Category Archives for Commentary.
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.
The FBI interdicted Representative Perry at the airport to seize his cell phone one day after the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Proving once again: there is a travel angle to everything.
Here’s how to think about monkeypox. If you have it you should isolate. Take precautions if engaging in close contact within high risk groups and absolutely get vaccinated if you can. But if you don’t have monkeypox and aren’t engaging in high risk activities with people who might have monkeypox then you don’t have to think much about it. That could change, it could cross over into other communities, and if that happens you should update your priors.
Right now I am taking zero precautions against monkeypox. I hope that doesn’t change. But any change that I make will be based on scientific evidence.
Some programs offer ‘saver awards only’. Award space is available or it isn’t. You get a ‘decent’ price, or no option to book at all.
Other programs offer last seat availability, or access to most seats for points. But when fares are exorbitant, the algorithms can lead to some absurd results, like over a million miles for a one-way flight on peak travel days. That makes the program look bad, and even if members like “last seat availability” offering these seats costs too much to the program’s reputation.
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 »
