Last week American’s Vice President Planning Vasu Raja told an employee forum, “We chose our way out of Tel Aviv. Arguably we did it too prematurely. We’re not going to be out of Tel Aviv forever.”
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
Wyndham Rewards members receive waived DoorDash delivery fees when ordering food to any Wyndham Rewards hotel with promo code WRD. In addition they’re offering 250 Wyndham Rewards points per order, whether delivery is to a hotel or not by starting the order through Wyndham’s site.
It’s an interesting partnership and if you order via DoorDash anyway, you might as well collect Wyndham points when you do.
If your schtick is handing out moose poop to politicians, you’ll need to have it with you at all times in case you run into one. And if you want to protest at the state capitol without living there, you’re going to have to bring the moose poop with you — and bring any leftovers home.
American Airlines is planning to make three changes that involve listening to customers, revisiting past decisions, and fixing pain points. That’s great news.
The plan is to make changes to their new domestic first class seat to offer greater comfort and more underseat storage. They’re going to improve their international wifi, moving towards the quality improvements they’ve made domestically. And they’re going to install working dividers between center seats in business class to provide passenger privacy.
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
Airlines are going to new great lengths to avoid involuntarily denying boarding to passengers — selling more tickets than there are seats and then not having enough volunteers to take a later flight for compensation when more passengers than expected show up. Some airlines are overbooking less. Others are paying out more compensation to get more passengers to volunteer to give up their seats.
We’ve seen stories about Delta giving a passenger $4000 in travel vouchers for agreeing to take a later flight and United giving out $10,000. American’s Day of Departure Desk will also authorize substantially more compensation than before.
Hyatt used to offer lucrative property-specific bonuses of 500 to 2000 points per night. These were colloquially referred to as ‘G bonuses’ because of the bonus codes attached to them. Combined with whatever promotion Hyatt was running (Faster Free Nights) and the fact that Hyatt used to give 2500 bonus points per night at properties whose club lounges were closed on the weekend meant that the old Gold Passport program was super lucrative, indeed.
We haven’t seen much in the way of property-specific bonuses in the past 8 years, but those are back for hotels that are brand new to Hyatt. And there’s a new 50% rebate on Hyatt’s most expensive redemptions.
American Express is running a 30% bonus on transfers to Virgin Atlantic through July 1. You have to log in to see the bonus.
Virgin’s miles are fantastic for ANA and Delta redemptions. However I’d only make the transfer to redeem a specific award, rather than doing to preemptively or viewing the program as a store of value.
While Korean Air’s first class lags in quality behind many other Asian carriers, I’ve especially liked that I could fly to Asia in first class and connect onward in first class as well because much of their intra-Asia route network offered a first class cabin. That’s being scaled back.
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 »
