It’s important to “do gardening” on your bookings, especially ones that you make relatively far in advance.
By gardening, I mean tending to the bookings — checking up on them, and doing minor maintenance.
Here are the things that can go wrong, but they are preventable mistakes!
Last week I needed to be in San Diego for one night. There aren’t any non-stops between Austin and San Diego, I rather expected Southwest might have one, but I wound up on American through Dallas. My flight into Dallas was a few minutes early but we had to wait about 20 minutes for a gate.
I wasn’t concerned as my relatively short connection time dwindled. I didn’t need to make it to my connecting gate before boarding started — for a simple overnight I just had my laptop bag and didn’t need any bin space. I’d be happy to be the last to board.
Chase has said “we have restrictions related to the number of new cards customers can receive in a period of time.”
The conventional wisdom is that Chase seems only to want to approve people for this card if they haven’t applied for 5 new cards in the past 24 months.
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.
I’ve argued many times that the greatest luxury in air travel is space and privacy. As a result there’s no first class product that comes close to Etihad’s First Apartment on the Airbus A380. There’s an inflight chef, an onboard shower, but that’s all extra.
It’s the sheer spaciousness of the suite that makes this the best first class in the sky — and I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to fly it again and to be redeeming miles to do so.
American Airlines gate agents are under a lot of pressure to get flights to push back exactly on time. As a result they organize their duties around this goal, at the expense of passengers.
There’s another wrinkle that several readers have emailed me about, though I haven’t experienced directly: gate agents who process upgrades by calling people at the gate, and skipping them if they aren’t waiting at the gate.
Earlier in the week Alaska Airlines agreed to delay the close of its acquisition of Virgin American to at least October 17 in order to give the Department of Justice more time to review anti-trust issues.
Of course the Justice Department doesn’t need ‘more time’ so they can think deeply about the issue and decide what to do. They’ve clearly expressed reservations about the deal. We can conclude:
Last year I wrote How to Get – and Use – Airline Status Matches. Travel providers are interested in acquiring their competitors’ best customers, but elite status has a lock-in effect. Sure, you might want to defect from United to American or from Delta to Alaska, but it’s pretty tough to do that and start from scratch with a new airline. You’re well treated as an elite, and it’s rough out there flying without any status (although now the bottom tier of status can be approximated in many cases with the airline’s co-branded credit card). So airlines came up first with status matches (you have elite status with a competitor, we will give you that status on our airline to make it easier to move your business over) and then status challenges (we’ll let you…
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.
Not all Asian carriers have the top business class products, but all of the truly best business class products are offered by Asian or Middle Eastern carriers. Take Singapore Airlines. With a four-across configuration like in first class, Singapore Airlines seats are incredible wide and they are also relatively private.
Increasingly US airlines are eliminating first class, with American slated to be the last carrier offering it and then only on their small fleet of Boeing 777-300ER aircraft. And US airlines don’t offer service or food that’s as good in first class as some of the better carriers offer in business. But I’ll still always take first class over business class.
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 »
