19 year Hannah Cohen has traveled from Chattanooga to Memphis for the past 17 years to seek treatment at St. Jude’s hospital for her brain tumor. She was “celebrating the end of her treatment” and on her way back home.
This woman is “partially deaf, blind in one eye, paralyzed, and easily confused” and so when she alarmed at the TSA checkpoint at the Memphis airport. She didn’t understand what the agency wanted to do to her.
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.
JetBlue has a very exciting promotion running, generating tons of buzz going after customers with points in a Virgin America account.
They will match whatever balance is in your Virgin America Elevate account by July 4 (up to 50,001 points but and in some cases matched better than 1:1) if you register and take a single roundtrip with them by August 31.
While I follow airline products around the world I’m much closer to the changes and business operations of US airlines than European ones.
So sometimes developments creep up on my. So let me share some surpising things that I learned perusing data this week.
One of the ways Etihad exercises this control is by purchasing controlling stakes in an airline’s frequent flyer program, something they’ve done with airberlin and Jet Airways. While foreign ownership restrictions limit equity in an airline, they do not generally limit ownership of an airline frequent flyer program.
Etihad purchased a majority stake in the Jet Airways JetPrivilege program and a 70% stake in airberlin’s Topbonus program.
Priceline founder Jay Walker is launching a new travel booking site in September. The focus is business travel for small and mid-size companies, and the goal is to save the company money while offering gift cards to employees.
Signup is quick and free. And people who sign up before the site launches have two big advantages.
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.
Bangkok is city where it’s difficult for me to pick hotels. Most everything is above average. Even the Holiday Inn Bangkok, at Gaysorn Plaza, is attached to the Intercontinental and practically the same hotel.
On the other hand there are very few properties that are so good they’re clearly better than all the others. It’s not a city where I stick to Hyatt, either, because while the Grand Hyatt Erawan is fine I don’t find it special.
The St. Regis was priced extremely reasonably for my dates and although the hotel is known for being great with suite upgrades, I decided not to just chance it or use a Suite Night Award but to pay for the suite. Long odds, as reported by others, but I hoped for a further upgrade.
Star Alliance airlines including United, ANA, Singapore Airlines, and Air China are all running super cheap airfares roundtrip to Singapore. Fares are so low you’d almost think Singapore had just withdrawn from ASEAN!
The country a great jumping off point for travel throughout the rest of Southeast Asia and worth a trip of its own.
Fares are generally available September through March and from a host of cities including San Francisco, Chicago, Newark, and Los Angeles. What’s odd is that usually cheap airfares like this are dropped into competitor hubs but you can fly United from its own hubs.
The world news and financial markets have been fixated the the UK’s vote to leave the EU for nearly a week. As far as what this means for travel, airfares to Europe are low — they were low already thanks to low fuel prices, too much capacity, and low cost carrier competition. The British pound has dropped, but it was already cheap relative to the dollar. It’s a great time to book travel.
Bizarrely, perhaps, it turns out that the plan to allow a vote on Brexit was apparently hatched inside an airport. In fact, it may have been sketched out at what was then Pizzeria Uno in Chicago O’Hare’s American Airlines terminal 3.
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 »
