According to an internal memo Cathay Pacific now exempts business and first class passengers from wearing masks while in their seats in lie-flat mode.
According to the airline, “seats in first and business class are more spacious with partitions, and passengers are exempted when lying flat for sleep.”
I am making fully refundable bookings using points. However I’ve been avoiding transferring American Express and Chase points when I do not have to, because while awards can be redeposited into an airline frequent flyer account the points cannot usually be moved back from the airline account to Amex or Chase. When you transfer flexible bank points there is a cost in lost flexibility.
Domestic travel should be mostly doable this summer, especially for the vaccinated. We’ll likely be able to travel to hard-hit destinations with vaccination and a negative test, though countries that have quashed the virus will probably stay closed longer.
Alaska Airlines is running a ‘Buy One Get One’ sale which amounts to 50% off when two people are traveling using promo code LETSGO when booked by Monday, February 8, 2021.
It’s the Safety Dance BOGO since Alaska is using its ‘Men Without Hats’ parody on Covid safety as a Superbowl ad in select West Coast markets.
The U.S. now requires a negative Covid-19 test in order to enter the country by air – even if you’re a citizen returning home. We’re hardly alone, many countries require a Covid-19 test to enter. Since testing can be an expensive hassle even people without the virus are faking negative tests. On one flight 95% of passengers presented fake negative results. But it’s not just negative Covid-19 test results that are being faked.
Hertz is in bankruptcy yet last year their stock was a favorite of Redditors on the Robinhood app. They’ve been sending customers to jail when they fail to mark rental agreements as extended, or fail to mark a car back into inventory and rent it again.
Now they’ve sent out a message seemingly at least as customer-friendly as everyone else: that they were pausing points expiration through December 31, 2021. But their fingers were crossed.
American Airlines acquired TWA in 2001. And since then former TWA employees have felt like they’ve gotten the short end of the stick. The most recent case involves ex-TWA pilots suing both American Airlines and its pilots union arguing that they conspired to strip these pilots of their senior in the airline’s 2011 bankruptcy. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit threw out the suit.
The hotel business can be strange in many ways. But timeshare brands are far, far stranger.
How about Marriott Vacations controlling Hyatt’s timeshare portfolio? That’s something not a lot of people realize but gets a big exclamation point from Marriott Vacations Worldwide spending $430 million to acquire Welk Resorts to turn them into Hyatt Residenes properties. And wait – there are Lawrence Welk hotels?
Loyalty programs are wasting opportunities to attract good customers, but with hotels at low occupancy and more airline seats than customers competition for elite members is going to become more fierce. Enter the status match. Loyalty programs are going to want to make sure they don’t become too expensive (offering benefits to people who do not become customers) and aren’t the victims of fraud (there are new techniques to fight status match fraud).
Two brothers were kicked off a United Airlines flight departing Newark on January 23 because they were wearing too much personal protective equipment, not too little. Usually we hear about anti-maskers. And Dr. Fauci even recommends wearing two masks. But United wasn’t having any of the more-protective masks these passengers wore.
When Marriott acquired Starwood and merged the loyalty programs, as much changed with their credit cards as with the loyalty program itself.
Chase’s Marriott cards used to earn 1 point per dollar. Starwood’s Amex cards earned 1 Starwood point per dollar. Marriott themselves declared 1 SPG point worth 3 Marriott points. In other words, the Amex cards were 3 times as rewarding for spending.
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 »
