In updating its terms and conditions, IHG Rewards Club updated its right to update its terms and conditions.
Specifically, they made clear the right to devalue the program and what they expect you to do to find out if they’ve made changes to their rules (hint: they don’t have to tell you).
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.
Drunk air marshals are now going to be on Cuba flights. This was a safety priority.
Since Hilton’s award chart changes in 2013, there haven’t been huge additional changes.
Hilton decided to alter the way they made changes to how they re-assign hotels to award categories. Instead of an annual change to tons of hotels (a schedule they really weren’t wedded to in the past anyway) they decided they would make rolling changes throughout the year. And instead of informing all members proactively of these changes, they would just post them on a web page in the name of transparency.
Doha’s still-new Hamad International Airport is over the top in many ways. For instance there’s the giant Teddy Bear sculpture. It’s made out of bronze, is 23 feet tall, and weighs nearly 20 tons. A member of the Qatari royal family apparently purchased it for about $6.8 million. It had previously been displayed in front of the Seagram’s Building on Park Avenue in New York. There’s now a big clay sculpture there.
Delta is moving its Minneapolis – Tokyo Narita flight over to Tokyo Haneda airport at the end of October and award availability is amazing.
Most days there are 9 or more business class saver awards available, although I’ve put together calendars showing when there are 6 or more business class seats. These cost 80,000 miles per person each way.
American’s new business class seat is the B/E Aerospace Super Diamond going into their Boeing 787-9, Airbus A350, and later retrofits of Boeing 777-200s.
The B/E Aerospace Super Diamond is one of the world’s best business class seats, but American seems to have made one very poor decision customizing theirs.
We’ve known devaluations were coming for a very long time. It was obvious when I wrote ten years ago that I was afraid the great values wouldn’t last.
I suggested that as more and more miles were printed, without a corresponding growth in airline capacity, we’d see devaluation. And truly outsized-value? I’ve always said that you should take advantage of the best awards, the ones that are orders of magnitude better than average redemption value, because they aren’t going to last.
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.
It’s important to “do gardening” on your bookings, especially ones that you make relatively far in advance.
By gardening, I mean tending to the bookings — checking up on them, and doing minor maintenance.
Here are the things that can go wrong, but they are preventable mistakes!
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 »
