United will be leaving New York JFK airport completely after October 25, and shifting their premium Los Angeles and San Francisco operations fully over to Newark. As long as the government signs off, Delta will get United’s JFK slots.
In general I find the best business class seat to be reverse herringbone like that offered by Cathay Pacific, American (and US Airways), Delta (on not enough routes), and EVA Airways. You get both privacy and comfort with all-aisle access.
There’s a new concept from B/E Aerospace, not yet installed in any aircraft, that’s certainly interesting — that it’s too limiting when you try to manage all functions through just the seat. There’s greater adjustments possible for more uses.
A collection of the most interesting links you’ll want to see, many you’ll want to click.
IHG Rewards Club – the loyalty program for Intercontinental, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn and related brands — is offering a 100% bonus on purchased points through June 30.
This means you can buy points at $0.00575 apiece.
A truly top quality time lapse YouTube video of the Dubai airport made from 88,000 shots that you can spin 360 degrees.
A couple of comments I’ve heard over the past several days are worth addressing, because they represent ideas that make flyers worse off. And it’s flyers doing it to themselves.
The first is that — no matter how much better a program is — “I’m not going to switch because the other program will devalue too.”
American flies 3-cabin 777s sold as 2-cabin domestically. And right now anyone, even without elite status, can reserve those business class seats when buying an economy ticket at least on one important route.
Earlier I wrote about loyalty program fraud discussions that take place at the major programs and how they often prioritize the wrong things and start out with a ‘blame the customer mindset’ even when it is against the interests of their own program.
But I don’t want to leave the impression that all members behave reasonably towards these programs and that it’s only hackers that loyalty executives ought to worry about.
British Airways has devalued their mileage in a major way. They’ve built a system that rewards paid full fare business and first class passengers who want to redeem their miles for short haul economy. They’ve made status harder to earn. And the truth is that once you earn it, it isn’t very valuable.
Indeed, even a British Airways Gold member who primarily flies BA and lives in London even would likely be better off flying the airline but crediting their trips to American AAdvantage.
I’ve been around several ‘loyalty fraud’ discussions recently amongst airline and hotel loyalty program executives. Fraud by members is a huge topic of conversation for loyalty programs these days.
And I’ve figured out that there are really four kinds of loyalty program fraud. And programs are focusing on the wrong ones. They think their members are out to get them, even though they write the rules… and too often are themselves the ones committing the fraud.
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 »
