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.
We were promised these hotel brands would offer Platinum breakfast benefits. They don’t. They offer a food and beverage credit, which can be used any time during a stay.
That credit won’t cover breakfast at all of their properties, but the news isn’t as bad as it appeared at first — Marriott is updating their chart, which suggested the credit would be only once per stay rather than once per day (for the member and guest).
For several years Air France has limited first class award redemptions to members using their own Flying Blue miles, who had elite status in the Flying Blue program, and made those members pay the double/triple miles price for the seats.
Right now first class awards are available to anyone, and on most flights.
You can fly Chicago to Europe for 11,000 miles each way. That’s coach, but it’s still a great deal since fuel surcharges are modest on economy awards. That really stretches the miles. San Francisco awards are available too.
American Express, Chase, and Citibank points all transfer to Flying Blue.
Hyatt is offering 2500 points every 5 qualifying nights at Grand Hyatt and Hyatt Regency hotels starting today through checkouts August 31. That’s not very strong.
Hotels are full and room rates are up, the effect of last year’s hurricane season notwithstanding we should hit all time records for 2018. And that’s why hotel marketing programs aren’t spending a lot to put heads in beds — there aren’t many empty beds out there to start with.
Hyatt is extending the validity of the suite upgrade awards members already have through February 28 of the year following when they’re earned . The same applies for the four club lounge access awards given to Explorists each year.
Over the last six months Hyatt has been fixing some of the pain points in their new program. At the end of 2018 they announced free night awards for achieving status would last 180 days instead of 120, and award nights would count towards status.
Marriott’s program is about cost savings for hotels. CEO Arne Sorenson touted this in the chain’s earnings call earlier this year, noting that “loyalty rates have been reduced [to hotels] already twice and they will be reduced a third time” and several changes are helping the chain drive down those costs.
If you paid British Airways fuel surcharges between November 9, 2006 and April 17, 2013 you should get points deposited into your account — without doing anything at all — or if you prefer (and fill out a simple form) 16.9% of your cash back.
A passenger joked about a bomb and everyone started leaping out of the plane through the emergency exits on Monday. And 10 passengers were injured, some hurt “after falling through the plane’s engine.”
Here’s video of the spontaneous evacuation with passengers jumping off the aircraft. Flight crew did not instruct passengers to leave the aircraft.
United pulled out of New York JFK entirely in fall 2015. A year ago the airline’s President Scott Kirby said that was a mistake. Now he wants to return to New York JFK and doesn’t know how to do it.
When the airline left JFK it was because bean counters looked only at revenue and expense for the those particular JFK flights and missed the bigger revenue picture — lucrative corporate contracts which made other routes profitable, and which they lost without the JFK service.
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 »
