News and notes from around the interweb:
- The ORD Taxi Rap, this is kind of cool:
Making the rounds in aviation circle about taxiing at ORD.
I know the guy that made this. He’s a KC-10 bro. Good guy.
KC-10 folks have a history of making media. “Hot cause I’m deployed” came out 18 years ago. They guys got in trouble because a frequency was shown on the…
— KC-10 Driver ✈️ 👨✈️ B-737 Wrangler (@MCCCANM) April 19, 2026
- Marriott promises advance notice before Bonvoying their program – but only for members in China
- This monkey had its own room in Mexico. (HT: Paul H) This is not uncommon! Monkeys would enter rooms all the time at The Andaman in Langkawi, Malaysia which was part of Marriott’s Luxury Collection until it caught fire in 2021. It was sold in 2024 but still has not re-opened?
@juliew1111 POV: you left the balcony door open for 2 minutes in xcaret #mexico #newpet #monkey ♬ Welp, Didn't Expect That – Yu-Peng Chen & HOYO-MiX - 91 points? That’s a great redemption!
Spotted UAL-branded Laurent-Perrier at Central Market HEB in Dallas
by
u/sooner_25 in
unitedairlines - Redeem 1,000 Air Canada Aeroplan points for reserved seating at Dinsey’s Epcot fireworks show (HT: YMMV)
- Visual: America’s busiest airports by flights
- Looks like Thompson San Antonio Riverwalk is becoming a franchise, no longer Hyatt-managed. Not going to make it better.
Hyatt No Longer Managing Thompson San Antonio
by
u/PutAny5012 in
hyatt - Eric Swalwell donors footed $500K in hotel bills, including rooms where alleged rapes happened
Marriott follows sensible consumer protections… but only in an authoritarian totalitarian state. *facepalm*
You should read the article in the WSJ today – Private Credit Is on the Hunt for Credit-Card Debt. It’s all about Bilt and how the deal basically came together at the last minute once Bilt satisfied additional demands by Blue Owl, including a guarantee that Blue Owl would get the first dollars out as well as giving Blue Owl further diligence rights into its forward-looking projections. The article says the deal only got done the night before Wells transferred its balances. Not only does that sound like a complete mess, but Blue Owl itself has been in the headlines this month with a complete mess of its own, with surging redemption requests and Moody’s cutting Blue Owl’s outlook from stable to negative.
Yikes.
@Peter — Oh man, I saw that! Yikes, indeed…
O’hare had 992,000 flights in 2004 witth fewer runways. It now has 8 instead of 7 and has 6 parallel which makes it easier instead of 2, but yet they are still capping flights.
(Bilt? More like Biltricide… I think it’s medicine for treating parasites… oh, how fitting.)
@1990 – Right on in the first comment!
@Peter – here’s the relevant snippet, Blue Owl (which has had well-publicized withdrawals capped from unrelated funds) was one of several financing providers for acquiring balances from Wells. And there’s no reporting on a guarantee of first dollars out being agreed to, just that Blue Owl sought to extract that.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/private-credit-is-on-the-hunt-for-credit-card-debt/ar-AA21euCL
“In the Bilt deal, the credit-card debt was moved to Fidem Financial, which acts as a balance sheet and gets funding for the program from Goldman, TD, Blue Owl and Stone Point. (Stone Point is also an owner of Fidem.)
Shortly before the Bilt deal was scheduled to be finalized in early February, Blue Owl raised concerns: It wouldn’t continue with the deal, it told parties involved in it, unless several things occurred.
Blue Owl wanted a guarantee that would involve its receiving the first tens of millions of dollars of profit generated by the credit-card program and wanted to dig more into the feasibility of Bilt’s forward-looking projections, according to people familiar with the matter.
Blue Owl blessed the deal on the eve before the card program was scheduled to transfer its balances away from Wells Fargo.”
There’s also no reporting here on whether there was additional capital that would have replaced Blue Owl, or how much of the total they were providing. Sounds like they acted in bad faith to extract better last minute concessions, using due diligence as leverage, but unclear what they actually received.
So very sad how Americans have have voted to be shafted to the point where Chinese citizens have more rights against corporations than American citizens do.
@Gary – yep, and helpful to provide the additional context, but I’m not sure why it’s bad faith per se. Is it using leverage at a pivotal moment – sure. But there are plenty of club financing deals and many larger participants have last minute demands to ensure participation in the financing. A demand for first dollars out is somewhat atypical though and could be indicative of broader concerns – whether they got that, who knows. Perhaps Bilt is currently looking for different private capital providers to replace Blue Owl in the deal, perhaps they’ve satisfied Blue Owl’s diligence concerns, perhaps the turmoil with some of Blue Owl’s funds will not spill over to the rest of Blue Owl’s business (perhaps it will help slightly that the founder’s personal loans are no longer secured by Blue Owl’s shares) – who knows.
We’re not in the room, so it’s just swirling speculation as to what actually happened. We know it was a chaotic roll out by Bilt. This just adds some potential color to the chaos.
None of this is a judgment on the potential value that Bilt offers by way of points for spending (it’s really great value), but it is further potential color on the possible bigger picture risks of doing business with Bilt longer term. If I want smaller picture color, I can just look at the Bilt thread on Reddit. Obviously people complain more online versus giving praise, but it’s not exactly a love fest over there.