About Gary Leff

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 »

More articles by Gary Leff »

New United Airlines Status Match Program

by Gary Leff

united-planes-runway
Jan 05 2020

There’s a new United Airlines status match program. Elite frequent flyers are valuable customers – to the airline they’re loyal, and also potentially to other airlines who might poach their business. The same holds for elites in hotel loyalty programs.

Status makes it difficult to switch, you’re better treated by an airline or hotel chain and it’s tough to start somewhere else from scratch. That’s why many loyalty programs offer to match your current status in order to win your business.

Continue Reading »

The Post-David Dao Era – and the $10,000 Bump Voucher – Is Ending

by Gary Leff

airline ticket
Jan 05 2020

Airlines are tightening their belts, trying to cut what it costs them to give out denied boarding compensation to passengers when they overbook a flight. Both United and American have copied Delta in soliciting ‘bids’ from customers for what compensation they’d accept, hoping to avoid bidding wars at the gate.

In the wake of United’s April 2017 passenger dragging incident – where David Dao was told to give up his seat for two crewmembers and refused, winding up bloodied by airport – there was a huge public backlash against bumping passengers off of overbooked flights. And airlines started paying out far more compensation to avoid involuntarily denying boarding to passengers.

Continue Reading »

New Restaurant That Sells Airplane Food On The Ground Isn’t Very Good

by Gary Leff

Jan 05 2020

AirAsia wants to create Santan Restaurant and T&CO Cafe as a franchise with 100 outlets within 3-5 years, even expanding to New York. They see a market for an Asian version of American fast food chains. U.S. chains succeed even though they aren’t inherently great and charge more than local equivalents.

A model of bad food and high prices isn’t a great starting place except at airports and tourist spots, but that’s usually driven by high rents and a need to meet highly diverse tastes – people aren’t there for the food.

Continue Reading »

I Got One Detail Of The Mileage Run Mexican Jail Saga Wrong

by Gary Leff

Jan 04 2020

A former producer of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette took an end of year mileage run and wound up in a Mexican prison. Many people were calling into questions details of his story but most of it actually checks out.

However Kimmel reached out to me and let me know there was one detail of the story I had gotten wrong though. All this wasn’t even to renew his Executive Platinum (100,000 mile) status. He was mileage running to make Platinum Pro (75,000 mile status).

Continue Reading »

Chase Will Ban Third Party Apps That Use Your Password To Screen Scrape Their Site

by Gary Leff

chasebank
Jan 04 2020

f you use Award Wallet to check your frequent flyer account balances, you give them the username and password for your accounts and with a single click they check your accounts for you (and you can log in with a single click as well).

Award Wallet and other services are going to have to change the way they interact with Chase, and the information they’re able to get may be limited

Continue Reading »

Air France First Class Lounge & Dining, Washington Dulles

by Gary Leff

Jan 03 2020

Air France offers space available upgrades from business class to first class at check-in. This is true even for customers flying business class on an award ticket.

A reader shares that he bought up from a business class award ticket to first class flying Washington Dulles – Paris. He detailed the first class experience on the ground at Dulles airport.

Continue Reading »

One Airline Flight is at the Heart of US Problems With Iran

by Gary Leff

airplane taking off
Jan 03 2020

In the US we still think of Iran taking hostages after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Of course they overthrew the Shah, whose power had been consolidated with the help of the CIA (after the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadegh). The US backed Iraq in the 8 year Iran-Iraq war, though in hindsight this didn’t go well, shortly after it ended Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait – which had provided billions for his anti-Iran crusade.

Iran came to the table for peace, helping to end the war in a stalemate, shortly after the US shot down a civilian Iran Air flight in 1988. They may have believed that the US was openly joining Iraq’s fight and would stop at nothing.

Continue Reading »