News and notes from around the interweb:
- Emirates Skywards Gold and Platinum elites will only be able to upgrade from coach to premium economy on flights offering the product, and will no longer be able to upgrade from coach to business.
- JP Morgan acquiring CXloyalty Ultimate Rewards dropped Connexions for its travel portal in favor of Expedia, now they’ll ditch Expedia although the timing is not yet clear. (I was perhaps the only one saying moving to Expedia was a bad thing that I can recall at the time, most parroted the press release line about the increased number of hotels in Expedia’s inventory.)
- The Anthony Bourdain Food Trail (HT: @nomadicmatt)
- Overseas travelers get dedicated train cars for Narita-to-Tokyo trek
- Rapper Lil’ Pump banned from JetBlue for refusing to wear a mask on Sunday flight.
- EVA Air has now fired four flight attendants and four pilots over poor adherence to Covid-19 practices during layovers, after a pilot brought the virus back to Taiwan and spread it – the first local transmission in months there.
- Such a sad sight, this aircraft this just 10 years old.
🇫🇷 L’Airbus A380, immatriculé F-HPJB, ex Air -France est en cours de démantèlement à Knock en Irlande.
📷 unknow pic.twitter.com/2xnZsNrjX3
— air plus news (@airplusnews) December 29, 2020
HSBC Rewards travel portal just moved to priceline and gutted the benefits. Rather than a $100 Air Travel rebate it’s now a glorified 5% rebate. Book $2000 through the priceline portal and receive $100 back up to 4x.
I suspect they will lose vacation home rentals then? I have enjoyed booking those with points but I have noticed that the fees that are tacked on keep going up. At first the price you were shown up front was the price, now it can double because of all of the fees and taxes but there is no breakdown of those costs for you to know what you are actually being charged for. I hate that.
I found that the Chase/Expedia pricing was not competitive.
They seemed to up the price about 10% over their competitors offerings and then discounted the points needed by 20% to show an oversized perceived value. It looked like a bargain but it was not. When I brought it to Chase’s attention they played dumb.
Interesting idea with the gaijin express.
@Angela – ever want to know what the fees are really for – just go to VRBO they are where Expedia pulls vacation rentals from since they own VRBO . On the main site there is always a breakdown. It usually consists of paying the “owners” fee to VRBO / Expedia and the cleaning fee
Connexions is the reason I will never book direct through Chase travel ever again. Only points transfers from here on out. They cost me a lot of money, and held my money for months.