News and notes from around the interweb:
- This may be the dumbest title for anything in the genre, Flight attendants reveal the drink order that gets you noticed for upgrades. Now, there are airlines where upgrades after you’ve boarded! It’s possible, to say, have ordered a drink in business class on Emirates and still upgrade to first. But never once in the history of drink orders has one been responsible for an upgrade.
That is on par with whispering the words ‘revenue management’ when asking to get moved up.
- Earn up to 4x Qatar Airways Avios with Turo and that should stack with Rakuten, Capital One earning etc. as well as card-linked offers from Amex, Chase, or Citi.
- People are redeeming Bilt points at dreck value for things like Lyft rides. That’s actually great, it drives down Bilt’s average redemption cost, and lets them afford to keep printing so many points, and offer high value transfers and transfer bonuses for those of us that know better. “It used to be travel was number one… micro-redemptions are our highest redemptions now across the ecosystem.”
- Oyo Las Vegas now says that the scam where they listed two hotels that didn’t exist in an apparent attempt to trick guests into staying at the property and escape their bad reviews, with AI-altered images and signage that didn’t exist, was all just a mistake – mockups that somehow escaped controls and went live accidentally. Okey dokey.
The final update on the OYO Las Vegas and the fake AI generated hotel they created “Palette” to trick guests into booking, only to refuse them a refund and force them to stay somewhere that’s dirty, smells bad and unsafe. OYO ranks among the worst in Vegas with broken elevators,… pic.twitter.com/23Hn3QpLvp
— Jen G. (@vegasstarfish) August 19, 2026
- The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority says that its cost per passenger won’t actually be $90 when they’re done renovating, because they’ll add passengers and flights to spread those costs out over. They cop to $60 – $65, compared to $12.77 per passenger today. However,
- Those higher costs are precisely what will make it difficult to add flights and passengers
- Costs were already seen as a high enough burden, limiting flights to the airport, that Virginia subsidized the airport and the airport authority transferred funds from National to keep costs down
- Interest payments on $20 billion in debt will be greater than the entire operating costs of Dulles and National airports today
- The project documents at this price don’t even show all the elements that the President announced last month (like the ‘world’s largest parking garage’ or on-site hotel)
The plan for Dulles remains insane, and that these costs will lock out low cost and low fare airlines – preserving a competitive moat for United. And since bonds are backed by the airport authority, costs at National could wind up rising too – Scott Kirby may ultimately make American Airlines pay for part of this.
- Those higher costs are precisely what will make it difficult to add flights and passengers
- I’m dying. I’m literally dead. This is (unintentionally?) hilarious.
WELCOME TO PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT✈️🌴
You can now see DJT printed on the boarding passes for the first time!
And guess who made a surprise appearance?@POTUS called me to speak to the hard-working crew on the ground 🇺🇸
📞 CHECK IT OUT!… pic.twitter.com/GSEqazTlOU
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) August 19, 2026
- Very nice.
This pic is UNREAL… except it's absolutely real.
Astrophotographer @AJamesMcCarthy took 1.7 million photos of the sun over six days to capture this shot of UA 2460 flying from IAH to LAX, a photo he calls one of the luckiest of his career. Lucky for us, we get to share it… pic.twitter.com/miRW9nGCz9
— United Airlines (@united) August 19, 2026
I have had the best upgrade success by ordering a ginger ale with a side of pretzels. Works at least 50% of the time
Nice use of ‘dreck,’ Gary. And, I suppose, we can use our BILT Cash $10/mo Grubhub ‘discount’ to order-in some gefilte fish while we’re at it. Oof.
Oy, Dulles… oh, did we say, $90, we meant $60… *used to be $12* Meanwhile, United basically threatened to leave when they talked about doubling it a decade ago (what a bunch of jokers…)
Duffy: “Show ya grandkids…” (yeesh).
I will never fly into West Palm Beach until they change the name. FLL is close enough for any reason I fly to that area. It’s 29 months to the day until our national nightmare ends, unless Congress, disease, or the 25th Amendment do their job and rescue us. Duffy is a braindead minion.
After all these years I have no idea why these “how to score a free upgrade” stories exists. Do people really believe that if they tell the flight attendant it’s their birthday they will be escorted to an open first class seat. Particularly given that there are no open first class seats.