I lived just outside of Washington DC on 9/11. My commute took me past the Pentagon each day, one of the sites attacked that day. I was acutely aware that I was, by extension, a primary target. Yet nothing ever happened to me in the ensuing 13 years that I continued to live there.
I will return to Paris in a matter of weeks. I’m not changing my plans. Here’s why.
The Hilton HHonors online shopping mall is giving out 500 HHonors points just for logging in for the first time.
It just entails clicking a link and then signing in with your account information It’s worth doing, I certainly did it.
American Airlines Chairman and CEO Doug Parker offers an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal calling on the Obama administration to do something about the scourge of low fares and flight choices that consumers have thanks to service offered by Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar.
He sees the big Gulf airlines as an existential threat at a time when his own airline has been earning $2 billion per quarter, is only out to ‘save American jobs’ at a time when aviation jobs are at a peak, and skirts the issue of big subsidies received by his own airline the very week they asked for tax breaks for a new corporate headquarters.
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The left hand side of a 70 year old man’s seat broke shortly after takeoff on a flight from London to Calgary.
The flight was completely full. They tried to prop the broken seat up with blankets, but it didn’t really work.
So he had to stand.
While there’s little chance the gap between American AAdvantage and Delta SkyMiles will disappear, it may just narrow enough so that other priorities push me to Delta. I never thought I’d even go through the exercise to see if Delta made sense for me.
The Department of Transportation requires airlines to allow passengers to cancel a ticket within 24 hours for a full refund, or hold a ticket without purchase for 24 hours, if it’s at least a week prior to travel.
But is allowing a 24 hour hold option deceptive? One ‘consumer advocate’ thinks so. I think that for some consumers the option is better and that in any case I like airlines to have different policies, and compete.
I needed a flight from Philadelphia to Austin on Monday evening. Since the US Airways merger American has shifted to a more US Airways-like scheduling practice, with flights varying more by day of week. There’s just not nearly as much Monday night travel as Monday morning or evenings later in the week. So there’s no flight between 5:45pm and after 8pm that I could take on American to get get home. And I had a meeting in Wilmington that would go until 5.
So instead of spending the night in Wilmington, or flying late to Dallas and overnighting there, I decided to get home late with a 7pm Southwest flight. Five days out the one-way cost me $182.
It’s interesting that as airlines try to re-align their programs to ‘better reward high value customers’ (read: devalue the program for lower revenue customers, and at best remaining neutral for high spenders) they introduce mileage-earning from flight activity based on ticket price but have not yet introduced revenue-based redemptions.
Delta has hidden their award charts but still, more or less, prices awards on the basis of award charts. United maintains award charts. American is expected to as well.
Less than two weeks after news broke that Design Hotels would become Starwood’s 11th brand, Design Hotels is already being brought into Starwood Preferred Guest.
Today is the soft launch for the effort to bring Design Hotels into the Starwood Preferred Guest program. Only 5 of the 287 Design Hotels properties are live with SPG so far. They start with points-earning and limited in-hostel benefits.
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 »
