or something? This would melt down air travel, and be really bad prioritization – you do risk-based searches not blanket ones because focusing on small bills in books distracts from real security and customs interdiction. Such a strange demand. President Lee ordered to “look through all the books” in response to President Lee’s reply, “You can check if 100 bills are overlapped, but it is a little difficult to find them with the current technology if they are inserted like bookmarks one by one.” In addition, he said, “People…
Two boys plotted an airport dinosaur surprise for their grandma, practicing their roars and waiting in costume for her to walk out of arrivals. But when the sliding doors finally opened, grandma emerged in a T-Rex outfit herself — wearing the exact same costume she once used to scare them, and completely stealing their moment.
Frontier just replaced CEO Barry Biffle effective today, naming President James Dempsey interim chief as Biffle shifts into a short-term advisory role. The leadership change comes as Frontier’s cost edge has eroded and its revenue strategy is playing catch-up—forcing the airline to rethink what an ultra-low-cost carrier looks like in 2026.
I got into the Capital One Lounge at DFW quickly, but the experience felt noticeably different: the grab n go area was closed and items were only available “on request,” while the hot food lineup was weaker than what I remember from early visits. The company says a temporary maintenance issue is to blame, but the overall drift—less selection and less polish—has been showing up more than once.
JetBlue’s long-promised domestic first class (the so-called “Mini Mint”) finally has a credible timeline: a prototype install is targeted for June 2026, with fleet installs beginning that August. The catch is how they’re making room—by squeezing coach and giving up the roomy economy pitch that used to be part of JetBlue’s core identity.
On December 8, a passenger parked their car at Buffalo airport short-term parking. she was only expecting it to be there overnight, for her quick trip to New York and back. The next day she boarded her JetBlue flight home from New York JFK, stowed his backpack in the overhead bin, kept Her purse as her underseat personal item, and then fell asleep before takeoff. A flight attendant removed the backpack from the overhead bin while trying to manage bin space, asks the cabin whom it belonged to, and — getting no response — assumeed it was left-behind item from the previous flight on that aircraft. So the flight attendant had the backpack taken off the aircraft. It seems odd to me that a flight attendant would think a backpack in the overhead bin was…
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 »
