On Saturday 16 year old Taylor Richardson reports that she flew United flight UA2369 from Denver to Jacksonville, Florida. She’s black, and says the white man assigned to sit beside her refused to sit next to her because of her race. He flagged down a United flight attendant, who then apparently changed his seat.
For years airlines have allowed you to print your own boarding pass at home. They don’t even usually tell you what kind of paper you’re allowed to use. We know you’ll cause some hysteria if you generate boarding passes for flights you don’t actually have a ticket for. But beyond that, are there limits to what you can get away with?
This is actually a pretty good gag, but if you decide to try it at home it’s a good idea to have a backup copy that’s smaller – just in case. And beware, travel alone is subject to flight shaming – just imagine if you waste paper, too!
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
There are several clues that suggest Singapore Airlines may use their A350 Ultra Long Range to launch Chicago – Singapore non-stop starting in fall 2020.
Every business can do this, cloak their self-interested lobbying in the mantle of benefit for a broader public good. Indeed, most businesses who seek to profit by political rather than economic means do this today. It’s just exceptionally common in the airline industry, where government corruption has run rife on consumer interests for a hundred years.
This is much better than the olden days when everyone on a plane watched the same thing because there were just overhead monitors, and one thing playing on all of them. On an American Airlines flight from Sydney to Honolulu to Dallas back in 1991 they kept playing John Goodman’s King Ralph over and over – and I wanted to impeach the airline’s Vice President of Inflight.
It’s sad that United maintained they weren’t making changes to partner award pricing – and then did so immediately on the very day they eliminated close-in booking fees in cash.
As a general matter they appear to be charging more for close-in redemption of United flights, too – so there’s no ‘fee’ for close-in booking, just a mileage penalty.
First we had deceptive resort fees – part of the room rate is hidden, called a fee, and you don’t see it included in the total cost of a room when you’re comparing hotel rates on a website. Resort fees spread to hotels that aren’t resorts. In cities they started to call resort fees urban destination fees.
I thought we had reached peak absurdity with the spread in Las Vegas of ‘venue fees’.
When I covered this new type of fee back in September I asked, ‘Karl Marx said history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce. If venue fees is hotels repeating the resort fee as tragedy, can the farce be far behind?” Apparently we’ve already reached farce.
The aviation world is excited about the 2020 release of Microsoft’s new version of Flight Simulator. But that’s not the only aviation game coming out soon.
The world is about to get a taste of Airplane Mode – a six hour trip as a passenger on board a transatlantic flight which occurs in real time.
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
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 »
