Category Archives for Commentary.
This blog is apparently recommended for a very specific niche of traveler. [I]f you’re a road warrior who will make three ugly flight connections for triple bonus points, you may want to go straight to a pro-blogger who focuses on mileage programs, such as WebFlyer (www.webflyer.com/blog) If only “pro” in this context meant “participating for gain or livelihood”…
Michelle Malkin links to my old Impeach Norm Mineta bumper stickers. Now that Mineta is clearly staying in the Bush Administration, it’s time to resurrect them. Oh, and I’m already getting orders for them via paypal.
Or the US State Department may not give you a Visa. The State Department frowns on toothy smiles, which apparently are classified as unusual or unnatural expressions. According to the Bureau of Consular Affairs, smiling distorts facial features. Officials say smiling can change facial features so much that facial-recognition software would think the passport or person weren’t the real deal. Who knew that terrorists could avoid detection by smiling?
In the middle of the night Thursday night, a Krispy Kreme doughnut truck was stolen. The back door to the truck was left open, and police followed a trail of doughnuts to find the truck. Hat tip to Ramble On.
The only thing I hate more than devaluing points is being lied to. It’s laughable enough when Qantas describes the gutting of its award chart as “rebalancing.” But now they explain the end of mileage upgrades on discount fares as a way to support its most “loyal” customers. The changes would give “more availability to those business and first class fares rather than just somebody who books a one-off and uses the very bottom, cheapest fare and then upgrades”. “Because it is a loyalty program we’re rewarding those obviously more loyal to us,” the spokesman said. So Qantas is doing this because full fare paying passengers have been unable to buy business and first class tickets? I buy that they define loyalty as high revenue rather than high frequency or fidelity to a single airline.…
A 10 year old grilled cheese sandwich with an image of the Virgin Mary on it sold for $28,000 on eBay. Alas, this grilled cheese sandwich with an image of Hello Kitty is only currently pulling in $5.50. Hat tip to The Volokh Conspiracy.
Steven Aftergood writes in Slate about the growth in rules dubbed “Sensitive Security Information” as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 — government rules that we have to follow but aren’t allowed to know the details of. “Before the Law stands a doorkeeper” begins Franz Kafka’s famous parable, which tells of a man who seeks “admittance to the Law” but who is denied access by the doorkeeper—something he did not expect. The Law, he thinks, “should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone.” Federal employees can’t be prosecuted for revealing the contents of such information (only fired), but they’ve been threatened with prosecution nonetheless. And the TSA has used federal funding as a carrot and stick to impose secrecy rules on local police departments. “If I hadn’t seen this contract…
This morning’s New York Times carries a piece by Christopher Elliott on airline audits of frequent flyer accounts. Suspicious activity can cause an airline to freeze an account and investigate. The piece suggests that audits are on the rise, but provides no evidence of this other than that audits happen. It speculates that airline financial problems have spurred more audits, but I know of no carrier that sees auditing of accounts as a meaningful new revenue source. Instead, if audits are becoming more common it’s likely due to technology. If you don’t provide your frequent flyer number on an airline reservation at booking, and then after the flight submit the boarding passes to the airline you flew as well as their partners, the various carriers are much more likely to catch that now than they…
The old one was glitchy at best, this new one should work better for those who use blogreader type programs: http://blogs.flyertalk.com/viewwing/index.rdf
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants passengers on planes headed to the U.S. to be on board an hour before flight time. They trot out the usual justification The United States wants to tighten passenger checks to prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11 Even though, of course, this measure wouldn’t have prevented September 11 in the first place. As if we didn’t already have to get to the airport early enough, not only would the push back that time even further but connections would have to be much longer. It would no longer be enough to have an hour between connecting flights if you actually have to be onboard the new plane an hour before takeoff.
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 »
