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 »

How George Clooney Deals With Crying Babies on a Plane

Dec 13 2017

George and Amal Clooney have six month old twins. They were flying to the U.K. with the kids (their kids were born in London in June, and Amal is from the UK).

And they pro-actively “passed out noise-canceling headphones” to other first class passengers along with a note “apologizing ahead of time” on the chance that the twins cried.

Continue Reading »

US Will Take UAE and Qatar to Task Over Subsidies

airplane docked
Dec 12 2017

The U.S. is going to enter talks with the UAE and Qatar about airline subsidies but it doesn’t sound like they’ll amount to much.

The irony of complaining that other airlines were too intertwined with governments always seemed lost on United, who lost a CEO over a scandal involving the airline bribing a government official. Or Delta’s CEO who started all of this going on to run heavily subsidized Amtrak.

Continue Reading »

Why the Era of Spinning Off Frequent Flyer Programs Should Be Over

united credit card
Dec 12 2017

To be sure there’s a case for spinoffs: if an airline needs to raise cash, selling assets is one way to do that. And frequent flyer programs are in many cases among the most valuable assets an airline has. It’s just not a free lunch, selling even a part of the program creates frictions that can reduce value. Sometimes an airline needs to do that, but financially healthy airlines should be extremely cautious before doing so.

Continue Reading »