Exclusive Show: Marriott Member Uses 2.4 Million Points to Choreograph Bellagio Fountains [Roundup]

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About Gary Leff

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 »

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Comments

  1. The Boeing story is informative. It is interesting that the story had several Southeast Asian names of managers but none of the names of the people actually doing the work who are probably being protected by their union. Figuring out who did the faulty reinstallation could be done by a process of elimination of those doing other jobs in the area during the timeframe of when the faulty reinstallation took place. It would take a lot of time and interviewing along with seizing a lot of phones. It seems like the people who installed the door plug had no training about doing the job correctly. Boeing is truly at fault by not having entries in the log that required signoffs. The manager of the disassembly and installation mechanics should have caught the lack of entries and signoffs if they were required by policy. I remember reading that other Boeing airplanes also had incorrectly installed bolts in the same place. I wonder how those situations happened. I still blame Alaska Airlines for not following up on maintenance correctly after getting alarms due to the door plug.

  2. So the guy did free labor for Bellagio, and he had to pay them 2.4M Marriott points? What an idiot.

  3. @jns … +1 . Wise comment . I was concerned about the apparent “rush” at the beginning of the article . I would rather any mechanic take his time .

  4. Geez. Does anyone remember how beautiful the fountain show was from the old bally casino hotel? Yeah I used to stay in the haunted floors, but the 24′ balcony was great entertainment. Someone please tell me the Horseshoe spared some of the grandeur. Good for the dude that realized his dreams.

  5. The MCO airport is pretty bad TBH. But I love low costs! This mega boot-strap of tolerating CLT like conditions in service to keeping costs low is absolutely the decision I would make. I would not spend the $1.8B. I would just have a normal maintenance budget and keep riding it down. “Nice” airports are an impediment to tourism because those expenses are just passed along to the flier. That wasn’t nice what is said before about comparing MCO and CLT. CLT is far worse – toilet water airport.

  6. Questionable platform moderation practices have resulted in Pavel Durov having been arrested at Paris Bourget airport when he landed there on a private jet from Azerbaijan.

    Pavel Durov is the founder of Telegram. Will Elon Musk be next? How about smaller fish in the sea?

    The idea of legally-protected freedom of speech in Europe and many other parts of the world is much more limited than the American idea of legally-protected freedom of speech. There are risks for online content providers and online content platform service providers to travel to/via places that aren’t as protective of freedom of speech/expression as the US.

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