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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Record labels and retailers to pay you $12.60

If you filed a claim for free money from the record industry (in the CD price-fixing case), it looks like you’re going to get $12.60. 3.5 million people filed. It’s now up to a judge to certify the deal on May 2nd, and then checks would follow a few weeks after. (Update via Aimee Deep.)

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How Many Miles is the Most?

Qantas’ top frequent flyer has 20 million frequent flyer miles — apparently mostly earned with butt-in-seat flying rather than by running up high credit card bills. The article has a few inaccuracies, for example domestic US carriers don’t have a business class, much in the way fast-food franchises don’t carry “small” drinks and burgers United does sell business class seats domestically on all of its 3-class aircraft. American certainly sells business class on 3-class planes from New York, Boston, and Washington DC to Los Angeles You can’t buy tier points by spending money on your credit card. Carriers don’t give them away in promotions. Actually, you can earn tier points by spending $25,000 on a Delta Skymiles American Express. America West is currently offering a deal where by flying and using its partners you can…

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5000 Free American, Delta, or Continental Miles

Tell Fortune about all the meetings you plan for work and you’ll get to choose which airline you’d like miles on. I pass this one along, but let me offer a caution. This one does sound a bit too good to be true. I did this one myself, although I notice a few things fishy about the site: They misspell resort as restort. This offer is on the front page of a website, as opposed to being a targeted offer. While they claim at the top of the page that “Fortune magazine invites you to qualify for 5000 Frequent Flyer Miles,” it’s unclear how (if at all) this is associated with Fortune magazine. There isn’t even a link to Fortune. The “Browse” link doesn’t work/do anything. There’s no “About Us” feature on the site. If…

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Can Two Sentences Really Explain What’s Wrong With the Airline Industry?

The CEOs of the major airlines make easy targets for criticism and derision these days, what with the billions of dollars in shareholder value they were entrusted with rapidly turning into absolutely nothing. And yet they (or more specifically, Continental CEO Gordon Bethune) keep opening their (his) mouth. Joe Brancatelli explains how two recent sentences by Gordo shed light on just how wrong the major airlines’ business models are.

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Going to the Freddies

I just made plans to go to the Freddie Awards, the annual award ceremony for airline/hotel/credit card loyalty programs. Thanks to the generosity of this website’s host, Randy Petersen, attendance is free. The event is being held at the Wyndham in Colorado Springs on April 24th. I even nabbed a room at that hotel via Priceline for $32. (There’s a special Freddie Awards rate of $79 night, as well.) Anyone care to join me there?

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Covering My Butt, or First They Came For the Bloggers…

My professional life rarely intersects with my travel opinions (even when those opinions are formed while traveling as part of my professional life). And it’s a good thing, too, according to a recent article in Human Resources Executive. I’d hate to get zetzed by an ill-fated corporate blog policy! By the way, Disclaimer The opinions expressed on this web page belong to the author alone and in no way represent the opinions, beliefs, inclinations, or hunches of his employer. Any similarity to any persons, living or dead, are unintentional, purely coincidental and really, really, not the fault of author . . . This website’s author, his employer, its service provider(s), equipment manufacturers, owners of networks this data may have passed through, red quarks used to bring you this page, and the telephone company that spawned…

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