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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Don’t Make This One Mistake Now That US Airways Website No Longer Books Flights

by Gary Leff

Aug 31 2015

You can no longer search flights at USAirways.com. Instead, when you enter search information you get redirected to the AA.com website.

Now, American and US Airways flights become one on October 17. From that date onward there will only be American Airlines flights.

For travel through October 16, though, customers have been advised that they are better off booking US Airways flights directly. That’s especially true for elites — if you book an American codeshare for a US Airways flight, you cannot upgrade until check-in.

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Behind the Curtain: What Delta is Really Trying to Do With Their Frequent Flyer Program

by Gary Leff

Aug 31 2015

Delta laid out a plan for SkyMiles several years ago. And all they’re doing now is executing on it.

When Delta rolled out the revenue-based earning part of their big overhaul of SkyMiles, I wrote that they had planned to go to revenue-based redemption too but backed off of that late in the game.

Let’s peak behind the curtain of what they were planning.

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American Agrees to Honor Big Mistake Fare… Then Cancels Bookings Anyway

by Gary Leff

american and us tails
Aug 31 2015

American was pricing Brazil-issued tickets with the wrong currency conversion. This was posted on Flyertalk on August 20, and a bunch of people purchased all kinds of tickets at ~ 90% off.

American confirmed through several sources that these fares would be honored. …Now I’m seeing a bunch of reports that several folks are having their itineraries cancelled. I reached out to American to find out what was going on.

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Delta’s Gorgeous New SFO Sky Club Has a Celebrity Chef and Adventurous Menu

by Gary Leff

Aug 30 2015

I’m very impressed by what Delta has done with their brand new San Francisco Sky Club that opened this past week. It’s aesthetically gorgeous. And while complimentary food items remain limited (no matter how they trumpet the improvements there) they have a strong paid menu with a celebrity chef.

Delta’s Sky Club celebrity chef is Mai Pham who has two restaurants in Northern California and a Food Network show on Vietnamese food.

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The Simple Reason Amtrak Guest Rewards 2.0 is a Good Transfer Partner, But Poor Travel Rewards Progam

by Gary Leff

Aug 30 2015

Amtrak launches their new revenue-based loyalty program January 24. I breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t nearly as bad as expected. But make no mistake that it is bad for the people it’s actually meant to reward.

Much of the analysis on other sites has focused on the strong points value, so folks accumulating points by methods other than actual train travel do fine (if not quite as well as the peak end as before). But I’m at least as interested in how the program performs as a mechanism of rewarding customers for train travel. And there it doesn’t fare well at all.

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