United is celebrating 90 years today.
United is highlighting their ‘firsts in aviation’ to mark this milestone. It hasn’t always been all sunshine and unicorns, but I’m flying United more and more (again in a few days), though I don’t expect to earn status with them.
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.
Virgin America’s CEO sent a note to employees about being bought out by Alaska Airlines for $2.6 billion.
Most Virgin America employees will keep their jobs for the foreseeable future. Alaska Airlines doesn’t serve many of the cities that Virgin does. Alaska doesn’t have enough flight attendants and pilots to maintain Virgin’s operation without Virgin’s employees. Alaska’s pilots generally aren’t currently rated on Airbus equipment. Alaska’s mechanics aren’t either. And the Airbus equipment stays, at least for awhile.
Many of you know that I offer an award booking service. It grew too big to handle on my own, and I was fortunate enough to be able to partner with one of the real veterans and gurus in the frequent flyer game, Steve Belkin (known in online forums as ‘beaubo’).
Steve is most famous for exploiting loopholes in frequent flyer programs like Aeroplan and United’s MileagePlus in a truly big way, scaling opportunities to earn millions instead of thousands of miles. And in that pursuit he has hired disable Thai rice farmers to fly in and out of the Golden Triangle area of Thailand, and New Zealand college students to fly to Europe for the summer.
One of the really fun projects he’s had is called Competitours. Every summer, Steve disappears from work to run what the Chicago Tribune calls “The Amazing Race for Regular People.”
Right now it looks like United, Aeroplan or LifeMiles for summer trips and American AAdvantage for Winter if you’ve got your eye on bringing (or sending) the family to Europe.
Marriott’s finally left alone to swallow Starwood. Accor put together a deal to buy Fairmont. But the musical chairs in the hotel space are far from over. In fact, each of the rest of the major chains could be a player in an upcoming deal.
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.
TravelSkills covers a lawsuit in New York alleging that Uber’s surge pricing amounts to price fixing under anti-trust law. The suggestion in the suit is that Uber’s app creates a cartel.
Fundamentally, however, surge pricing is great.
Last week I wrote that American changed its fare rules to charge you more on many connecting itineraries and on trips that include stopovers. In fact, United and Delta have done the same thing, though I also explained how to beat the practice.
In one example I showed you how to save as much as 74% on a ticket. Multi-segment itineraries may now be more expensive than buying each segment separately on these three major US airlines. However you can beat the practice by pricing out each flight segment separately, and if cheaper buying the series of one-way tickets instead of a roundtrip, open jaw, or circle trip.
Chris Guillebeau, who has visited every country in the world and has spoken at Frequent Traveler University, is out with his new book Born For This.
His Art of Non-Conformity was about building work to support lifestyle, and inspired a generation of of people who worked and traveled and didn’t even distinguish between the two. His $100 Startup helped people get beyond barriers to starting a business, to figure out what they’re best at and how to take the leap.
But this may be his most ambitious and important project — to help you figure out what you want out of work, whether working for yourself or someone else, and find it.
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 »
