Category Archives for Travel Tips.
Frequently when a hotel bundles services in with your rate your rate you’re going to pay a lot for very little. Those ‘romance packages’ may cost an extra hundred bucks a night and give you a bottle of $4 Andre and overripe strawberries at check-in.
If you want the Andre and strawberries you’re better off arranging them separately with the hotel (or doing it yourself).
In light of news that Anthony Boudrain had included his frequent flyer miles in his will, I wrote about how each of the major airline and hotel programs handle miles as part of an estate and what you need to do to make sure your points can be used by whomever you intend.
What I didn’t cover at the time was how transferrable bank points work when you pass away. And it turns out know this is even more important.
Loyalty fraud — and especially stealing miles from hacked accounts — has been a big issue for years.
Here’s the simple effective way to protect yourself.
Anthony Bourdain was a fascinating and complicated man. He certainly inspired a portion of my travels. He left the bulk of his estate to his 11 year old daughter.
Reportedly his estate is worth just over $1 million, which raises a ton of questions about why it’s not much more. Additionally, if he had outlived his daughter, his will says her inheritance would go to her nanny.
Doctors frequently tell their patients to wear sunscreen every day, and that’s even when they aren’t going to the beach. Vacationers in Hawaii, though, are going to find that over 70% of sunscreens are illegal to buy in Hawaii as the result of a new law the governor there is expected to sign.
I always prefer an aisle seat because I want to be in control of my own destiny. I can lean into the aisle for extra room (but watch the drink cart!) and I can get up for the lavatory whenever I wish. Crucially, I also have at least one armrest I don’t have to fight for.
This means giving up being able to gaze out the window (lost Instagram opportunity), and an obligation to get up when someone else wants to use the restroom, but those are easy tradeoffs.
The single most important factor in whether or not you have a good flight is having an empty seat next to you. The food or snacks seem better. Flight attendants seem friendlier. It’s less stressful overall.
So regardless of your size, if you feel more comfortable buying extra space, it’s something to consider especially when the price is right. Airlines don’t just sell extra legroom seats — who knew they sell extra width too?
Southwest, Delta and United telephone customer service has been compared to ringing up the IRS.
During irregular operations, bad weather events, calling an airline is much worse than usual – because everyone else is calling too. I’m used to hearing that “we’re experiencing unusually high call volumes” all the time as an excuse for not investing in customer service. It’s actually true during storms or other outages.
OpenTable made your points worth less and harder to use – while imposing new expiration rules – earlier this year. That’s after devaluing their awards program three years ago.
Now there’s another way OpenTable avoids rewarding you for your bookings through their website.
Air travel emits carbon dioxide. More demand for air travel supports more flights, and thus more carbon dioxide emissions.
While the interaction of emissions and temperature change is complex, the particular mechanisms subject to debate amongst scientists, a simple model suggests that your air travel is bad for the environment. But it simply isn’t true that every airline passenger and every ticket has the same contribution to emissions.
And we do know whether you have a high – or an exceptionally low – probability of affecting the number of flights, size of aircraft, and thus emissions.
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 »
