What’s the Best U.S. Airline?

by Gary Leff

southwest plane aisle
Sep 11 2019

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.

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American’s Approach to (Not) Releasing Award Seats

by Gary Leff

philips center
Sep 11 2019

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.

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Marriott IT Is Still the Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight

by Gary Leff

outside marriott hotel
Sep 10 2019

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.

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Airport Video Captures You Wherever You Go

by Gary Leff

Sep 10 2019

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.

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Privacy Policies are Useless Because Your Biographical Data is Worthless, Here’s What Has Value

by Gary Leff

man in suit looking at computer screen
Sep 09 2019

Your frequent flyer accounts are more than rewards for your behavior. They’re also data that’s valuable, too. So is your credit card spending. Banks don’t just give you points, get transaction value, and make money on interchange (merchant swipe fees) and revolve (interest). They generate intelligence about your buying behavior that can be rented out to companies that want to sell more to you.

When data is hacked, we hear about biographical information that’s taken – name, address, e-mail address, and we worry about social security numbers. That’s not even the really valuable stuff.

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I’m So Excited, I’m Flying Spirit Airlines!

by Gary Leff

spirit plane
Sep 09 2019

United and American were $225 for coach, and I wouldn’t be able to leave until 8 p.m. Spirit had a better flight time and was much cheaper. I can’t tell you how excited I am to leave my comfort zone and try Spirit again though honestly things already aren’t starting super well.

The first thing about booking travel with Spirit is that it’s complicated. Seriously, there’s a lot to think about.

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