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 »

Delta Fixes Partner Award Booking and Improves Korean Air Availability in a Big Way

by Gary Leff

Aug 18 2015

Delta had a major glitch where you couldn’t see any award availability on partner airlines on their website when searching one way. They’ve fixed that. But they’ve also done something much better.

They used to black out Korean Air award redemption for nearly one third of the year. They just updated their terms and conditions to fix that, breaking out the different regions of the world which are supposed to have different ‘high demand dates’ in Korean’s program. Now you can use your miles for travel on Korean Air much more freely!

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A New Opportunity for Airlines to Lose Lots of Money: Scheduled Air Service to Cuba Could Resume By End of Year

by Gary Leff

capital building
Aug 18 2015

Now that Americans are traveling to Cuba again and the US embassy in Havana has re-opened, the Obama administration is looking to allow scheduled air service between the US and Cuba (rather than just charter flights) by the end of the year. A key stumbling block is allowing Cuba’s state airline Cubana de Aviación to fly to the US.

There are several reasons to think these flights will be big money losers.

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Southwest Refuses Singer Jason Derulo an Escort through Security onto Plane, Ruckus Ensues

by Gary Leff

Aug 17 2015

Singer Jason Derulo (to show you how unhip I am, I had no idea who he was) showed up at the Reno airport on Saturday to fly Southwest to Los Angeles.

Apparently TSA Precheck was closed, and so he demanded that Southwest Airlines provide him with an escort through security. (There are mixed reports that he may not have been in the A boarding group, either.) Derulo became abusive to airline staff after they refused to escort him through security and onto the plane.

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Starwood Points Just Got More Valuable With Addition of New Airline Transfer Partner

by Gary Leff

Aug 17 2015

Starwood’s Starpoints are already the most valuable loyalty program currency.

They have the most airline transfer partners where points transfer 1:1 and of course when you move Starwood points into 20,000 miles you get 5000 bonus miles. That gets you effectively a 1:1.25 transfer ratio with most airline partners.

Now, Starwood has added a new transfer partner and it’s a really useful one: Korean Air Skypass.

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