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.
It’s possible to open over 3 million hotel doors worldwide with just two taps. One of the people that figured out how to do it is the founder of airline award search tool Seats.aero.
Two years ago a group was invited to hack a brand of hotel door lock in Las Vegas. What one team found was flaws in the RFID-based keycard locks by Dormakaba, a leading Swiss lock manufacturer. This vulnerability affects Saflok systems installed in doors across 131 countries. There’s a fix rolling out, but it’ll take months or even years to be in place worldwide.
Legislators in Tennessee are convinced that contrails are really government weather control experiments, or targeting of civilians with poison – and the state’s senate has passed legislation to ban “chemtrails” within the state’s borders.
Chemtrails is a conspiracy theory that the trails left by aircraft are chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for nefarious and secret purposes.
Prior to departure of an American Airlines flight from Tampa to Philadelphia, a passenger gets into an altercation and calls a flight attendant a “kike” but I don’t think he knows what that means.
The U.S. Department of Transportation is launching a comprehensive review of the top U.S. airlines’ privacy practices concerning passenger data, focusing on potential unethical monetization and data sharing with third parties, in an effort led by Secretary Buttigieg and influenced by Senator Wyden’s advocacy for stricter privacy protections.
The Ritz-Carlton Los Angeles has a hole in its front wall. Someone stole a city Metro bus, hijacking it with a BB gun late last night, ordering the driver to go to several locations. Inside the wall of the Ritz-Carlton may have been one of 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.
A passenger was told that if they wanted to remove an item from their checked bag to get under their 50 pound allowance, they would have to go to the back of the line and start over – and then they would miss their flight (or, presumably, the cut-off time for checking bags before their flight).
Of course paying the overweight bag fee would likely take at least as long as avoiding the overweight bag fee.
A report from an executive meeting with JetBlue employees over all of the change that’s going on at the airline after the government blocked their partnership with American Airlines, stopped them from acquiring Spirit Airlines, and after corporate raider Carl Icahn took a stake in the carrier suggests that cuts may be coming to transatlantic flying and that there’s risk to their partnership with Hawaiian Airlines too.
The Four Seasons Hotel San Francisco at Embarcadero owner has defaulted on its property loans. The hotel was acquired for $126.6 million in 2019 or ~ $816,000 per key. They owe $72.5 million, are over $3 million behind in making payments, and have defaulted.
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 »
