Amazing Offers for United Card Let You Earn Up to 75,000 Miles and Even Get Paid

by Gary Leff

Jun 03 2016

Credit card signup bonuses have bounced around a lot over the years. Normal when I started was 15,000 miles. Bonuses surged tremendously around 4 and 5 years ago, it wasn’t uncommon to see 100,000 mile bonuses at least for less popular cards or in the form of targeted offers.

For the most part things have settled down, where 50,000 miles is a good offer and sometimes offers fall to 30,000 miles. Miles are more expensive to issuers than they were in the depths of the Great Recession, and they’ve gotten more sophisticated figuring out what it takes to earn back revenue from portfolios of customers to cover acquisition costs.

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American Dumps Gogo as Exclusive Provider for Faster Domestic Internet

by Gary Leff

Jun 03 2016

Improved inflight internet was one of the five priorities I outlined for the airline now that they completed customer-facing integration of US Airways and American. Another was offering a consistent product.

American is going to go with ViaSat for domestic high speed inflight internet. For some planes. Starting over a year from now. So they will have 3 different internet providers, and fast internet only on a small portion of their domestic fleet.

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United CEO Oscar Munoz Doesn’t Fly United (But Hopes to Soon)

by Gary Leff

people posing for picture
Jun 03 2016

Scott Mayerowitz, covering yesterday’s launch of a new United Airlines premium product, shared this interesting tidbit about United CEO Oscar Munoz’s health having returned to the job after a heart transplant shortly following his being appointed to the role.

The CEO of United has been under doctor’s orders not to even fly commercial. We certainly wish him – and United – continued recovery!

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Teen Stows Away in Cargo Hold Seeking Life of Riches as Beggar

by Gary Leff

Jun 02 2016

One Chinese teen reports that he found Emirates A380 cargo “comfortable.” It just goes to show that Emirates A380s are comfortable in all classes of service.

The 16 year old boy from Bazhong City climbed a fence at the Shanghai airport and snuck into the plane’s cargo hold. The flight took off shortly after midnight and made the journey to Dubai where the young Mr. Xu planned to make his fortune.

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United’s New Business Seat, Bedding, and Lounges Revealed By New CEO Oscar Munoz

by Gary Leff

Jun 02 2016

Oscar Munoz took the stage at Gotham Hall in New York this morning to talk about their new push at United. It as as much about the culture of the airline as it was about the new product — the “culture of caring” and “new spirit of United” that he acknowledges has been “missing far too long.”

So the center of their design is the new Zodiac seat (coming from Zodiac UK, with a dedicated product line that United says is on-time for a seat that’s been certified).

The seat will be fully flat with direct aisle access. That puts it a cut above British Airways and Lufthansa, but plays catch up to Delta and American.

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Here’s How to Finally Fix the TSA Mess

by Gary Leff

Jun 02 2016

Julian over at Travel Codex picks a fight with me. He doesn’t just disagree with me over privatizing the TSA. He gets personal: “Though do you remember the Dean in “Old School”? That guy was a total jerk, right? So maybe for the purposes of today’s post we’ll think of Gary as that sort of “Dean” of Boarding Area and then it’ll be okay to argue with him and maybe egg his house or something.”

He throws down with Jeremy Piven, who isn’t just Ari from Entourage. He’s also the creepy guy who kept texting evil travel hacker Justin Ross Lee‘s girlfriend.

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