Marriott is buying Starwood and Starwood Preferred Guest members are nervous.
Blog reader Vineet S discovered a famous fan of the program ready to take action. Vineet took advantage of a Starwood Preferred Guest private event to meet Lewis Hamilton, the 2014 and 2015 Formula One World Champion.
It’s a good thing that the TSA doesn’t actually contribute to security, and is only theater meant to make people feel safer while giving up their rights.
Because otherwise it would be a problem that this homeless man went through a TSA checkpoint at Salt Lake City’s airport using a boarding pass that a woman left behind at a check-in kiosk.
I have the opportunity to give a reader a 3-night stay in a 3-bedroom luxury apartment in Knightsbridge, London. All you have to do to enter is comment.
The giveaway highlights some luxury travel auctions that regularly give away some really high end opportunities dirt cheap — like chartering a yacht in the Caribbean or spending a week in a villa in Greece.
Hilton is testing a $50 fee for cancelling cancellable reservations.
Skift attributes this to a stronger position on the part of hotels with high occupancy rates, suggesting that “a seller’s market provides hotel owners with a greater freedom to dictate contract terms, including cancellations.”
Hilton’s CEO suggests it’s about hotels lowering rates closer-in, and customers who booked higher rates cancelling and rebooking. He considers that type of perfectly reasonable behavior (wanting to pay less when a hotel will charge less) “gaming.”
Airbus filed for a new patent in 2013 and which was approved this week: “…Airbus [is] reconsidering the boarding process with an idea to turn aircraft cabins into what amount to shipping containers.”
Passengers would board a module at the gate. Everyone sits down. The module would be lowered into the plane once it arrives. Then when the plane makes it to its destination, the cabin module would be removed and swapped out for new passengers in their own module. And the plane goes on its way.
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.
Last Friday an American Airlines passenger preparing to depart Dallas Fort-Worth for Orange County was asked to leave the plane “for being too big.” He’s 6 feet tall, 260 pounds, which seems like a weight and height of a person who flies every day without incident.
He was seated in a middle seat, and the woman sitting in the aisle got up and walked to the front, spoke to a flight attendant, and that’s when cabin crew approached to eject him from the aircraft.
The strange thing is the situation was resolved when he agreed to switch seats, giving up his middle seat and taking the complaining woman’s aisle instead.
Earlier in the month an alert reader spotted a popup American Express Centurion lounge display at LAX. That turned out to foretell a coming Centurion Lounge at the airport, at least according to an LAX employee newsletter.
Alert reader @tarheeljason tweeted me about an even more extensive popup at Chicago O’Hare. So I went to American Express to find out what’s going on.
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.
Three years ago Delta introduced minimum spending requirements for elite status. The revenue requirement was essentially set at 10 cents per mile — e.g. $2500 for 25,000 mile status, $5000 for 50,000 mile status and so on. That was a big conceptual move, but one with limited effect in practice.
However revenue-based requirements for elite status have now spread internationally — to North of the Border. Air Canada is clearly trying to cull their elite ranks, something consistent with their past stated attitudes towards elite frequent flyers.
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 »
