News and notes from around the interweb:
- Reminder: Discounted fee paying rent with your credit card to earn points will end May 31. Remember that if you have a business you can generally write off the credit card fee used to pay bills and pocket the miles.
- 50% bonus transferring hotel points to Cathay Pacific Asia Miles, the program has a really attractive award chart that you should get to know and you can transfer Amex points… but you’re not going to get bonused with this offer for Marriott or Starwood transfers.
- Alaska Airlines is eliminating 24 hour free cancellation of tickets booked within 24 hours of travel, eliminating fee-free cancellation of tickets more than 60 days from travel and increasing the cost of same day changes from $25 to $50. They’re also rolling out Basic Economy. The hope when they acquired Virgin America was that a larger Alaska Airlines could better compete against United, Delta, and American rather than becoming more like them.
- There are regularly fantasies in the Netherlands about KLM splitting from Air France and being independent again that parlor game heats up whenever Air France is suffering which seems to be quite often these days.
- A dual-branded Hyatt Place/Hyatt House is under development near LAX and expected to open in 2020. The Hyatt Regency remains the closest hotel to LAX, and a new Hyatt Place can’t be good for the Hyatt Place El Segundo/LAX which is close enough to offer an airport shuttle.
- Important Fourth Circuit Ruling on Cell Phone Border Searches
It scrutinizes the border search that occured to see if the government’s cause for searching in this particular case satisified “a ‘nexus’ requirement” of showing sufficient connection between the search and “the rationale for the border search exception,” requiring a link between the “predicate for the search and the rationale for the border exception.” In other words, the Fourth Circuit appears to be requiring the government to identify the border-search-related interest justifying that particular search in order to rely on the border search exception.
