News and notes from around the interweb: Etihad Guest Silver status and GHA Discovery Platinum status for joining a travel club Uber is offering on-demand skywriting in New York City today for $500. Answering ‘business or pleasure?’ correctly saves you 5% on your hotel room in Berlin. Two of the TSA’s panic buttons weren’t working at LAX the day of the shooting there at the beginning of November. But no one tried to use them anyway. Which is sort of like how the Emergency Broadcast System wasn’t activated on 9/11. You can join the 30,000+ people who see these deals and analysis every day — sign up to receive posts by email (just one e-mail per day) or subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s free. You can also follow me on Twitter for the latest…
About Gary Leff
How Airline Auto-Rebooking During Major Weather Events Makes Travel Worse Not Better
More flights have been cancelled this year than at any time since DOT cancellation statistics began 25 years ago. Many travelers aren’t aware that they can get a full refund when they cancel, one of the more common questions I get is “if the trip I’m getting rebooked on doesn’t work for me, am I just flushing this ticket down the toilet?” No, you’re not, if your flight doesn’t operate you can get all of your money back. Airlines aren’t always clear on this point. But rebooking options don’t always work for passengers. Planes run much closer to capacity these days, which means there isn’t a lot of slack in the system to re-accommodate folks whose flights have been cnacelled. It’s tough to get through to airlines to sort things out. You’d expect websites to…
You Know There’s Bad Weather and Flight Disruptions When…
I suppose this is why Google is such a great tool for understanding the world, what’s collectively on people’s minds. Here are the top search terms that brought people to my blog yesterday: There were about a thousand views of this post. Sometimes the shelf life of content can be rather long. Interestingly as well, search terms exhibit a pretty long tail, there were only 3 queries for “corportion of hilton said i didnt cash my check” (yes, with that spelling). You can join the 30,000+ people who see these deals and analysis every day — sign up to receive posts by email (just one e-mail per day) or subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s free. You can also follow me on Twitter for the latest deals. Don’t miss out!
$85 Discount on a $200 Hotel Stay
Hotel booking website TravelPony offers new members a $25 first-time booking credit, but ups that to $35 if you’re referred by an existing member. That credit is currently stackable with promotion code KATE50 which provides $50 off of a $200 reservation (and it seems to work even when you reach $200 total only inclusive of tax). So you can currently save $85 on a $200 booking, which is 42.5% off. They’ve got some great rates, sometimes, especially on higher-end properties and especially hotels that are part of smaller chains. Loyalty Traveler finds that TravelPony’s rates can be good but are sometimes higher than the best rates you might otherwise find. So they’re not a slam dunk all the time, outside of when you’re able to use discount codes they’re offering. This is my referral link,…
United.com Will Now Show Brussels Airlines’ Great Award Availability
Transatlantic business class space to Europe using miles from a Star Alliance airline like United or Air Canada is often easiest to find into and out of Brussels… both on United and on Brussels Airlines. Brussels Airlines has been a Star Alliance member for four years but with award space only in the past few days made searchable on United’s website. (Previously you could search it using the ANA, Aeroplan, or FlightStats websites.) Ironically United.com adds this functionality two months after United proactively removed Singapore Airlines award space from their website (and lied about it being Singapore’s fault). And, of course, after United jacked up the price of partner awards. Check it out yourself, though — for quite some time I’ve been pointing out how good the award availability is. And since Brussels Airlines hubs…
Camera Falls from a Plane, Lands in a Pig Pen. Watch What Happens Next!
Supposedly this camera fell out of the sky and into a pig pen. Fortunately it didn’t crash down (and kill) any pigs. Watch the end. I’m somewhat skeptical of this, or at least surprised that it landed facing upwards, in working order, having come down from the sky. Supposedly it was found by the farmer eight months later and posted to Youtube. At this writing it’s been viewed over 4 million times in 3 days. (HT: Ron S.) You can join the 30,000+ people who see these deals and analysis every day — sign up to receive posts by email (just one e-mail per day) or subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s free. You can also follow me on Twitter for the latest deals. Don’t miss out!
There’s Fantastic Delta Business Class Award Space to Europe for 2 or More People!
Delta miles are notoriously difficult to use. They’re called SkyPesos for a reason. There are a lot of other things I don’t like about the program, like the lack of international first class awards and the lack of one-way awards at half the cost of roundtrip, as well as a pricing engine that is frequently broken, charging more miles for an award than required. But Delta miles can be used, and used effectively. Often they have partners with reasonably good availability. At the Frequent Traveler University event back in September, Lucky from the One Mile at a Time blog put me on the spot and in an auditorium full of people made me book a business class award to Delhi on specific dates. I put together something with Skyteam members Saudia on the outbound and…
Barclaycard Now Issues the Hawaiian Airlines Card
I’m not sure how I missed this — Hawaiian Airlines used to offer a co-brand credit card through Bank of America but that product disappeared for new applications sometime back in the fall. And then apparently around the beginning of the year Barclays appeared with a HawaiianMiles credit card. I spoke with Barclaycard yesterday and learned about the product for the first time, although Googling around it seems others were aware of it last month. Apparently they’ve been in a soft launch for the card, and the public marketing begins in earnest next week. At this time I do not receive any referral credit if you sign up for the card, I’m just reporting on a new product that I didn’t realize was in the market. There’s a personal MasterCard and a business MasterCard. Both…
Etihad Honoring Their First Class Mistake Fare… Grudgingly
A week and a half ago Etihad had a mistake fare, offering first class roundtrip between Colombo and Dallas for ~ $1450. One way was available for about two-thirds the cost, but you had to originate the trip in Sri Lanka either way. Etihad is honoring the fare, as I expected. They’d have had challenges with US regulators if they didn’t. But they’re being as restrictive as possible with it. No changes, but that’s to be expected, changing a ticket prior to departure will generally cause a reprice. No chauffeur service, Etihad gives business and first class passengers complimentary car service but that won’t be given to folks flying these tickets. No “bonus miles” although it’s not clear what that means, whether that’s no class of service bonus when crediting to an Etihad Guest account…
100,000 Miles Down the Drain, a Bad Weather Plan B, and an Actual Mileage Addiction (Bits ‘n Pieces for February 12, 2014)
News and Notes from Around the Interweb: Fast, fast, fast: The 100,000 mile British Airways Visa signup bonus that I wrote about yesterday seems to be unavailable. It’s still on the British Airways website, but the application won’t come up when you click through. Possibly dead, possibly a temporary glitch. If the former, that was quick! (HT: Miles in the comments) Cheaper than you think: Yankees pitcher charters a 787. It cost $200,000 from Japan to New York, even with the plane flying back empty. Robert Palmer Was Right: (Might as well face it, you’re addicted to miles.) I was asked to contribute a piece on extreme miles behavior for an addiction and recovery website. A little bit tongue-in-cheek, and surprisingly (?) controversial. Bad Weather Plan B: Using airline 24 hour cancel rules to buy…
