Category Archives for General.
Through Wednesday only United is again offering to sell miles at the lowest price I’ve ever seen from MileagePlus — in fact at 1.88 cents apiece it’s the price that US Airways used to sell miles for prior to the merger with American.
There are no hard and fast rules, only tendencies. And the tendency to devalue – which isn’t universal – is consistent with the trend towards rewarding less across the board, tying rewards to spending (while rewarding even high spend less), and then making tweaks to the less rewarding model as business needs dictate.
Business decisions made in isolation compound over time taking what was once a simple program and making it complex. Multiply that out over tens of millions of members that a given program is trying to serve and tweaks along the way get made which only add to the complexity.
You don’t get if you don’t ask. So e-mail Hilton and ask if they’ll give you bonus points on your next stay with them!
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
On Tuesday morning a Jet Airways passenger bus crashed into a parked Air India ATR turboprop in Kolkata.
It took nearly 5 days just to separate the two from each other, and the aircraft at that point still wasn’t movable. It took engineering teams from Mumbai and Kolkata a full night to pull the two apart.
One of the things I really enjoy doing is responding to reader questions. Here’s your chance. I will my best to cover many of your questions. Some I may answer right away, others that I answer will take me a few weeks.
Please leave requests in the comments section.
For the longest time I was a ‘whatever bag I can buy for $35’ guy. But I travel enough that a quality bag isn’t really that expensive — it’s one thing to spend a few hundred dollars on a bag that you’ll use once or twice a year, but on a per-trip basis the extra cost for a quality bag isn’t all that much when you’re using it every week.
I’ve been using my 19-inch Briggs & Riley Baseline for several years. It’s the old two wheel kind, and I’ve finally been converted to preferring four wheels….
Building your own working model aircraft — not unlike you did as a kid — is a hobby some people take into adulthood.
Only some people are better at it than you were.
Air India will offer only hot vegetarian meals on domestic flights 61 to 90 minutes long.
They used to serve cold sandwiches. Then introduced hot meals. But they received many complaints about the hot items not being vegetarian so they will serve only vegetarian. Because the flights aren’t long enough to offer a choice of meal options. This is highly controversial.
Turkish Airlines has some really interesting ‘fifth freedom’ routes — flights between two countries other than their home country. Last I checked they were fourth in the world for number of destinations served, and they served the most countries at 110.
Here’s a fifth freedom route I didn’t know about: Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. The flight operates 3 times a week in each direction.
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 »
