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 »

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19 Year Old Woman Will Do ANYTHING To Travel In Luxury (But Won’t Earn Miles)

Dec 11 2019

In 2012 a site launched called Miss Travel (‘beautiful people travel free’) it was a sort of dating site largely for well off guys to meet young women who wanted to travel with them. One points blogger actually tried it out.

One woman though is dropping the pretense of meeting people for friendship and straight up offering sex at auction to fund her travels, starting price of $110,000.

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Cathay Pacific Asia Miles Improves Miles Expiration Policy, Becomes a Better Place to Move Credit Card Points

first class cabin
Dec 10 2019

Cathay Pacific’s Asia Miles is a transfer partner of American Express, Citibank, and Capital One. Up until now it hasn’t been a great store of value, a place to transfer points and hold them, because Asia Miles expired after 36 months – this didn’t get extended with more activity in your account.

The good news is that this is changing – effective January 1, 2020 you can extend the life of your miles with any activity in your account every 18 months. Earning any miles, or redeeming any miles will extend validity.

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This Passenger Pranked Three Employees At The Airport – And He Has a Great (?) Sense Of Humor

person moving wheelchair
Dec 10 2019

What would you do if you were pushing a wheelchair and the passenger… fell out? What if you were a flight attendant, standing on the jetway, and saw this happen to one of your passengers?

And what if it was all a prank? This passenger deals with a lot more in life than I do each day, yet manages to maintain a great positive outlook and has fun with the people he meets. I find that inspirational.

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American Airlines Adds Big New Routes to Austin and Several One Off Event Flights

austin airport food court
Dec 10 2019

American Airlines announced this morning several new routes, the biggest of which are from my home airport in Austin. They also announced several one-off services to major events like the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting and Augusta National Masters Golf Tournament.

The Austin flights in particular are exciting because they’re a departure from American’s usual strategy. These are point-to-point flights that don’t touch hubs, instead they’re aggressively competing with new flights between Delta focus cities.

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Town Of Burien, Washington Stops FAA From Sending Flights Over Its Skies

man expressing stress and noise at the airport
Dec 10 2019

When residents complain about airport noise I’m not usually sympathetic, the airport was there before you were and planes aren’t as noisy as they used to be. And when you see thousands of noise complaints about an airport it’s frequently just one to three residents making them all believe it or not (the complaints process has been automated).

But what about when the FAA redirects air traffic overhead?

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