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.
British Airways is offering 40% off economy awards originating in London (although it apparently works from other cities in the UK as well) booked by November 2 for travel through March 20 to a variety of destinations.
Since you still pay full taxes, including exorbitant fuel surcharges, this isn’t as great a deal as it might seem. You’ll often pay a substantial portion of what an economy ticket would cost without the availability of a paid ticket and without earning miles. However this can be especially valuable for:
Aer Lingus flight EI485, an Airbus A320 from Lisbon to Dublin, diverted to Cork, Ireland this evening after a 24 year old bit another passenger about an hour into the trip.
The man was restrained. He became “unwell and then fell unconscious.”
Canadian airline WestJet has a new Frozen-themed Boeing 737 featuring Anna, Elsa and Olaf. With the airline headquartered in Calgary, that seems somehow appropriate.
The aircraft’s tail shows Anna and Elsa ‘celebrating sisterhood and the magic of snow.’ The interior of the plane moves from cold to warm, back to front, mimicking the outside of the aircraft.
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.
Best can mean a lot of things. There are pure quality metrics, and we can debate those. But Starwood has done something interesting in coming up with a list of bests as deemed by Starwood Preferred Guest members which is to say that they are the hotels that best satisfy members and meet their needs (which is going to incorporate quality but also convenience of location and price point).
It’s an interesting methodology: What they did is they took the hotels with the highest customer survey ratings (“Guest Experience Index”), the best ratings and reviews on the Starwood website, and the most award nights redeemed. These three categories were evenly weighted, though they removed the properties that had low scores on customer surveys and online reviews, so ultimately removed several frequently redeemed-for hotels.
Back to the Future Day is this coming Wednesday.
In the ‘real world’ US Airways had its last flight on Friday, October 16. But thanks to Twitter, we learn that US Air actually survived as an independent brand at least until October 21, 2015.
Chilean carrier Sky Airlines flight 112 was forced to return to Santiago shortly after takeoff when a panel flew off the Airbus A319’s engine.
A passenger was filming the takeoff. This would have been scarier for me onboard than any other flight I’ve taken.
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.
Things went very smoothly this morning departing Austin the morning that US Airways transitioned to publicly become American Airlines. Computer systems were working, passengers were getting processed, flights were taking off. My own flight pushed back on time and even landed almost 15 minutes early in Phoenix. Not everything went as planned, though…
Agents went through training at various times. One that I spoke to had just done her training, she wanted to be fresh for the cutover. Another who trained in August told me she assumed that she would go to training and that would be it — she was surprised to be emailed her account credentials immediately after, and she had two months to practice.
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 »
