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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Air France KLM Introduces New Award Chart, Free Stopovers

Dec 07 2022

I still see Flying Blue as the most useful SkyTeam program, with better award availability on Air France and KLM for their own members than is offered to partners and mostly reasonable pricing when saver inventory is available. The addition of free stopovers on one way awards is great, and modest pricing and region adjustments are things most will be able to live with.

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25% Off Southwest Paid And Award Holiday Flights Booked By Wednesday Night

Dec 06 2022

Southwest Airlines is offering a 25% discount on tickets booked by December 7 for travel December 24-25 and December 31, 2022 and January 1, 2023. These are the Saturdays and Sundays of holiday weekend, and generally less-traveled days since many people will be taking off on Friday and Monday. Use promotion code HOLIDAY25 to get the discount. You’ll see a ‘strike-through’ of the original fare on eligible flights. Not all flights will have discountable inventory. Two key points: Since Southwest awards can be cancelled with points redeposited with no fee, you can make speculative redemption bookings to take advantage of this offer. If you have existing tickets you want to reprice, check the new price and then cancel/rebook. Seeing Southwest make a move to try to fill seats this late in the game suggests that…

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Return Of Business Travel Has Plateaued, May Never Return To Pre-Pandemic Levels

Dec 06 2022

On CNBC this morning United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said he likes that pilot wages are going up, which is really saying he likes pilot shortages, because of what that does to competitors. Low cost carriers can’t hire pilots cheap, eroding their relative cost advantage against United.

He also revealed something interesting about business travel: it’s not continuing its recovery, and specifically that it has “plateaued”.

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