German airline Condor was flying from Frankfurt to Cancun on February 6th when the Airbus A330 declared an emergency about 880 nautical miles west of Shannon, Ireland.
There was reported smoke in the cockpit. The “flight crew donned their oxygen masks” and declared mayday via ACARS, the digital short message system, because communications were hobbled.
LifeMiles is one of the best frequent flyer programs for advanced miles and points collectors because they have hidden deals and there are tricks to reduce the price of awards.
I once heard the head of the program give a presentation where he called miles earned by flying “bad miles” and miles sold to partners (like banks) and to customers “good miles.” This frequent flyer program is basically the consolidator for Star Alliance airline excess premium cabin inventory. Lots of ways to get their miles cheap, and use them for seats that their partners aren’t going to sell for cash (saver award inventory).
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.
One of the 10 best deals in all of travel is using Etihad Guest miles to fly business class on Royal Air Maroc.
You can transfer American Express, Citibank, and Capital One miles to Etihad and then Etihad charges just 44,000 miles each way for any trip on Royal Air Marco that is over 2000 miles.
Choose the airline with the best schedule, where they’re equivalent with the best reliability, and for regular coach comfort go with Southwest. Since I need to work inflight pretty much all the time I prefer American or Delta, United still isn’t an option though if I lived on Staten Island I’ve fly out of Newark and sacrifice productivity.
No airline is all things to all people, no airline frequent flyer program among those four carriers is a real differentiator and reason to go out of your way to fly a specific airline, but it’s useful to stick with one carrier and earn status where you can. Your miles will be earned through things other than flying and there flexible points transfer programs are best.
When US Airways management took over at American they brought with them a revenue management philosophy of making far less award space available. However they’ve made efforts to make more economy award space available, bidding for space based on a fare value of miles.
International business class is another matter, even on the most lightly booked of flights.
The internal e-mail address that Marriott is using to process claims is changing. The old one is set to expire. However the website hasn’t been updated to use the new e-mail address, and this generates a message to the customer. Oops.
Here’s hoping Marriott IT can update the web form before IT expires the old address, or else Best Rate Guarantee claims will go into the ether the way so many customer service requests did last fall after Marriott, Starwood, and Ritz-Carlton loyalty accounts got combined with the launch of the new program.
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.
Did you realize that all of your airport movements are being captured on video? At most airports all public spaces are being recorded. Those recordings aren’t just used for security either. Airlines have access to them. Whenever a story about bad passengers comes out, or airlines acting badly towards passengers, there’s video and airlines review it to see what really happened and potentially defend themselves.
The quality of video is surprisingly high in some airports around the world.
The ‘Big Front Seat’ on Spirit Airlines is one of the best deals in travel. However their regular seating is miserable.
The ultra low cost carrier is optimizing within the most constrained footprint of any U.S. carrier. That’s a good thing, but it doesn’t mean their coach is comparable to what other carriers offer.
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 »
