Category Archives for Commentary.
My award booking partner Steve Belkin has a new book out, Mileage Maniac, which any frequent flyer or mileage junkie will get real enjoyment from.
President Biden announced the nomination of Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger to the ambassador-level position of U.S. representative to ICAO, International Civil Aviation Organization. Sullenberger is best known, of course, as the pilot of US Airways flight 1549 which went down in a ditching in the Hudson River after a double bird strike.
A Republican for most of his life, he switched his voting registration to Democrat in 2019. He endorsed Joe Biden for President in February 2020. This past fall he created a commercial with the Lincoln Project tying his experience with US Airways 1549 to his opposition to Donald Trump’s re-election.
To fly from the U.K. to Ireland you need a negative PCR Covid-19 test. One woman, a U.K. health care worker, was denied boarding for her flight from Birmingham to Dublin despite having a negative PCR test.
The government doesn’t accept her test, because it was provided by the government – even though it isn’t one of the tests listed as unacceptable. Fortunately there was a workaround to add an enroute stop and avoid the non-sensical requirement.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is hitting back at the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s placing his country’s air safety rating under review, with expectations of a downgrade, and the implications for limiting new flights to the U.S. by Mexican airlines and placing constraints on the ability of U.S. airlines to codeshare with Mexican carriers.
Covid-19 vaccines are phenomenal. And they’re about to open up a lot of travel possibilities: so-called ‘vaccine passports’, only we don’t know how long those passports will be valid as a result of virus variants and uncertainty over how long they provide protection.
Much of the world is ordering not just first injections but also booster doses, in case these passports need to be extended. The U.S. hasn’t done this yet.
Happiness from vacation wears off quickly once you get back. The middle part of a trip winds up mostly as a blur, it’s the end that counts. You should probably work while you’re on vacation if you want to break up the trip and create more starts and ends and less middle, and avoid doing too many things that you’ve done before while you’re gone.
U.S. travel policies have not kept up with world events, or even the science of Covid-19.
The U.S. should drop its ban on travel from areas with less Covid-19 than the United States. And it should drop its requirement for a Covid-19 test for those that have been vaccinated.
I’ve been very ‘pro-mask’ throughout the pandemic, arguing that flight attendants should be allowed to wear them back when airlines forbid it and the CDC wasn’t yet recommending it. I’ve even argued that conservatives should favor mask-wearing as a ‘conservative alternative to lockdowns’. I applauded JetBlue as the first U.S. airline to require masks for passengers. It helped build confidence to travel, knowing that everybody else on board would be wearing a mask.
However the federal transportation mask mandate is no longer useful, and may be counterproductive – even extending the pandemic in the United States.
The Director of the CDC has stated “vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick.” Yet vaccinated Americans have to take a Covid-19 test before flying back to the United States and vaccinated travelers from the U.K., which has far less Covid-19 per capita than the U.S., remain banned from even entering the country.
But what if Covid-19 testing requirements are actually spreading the virus?
While travel shaming may have been understandable at the start of the pandemic, and getting out into the world may make sense for many that have been vaccinated, this is a time for tolerance of others’ risk profiles and preferences since we’re in an ‘in-between space’ where there’s still virus spreading and still people at great risk for it, even as an increasing number of people face very low risk to themselves and others.
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 »
