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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United Debuts Its First Polaris Lounge at O’Hare: Great for Business Class Customers, Not So Great for Loyal Ones

Nov 30 2016

United debuted their new Polaris lounge at Chicago O’Hare in the old club and first class lounge space at gate C18 today. This is a business (and first) class lounge. It is not a Star Alliance Gold lounge and not a United Club.

There’s a trend towards modestly improving membership-based lounges and substantially improving business class only lounges at least at United and American. As with changes to frequent flyer programs the best service and benefits go to those spending the most on a given trip, not over the course of a year or a lifetime.

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British Airways Working on New Pill Passengers Can Swallow to Get Better Service

british airways plane
Nov 30 2016

British Airways is looking to automate its service by getting passengers to swallow a pill that will communicate your needs to their crew.

The idea is to adapt technology currently in use in hospitals which, for instance, monitors whether patients take their pills so that cabin crew can stay up to speed with everyone onboard. This seems to go to great lengths to make sure customers don’t press the flight attendant call button.

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American Temporarily Rebranding First Class Lounges

Nov 29 2016

American is temporarily re-branding their existing Flagship lounges as International First Class lounges as it prepares to introduce brand new business and first class Flagship Lounges in the coming months.

That’s because these new Flagship Lounges are going to be a new concept, rolled out as renovations to existing lounges and new builds are completed starting this spring. We’re going to see New York JFK opening first in a few months, followed by LAX by mid-year.

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Giant Leap Forward for Citi ThankYou Points: You Can Now Redeem Garuda Indonesia Awards Online

Nov 29 2016

Up until now if you wanted to redeem GarudaMiles for travel on their own flights you had to endure “award redemption in six easy steps.” Roughly speaking Garuda Indonesia’s frequent flyer program thought it was Korean. North Korean.

For all intents and purposes the introduction of online redemption makes Garuda Indonesia an actual partner of Citi ThankYou Rewards, not merely a theoretical one.

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