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 »

The Senate is Grandstanding Against Airline Fees… Here’s How to Provide Real Consumer Protection Instead

by Gary Leff

Aug 11 2015

Republican Congressman John Mica (R-FL) is offering a phony law to cap checked bag fees as a stunt to push his real agenda, which is increasing the cap on facility fees that airports can charge as part of ticket prices.

Realizing that bashing the airlines is good politics, and not wanting to be left out, Senator Ben Nelson (D-FL) has a new report out of the Commerce Committee that bashes airline fees.

Not everything in the report is idiotic, even if most of the underlying premises are. In fact once we get through all the bad ideas, there’s a pretty good one in there.

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The FAA’s Magical Thinking at Dallas Love Field Misses the Simple Solution

by Gary Leff

Aug 10 2015

Dallas Love Field has 20 gates. They are legally forbidden to build more. (Thanks, Congress!)

Southwest has 16 gates. They’ve subleased 2 from United. That’s 18. The other 2 gates are controlled by Virgin America.

Delta flies from the former United gates. There’s a big court battle over whether they’ll be able to continue to squat on those gates or not. And it all started with the federal government requiring American to give up its gates to Virgin America.

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OpenTable is About to Devalue: Redeem Your Points Now

by Gary Leff

Aug 10 2015

Opentable is an online service for making restaurant reservations. It’s the market leader in the space, you can search for a specific restaurant and make a booking or search an area and find restaurants that have availability for when you’d like to eat, near where you want to eat, and for the number of people in your party.

They offer loyalty points, most of the time you earn 100 points for a booking, that’s worth $1 because 2000 points can be redeemed for a $20 gift certificate.

How that works is all about to change.

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The Future of Frequent Flyer Programs: No More Credit Card Rewards But We’ll Use Our Points to Go to Mars

by Gary Leff

Aug 10 2015

Although I won’t make any claims about what the future of space travel will look like (I’ll leave that to @BoredElonMusk) there will absolutely be loyalty programs in the future in substantially the form that we have now.

The fundamentals of any system that encourages repeat business are precisely the core tenets of frequent flyer programs: recognize and reward (elite programs and rebates).

Credit cards will be less important for rewards in the future, because new technology will reduce the margins for processing payments (so banks won’t pay to incentivize transactions). But we’ll definitely be using miles for space travel!

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First Class Passengers Get First Dibs on Overhead Bins

by Gary Leff

Aug 09 2015

American Airlines frequently begins boarding prior to posted boarding time, so when I am going to need overhead space I’m not just boarding 30 minutes prior to departure… I’m showing up at the gate several minutes before that.

Last Tuesday, though, my flight was nearly completely boarded when it was more then 35 minutes prior to departure. I got on and found all of the first class overhead bins closed. A flight attendant opened one for me, directly above my seat. It was empty.

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