Category Archives for Commentary.
Research suggests that traveling abroad while young and still forming worldviews and spending time speaking with ordinary people at your destination appears to foster Twain’s notion of becoming more open-minded and empathetic towards others without respect to geographic boundaries.
Not all travel meets these conditions, of course.
United Airlines has gone woke. Airlines are fighting over who can be the most environmentally-friendly. Delta even claimed to be carbon neutral before the pandemic, even though they literally own an oil refinery and most of it was dubious carbon offsets.
Expedia’s Chairman Barry Diller is bucking the trend dismissing ESG as virtue signaling.
Expedia Chairman Barry Diller called work from home “kind of stupid” as well as being “a crock.” He claims that ”sitting at a laptop computer at a dining room table” doesn’t lead to innovation.
Diller has been bashing his own employees, and blaming them for lack of innovation, efficiency and profitability even before work from home. Work from home is just the latest excuse for the Expedia boss.
There’s speculation that migrants could be headed to President Biden’s home next, based on filed flight plans for one of the planes that was chartered for the Martha’s Vineyard trip.
Airlines have gone through unprecedented challenges as a result of the global pandemic. Carriers have taken on enormous levels of debt and have only limited ability to invest in their product again. Delta CEO has even said he expects future bailouts if they’re needed. What if the solution to long-term airline solvency were right in front of us? What if it took just a tweak to one law to make happen? And we might never be stuck doling out subsidies again.
Over the past several days there’s been an argument brewing on twitter over the concept of “non-stop” versus “direct” flights, and how the difference confuses consumers.
With a non-stop flight you take off from one city and land at your destination. A direct flight between those cities entails landing somewhere else first. It may really just mean a connection to another plane, but that new plane carriers the same flight number as the first one.
Richard Kerr, formerly of The Points Guy and the Award Travel 101 Facebook group who is now with Bilt Rewards, offered a couple of provocative questions in his Instagram feed.
He asks why some people value clearly less valuable currencies more than a Bilt point. He may be asking about individual program members, but I’m going to ask it of those people who are supposed to know – travel bloggers who publish valuations of different mileage currencies. Much of the work those bloggers are doing fails to hold together.
The U.S. News Travel Rewards program rankings are out and they are a big ‘ol mess, largely because the methodology they use to rank programs makes little sense – which they’ve known for years and haven’t done anything meaningful to improve.
This year is worse than ever because they say they didn’t even bother searching award availability to determine which airline programs are best, blaming the pandemic. And hotel rankings even appear to punish hotel chains offering strong coverage in smaller markets.
I’m amazed at this LinkedIn post that is making the rounds on social media for its combination of humblebrag and pop wisdom, that still manages to come off as disingenuous and lacking self-awareness at the same time. Truly this discussion of traveling in business class on vacation, while leaving the kids in coach, is an impressive viral morsel.
When the Marriotts and Hiltons of the world actually owned the hotels that they marketed, there was better alignment of incentives for maintaining and extending their brands (and they found it much easier to deliver promises to guests on-property). An ‘asset light’ model where the chain simply rents out the brand can work – but needs a laser-like focus on defending and growing the value of the brand, not merely living off of and depreciating it.
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 »
