Category Archives for Destinations.
Starting January 10, 2024 Brazil will require Americans, Canadians, and Australians to obtain a visa for entry to the country. The cost will be approximately $80 and allow multiple entry for 10 years (Canadians and Australians only get 5 years). They will require you to provide them with a bank statement showing account balance and 30 days of transactions.
A British tourist requested wheelchair assistance for his mother while transferring between terminals in Dubai. He didn’t like the answer that a wheelchair would be provided but that he should wait for an inter-terminal bus without him, since he saw another passenger already had one. Trying to escalate his request for assistance, things got heated. He used swear words.
Pollster Frank Luntz took to social media on Friday to decry a Qatar Airways for not recognizing Israel. For someone so politically savvy, that struck me as naive. The obvious answer here was that Qatar doesn’t recognize Israel. It would be more of a scandal for Israel to appear on the moving map of its state-sponsored airline than for it not to.
Yet this morning a Qatar jet flew from Doha to Israel. It had to make a technical stop in out of the way Cyprus in order to avoid operating the first non-stop between the two countries.
There’s a new airline gold rush down in Mexico, with U.S. carriers lining up to fly to the Felipe Carrillo Puerto International Airport near Tulum. It’s 79 miles from the current Cancun airport, Enilria writes that an aviation study finds that this new airport could compete for a full quarter of Cancun’s passengers. Already American, Delta, United, and Spirit have announced service from the airport, which is slated to open December 1 and to become available to international passengers in late March. With American’s Dallas and United’s Houston service growing to twice daily, there are a dozen flights by U.S. carriers planned for the 12 gate airport: 93% of the area’s air passengers are tourists, and the bet is that there’s a never ending supply of upper middle class Americans headed to yoga retreats. Based…
A woman shared video this month after being “pulled into a room” and “interrogated” in Turkey because she didn’t look like her passport photo. She’d “undergone different facial treatments, such as Botox” which contributed to the difference, and wound up “interrogated by 6 members of passport control.”
Haiti experienced an unusual aviation situation where flights to the U.S. were up to 24 times costlier than those from the U.S., leading airlines to fly nearly empty planes to Haiti only to return full due to the country’s unstable conditions. As Haiti became increasingly ungoverned with rampant gang violence, alternative routes for Haitians seeking U.S. entry emerged, notably through charter flights to Nicaragua and other neighboring countries, before the Haitian government suspended these flights amidst concerns of massive migration.
Pro-Hamas demonstrators stormed Makhachkala Uytash Airport in Dagestan, responding to “rumors..that an Israeli aircraft was preparing to land.” Their mission: “Kill Israelis and Jews.” Meanwhile, they stormed a hotel going room to room in search of Israelis.
The U.S. is “advising…increased caution” for U.S. citizens while overseas. The State Department is a bureaucracy, and how would it look if bad things happened and they didn’t warn people? Now that they’ve done so, bad things aren’t their fault.
The State Department advises that you register your travel with them and… follow them on Facebook and Twitter. That’s hardly advice that, for now, is going to scare me off from travel.
It wasn’t always this hopeless. Things seemed so much better at the turn of the last century. The 1995 Oslo II Accord included international funding for Yasser Arafat International Airport in the Gaza Strip. Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands donated a Boeing 727 and 2 Fokker 50s to help launch Palestinian Airlines.
The new Gaza airport opened in 1998, and Bill and Hillary Clinton attended the official grand opening. At the time there were plans for a port and for a… casino!
The Wall Street Journal‘s Alison Sider asked during Delta’s third quarter earnings call this morning, “would Delta be open to flying Israel under a charter if the government asks..?”
And Delta’s CEO Ed Bastian replied “we don’t have any plans to be flying into Israel. It’s considered unsafe for a U.S. carrier to operate in that airspace currently.”
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 »
