Category Archives for Commentary.
Set up an account with PredictIt. Whatever your political stripes, you can still bet that President Trump will lose re-election – and earn your full bet back and then some.
As of this writing betting markets still have Trump with about a 10% chance of winning Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada, as well as a 9% chance of winning the Presidency.
Whether 2021 status requirements are set too high or too low really isn’t clear yet, because we don’t know what travel is going to look like even as it starts to come back once the pandemic begins to get under control. And not all benefits are scarce, so that more elites mean fewer benefits for those who earn it ‘the hard and usual way’.
If it turns out there are too many elites, how a program handles that is still entirely within their control. But we’re going to have to wait to see how the 2021 travel year develops, and how programs continue to respond. Laying out elite qualifying criteria is the start of this, not the finish.
Stephen McIntyre called himself the ‘Tampa Gift Card King’ and after $10 million in volume faces five years and three months behind bars for “conspiracy to commit money laundering.”
Frequently Presidents have chosen a member of the opposite party for one cabinet post. Sometimes it’s been Secretary of Defense (Republican Senator Bill Cohen of Maine under Bill Clinton, for instance). Sometimes it’s been Secretary of Transportation (Republican Congressman Ray LaHood under Barack Obama, former Clinton Commerce Secretary Norm Mineta under George W. Bush).
In a return to normalcy, and especially with a very divided Senate that Republicans have slightly better odds to control, President Biden might choose a Republican for his cabinet – perhaps part of a deal to get a vote on other cabinet nominees.
Pfizer reports their Covid-19 vaccine, in conjunction with BioNTech, so far appears 90% effective. With 94 people in the clinical trial having gotten Covid-19 so far, that means people in the control group receiving the placebo were about 10 times as likely to get the virus as someone who had received the vaccine.
The drug maker could reach milestone of 2 months since the second dose for half of trial participants in order to apply for Emergency Use Authorization next week. They report no ‘serious’ side effects in the trial. That’s great news, great progress. And it means we should have great optimism for travel.
Even if there’s an emergency use authorization for a vaccine in the U.S. in December it’s likely late in the second quarter before it’s available for most Americans. Will you wait until June for a vaccine, when you can get one somewhere else in the world if you have the ability to travel and the money to buy one? Would you take a trip to Dubai to get a vaccine six months earlier?
There have been thousands of cases of air marshal misconduct, and nothing has been done. Now air marshals are literally making travel less safe.
The federal government is looking to require foreign visitors and prospective immigrants to submit “fingerprints and possibly other biometric information..into a new database” prior to being permitted to submit online visa applications and even ESTA requests.
The grand experiment in ‘work from home’ has gone better than expected for many companies. Employees all over the world are learning how to do it successfully. It’s not a replacement for in-person interaction, that will happen, just not as often in the office. We’re going to see a new kind of business travel, starting next year.
The U.S. government has taken the opportunity during the global pandemic, when people aren’t traveling out of the country much, to roll out a new platform for storing information they believe they are entitled to take from people crossing the border. A new filing reveals how the U.S. Border Patrol will store data from traveler devices centrally, keeping it backed up and searchable for up to 75 years.
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 »
