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 »

IHG Guts Best Rate Guarantee, Eliminates Free Nights, Gives 24% Back in Points Instead

by Gary Leff

skyscrapers in city
Jan 10 2018

Hotel Best Rate Guarantees are mostly vaporware. Hotel chains want you to book directly through them because it costs them less to make a reservation themselves than it does to pay a commission to Expedia or other online travel sites (or travel agents). So they want you to believe you’ll get the best rate booking direct.

Best rate gurantees are largely a marketing claim rather than a promise, and they generally contain so much fine print and so many hoops as to be meaningless (on purpose).

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Rapper’s Manager Charged for Threatening to Off Flight Attendant’s Head, Claims Racism

by Gary Leff

Jan 10 2018

Rapper Rich the Kid touched down on an American Airlines flight at LAX on Tuesday and got up to use the lavatory while the plane taxied to the gate. A flight attendant told him to sit down. His road manager got into an argument with the flight attendant threatening to cut their head off.

That’s what it takes for American Airlines to deny charges of racial discrimination, it seems.

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Rumor: British Airways Ditching Plans for New Custom Business Class Seat

by Gary Leff

Jan 09 2018

You choose to fly British Airways business class when they have the best non-stop schedule to Heathrow and that’s where you need to go, or for connecting destinations when they’re the cheapest.

While they were a leader in introducing fully flat business class seating, today they offer one of the worst flat business class products in the industry. Their Boeing 777s, for instance, are so dense they seat eight-across.

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Alitalia Destroyed a 300 Year Old Viola, Says You Shouldn’t Trust Checking Bags With Them

by Gary Leff

Jan 09 2018

Myrna Herzog flew Rio to Tel Aviv via Rome on Alitalia on January second, arriving on the third. She checked a 17th century Lewis viola da gamba reportedly worth $200,000.

That strikes me as a dumb move, however she says Alitalia had “promise[d] that the instrument would be only handled BY HAND.” Of course it arrived in Tel Aviv looking, in her words, like “it was savagely vandalized, ..it seems that a car ran over it.”

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