Hilton Just Revealed Hotels that Will Cost More Points (and Less) Starting October 12

by Gary Leff

Oct 01 2016

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.

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Doha Airport Has a Theme Song and Music Video — But It Doesn’t Come Close to Munich’s

by Gary Leff

Oct 01 2016

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.

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Amazing Award Availability: Use Delta Miles to Take the Whole Family to Asia

by Gary Leff

Sep 30 2016

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.

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Here’s Why ‘Earn and Burn’ is the Best Strategy

by Gary Leff

airline cabin
Sep 30 2016

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.

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You Always Get Upgraded When You Want Upgrades the Least

by Gary Leff

Sep 29 2016

Last week I needed to be in San Diego for one night. There aren’t any non-stops between Austin and San Diego, I rather expected Southwest might have one, but I wound up on American through Dallas. My flight into Dallas was a few minutes early but we had to wait about 20 minutes for a gate.

I wasn’t concerned as my relatively short connection time dwindled. I didn’t need to make it to my connecting gate before boarding started — for a simple overnight I just had my laptop bag and didn’t need any bin space. I’d be happy to be the last to board.

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