On March 20 I wrote that American would be eliminating free 24 hour reservation holds on April 1 and switching to 24 hour refunds instead.
American reached out to tell me that wasn’t accurate, only it turns out that it is accurate. Nonetheless, there’s still going to be a way to put reservations on a 24 hour hold at least for some period of time.
Arguably the most worthless elite status in the world is OpenTable VIP. The second most worthless? Perhaps it’s UberVIP.
If you’ve had over 100 rides in a city where the feature is available, you’ve been ‘upgraded’ to VIP status which means you can select the option for UberX called UberVIP which gives you the best cars only with drivers rated 4.8 or higher. And since you aren’t looking at all available cars, you likely won’t get the closest car, and may have to wait longer.
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.
I love Alaska Airlines and the Mileage Plan program, but I love it a lot less this morning. While they don’t have plans to go revenue-based and most of their awards remain reasonable, they have gutted their award chart for travel on their partner Emirates and they have done it without notice.
Emirates has been my favorite Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan redemption. They fly to a number of US cities and have a fantastic first class product especially onboard their Airbus A380 which has showers.
These awards are mostly going to be out of reach now for Mileage Plan members.
Increasingly American Airlines has been imposing a new rule in its fares to make your tickets more expensive.
It used to be that if two one-way fares, say San Diego to Dallas and Dallas to Fort Lauderdale, were cheaper than the fare for San Diego to Fort Lauderdale you’d pay the cheaper ‘sum of the two one ways’ for your ticket. Now for many of the cheapest fares in many markets American has updated their fare rules to prohibit “End of End Ticketing” which means you cannot combine the cheap fares, you have to pay the more expensive fare.
Tiffany describes finding Delta award seats on the airline’s website. She’s making the booking for four passengers, and the miles aren’t all in the account. So she calls the airline, has them set up the award, and then purchases about $1000 in miles in order to buy the award.
And then the price of the award jumped from 110,000 to 375,000 per person one way when the agent went to issue the tickets.
After escalating to web support, a supervisor, and the re-issue desk they couldn’t get the flights to ticket at the price that would be initially quoted each time. They finally tried “seven different itineraries across three days” before getting something to come up at the promised price for the Tokyo – New York itinerary.
Boston Globe columnist Dante Ramos tweeted about a whole new way to be awful at 35,000 feet.
Although I think there’s far worse. I’ve had the pleasure of watching a fellow first class passenger clip their toenails during dinner service.
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.
Thank goodness the hijacking of an Egyptair flight MS181 ended peacefully. The hijacker claimed to be wearing an explosives belt. The plane diverted to Larnaca, Cyprus. The hijacker demanded to speak to his ex-wife. The President of Cyprus said, “There’s always a woman involved.”
And that wasn’t the most awkward moment of the day.
We may ask, “should you go to the restroom prior to boarding?” or “should coach passengers be able to use the first class lavatory onboard?”
But we rarely ask, “where’s the lavatory? Oh, is this it?” before opening the aircraft door.
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 »
