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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United Express Flight Attendant Forces Passenger To Retrieve Poop-Filled Diaper From Trash

united
Jul 11 2021

A doctor and mother, Farah Naz Khan, took a United flight out of Wyoming late in the week that was operated by United’s regional express carrier Mesa.

She was flying first class, and went to the back bathroom to change her baby’s diaper. She used a “scented diaper disposal bag” and placed it into the lavatory trash.

When she returned to her seat, the first class flight attendant “berated [her] for throwing away a poop diaper on the plane” calling it a “biohazard.” He forced her to retrieve the poop-filled diaper. Then, she says, he started harassing her after the flight.

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A Reader Is Being Threatened With Criminal Prosecution By Hertz Over A Car He Never Rented

Jul 10 2021

I’ve argued that Hertz needs to do something pretty basic, even before properly balancing the number of cars they have with the number of rental reservations they accept, and growing their fleet of cars to meet demand. Hertz needs to stop filing false police reports against their customers. Now they’ve got a new issue I haven’t seen before. They appear to be going after a reader for failing to return a car that they never even rented.

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Hotel Housekeeper Averts Mass Shooting Over 4th Of July. Why Are We Cutting Housekeeping Again?

toilet
Jul 10 2021

Eliminating housekeeping is bad for guests, but it is bad for hotels too. It eliminates part of what differentiates them from homesharing, gutting their competitive advantage. Given the role that hotels, and Hilton in particular, trumpeted in recent years playing fighting sex trafficking and mass shootings, how can they plausibly cut this from their budgets?

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Is Putting Business Expenses On A Personal Credit Card To Earn Miles “White Privilege”?

calculating money via paper and calculator
Jul 10 2021

Provided an employer is financially solid enough to make the payments, and processes expense reimbursements quickly, there’s few things better than being able to charge business expenses to your personal credit card. This makes it easy to earn initial card bonuses, as well as threshold bonuses that might help you keep elite status, and ultimately generates lots of points for you to use later. Imagine being able to charge plenty of airline tickets (at 5x) and conferences at hotels (3x) in large volumes!

But there are several big “if’s.”

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Is The Airline Industry Competitive? The Biden Administration Wants To Make 7 Changes

Jul 10 2021

With the Biden Administration taking aim at ratcheting up competition regulations across the economy, the airline industry’s lobby shop came out with a claim that the industry is already highly competitive. Some of their arguments are true and fair, others are misleading, and they skip over the role that government plays protecting big incumbent airlines from competition that might drive them to improve their products.

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American Airlines Refused Boarding To Turkish Fitness Model Over Revealing Clothes

Jul 10 2021

Deniz Saypinar, the first Turkish woman to become an International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness pro and the first non-American to win the US National Bikini Fitness Competition, is a fitness model with over 1 million followers on Instagram. American Airlines denied her boarding on a flight from Dallas Fort Worth to Miami on Thursday because they found her attire too revealing.

In an Instagram story she said the airline’s employees called her “naked.”

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