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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That’s Alight, Just Leave It There

dog pooping in airport
Dec 02 2018

Air travel brings people together from all sorts of backgrounds and experiences. So there are bound to be cultural clashes. And we’re not just dealing with people, we are also dealing with pets. And we’re dealing with how those people deal with their pets.

Walking through Washington Dulles airport on Thursday a passenger in front of me had their dog on a leash….

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Why Airlines Should Charge Passengers to Use the Lavatory

lavatory
Dec 01 2018

Whenever Ryanair is out of the news their CEO Michael O’Leary talks about making passengers stand (to cram more people onto planes) and making them pay to use the lavatory. In the U.S. pay toilets are illegal in many states but those prohibitions wouldn’t apply to airlines since they’d be pre-empted by the federal Airline Deregulation Act.

UK pay toilets are often cleaner than free ones. Would airlines charging for lavatories give us better lavatories? Would they give us bigger lavatories since they’d become a profit center?

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If You Can’t Stand Each Other Please Don’t Fly Together

police on airline cabin
Nov 30 2018

Right before Thanksgiving an American Airlines flight from Washington DC to Los Angeles had to divert when a husband and wife wouldn’t stop fighting. A flight attendant separated them, moving the husband to the back of the aircraft. However his wife followed and things escalated. I figured the guy must’ve said the wrong thing about his mother-in-law.

Now it seems another couple fought on board an American Airlines flight on Wednesday and caused the pilot to divert.

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