A reader recently flew Delta Air Lines business class from London Heathrow, and snapped photos of the wines being offered. I was appalled. The white was actually the same one being served in economy. It was a $5 Hidden Creek 2018 white blend. If the flight were still on the ground in the EU I believe it would legally have to be marketed as ‘table wine’.
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 mother took to Twitter to call out Southwest Airlines for their treatment of her young teenager traveling solo for the first time. She claims a Southwest gate agent yelled at her 13 year old son because he wasn’t following proper boarding procedure – that he was yelled at for queueing up during ‘family boarding’.
Forty nine hotels reported mattresses being stolen in a two year period. Not towels. Actual mattresses, and I imagine many hotels don’t admit the thefts so the real number is higher. How does a guest even do this without getting caught? (Most reports are that it happens in the middle of the night.)
What do you take from hotels, and what seems like crossing the line?
Yeah, boyeeeeee! Flavor Flav lost it at the Las Vegas airport on Thursday night after missing his Spirit Airlines flight to Detroit.
Sixty three year old William Drayton, Jr. became a public enemy of Spirit Airlines after the doors were closed before he could get onto the aircraft. And he was captured on video unloading on the gate agent with some salty language.
Baltimore/Washington International airport is named for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. But that’s not the interesting part of its name.
It was once known as Friendship International airport and its airport code was a logical BAL for Baltimore. Before Washington Dulles opened jets that were too large for National airport went to Baltimore.
The U.S. doesn’t require most Europeans to get a visa to come here. They do, however, have to register online in advance and get an approved “ESTA.” Which is like an electronic visa! It’s just that the process we put people through to get something we actually call a visa is much, much worse.
Europe is responding in kind and creating their own online registration system that residents of much of the world will have to use before being allowed to enter. It’s called ETIAS, for the European Travel Information and Authorization System.
In 1971 Southwest Airlines had just won a legal victory that would allow them to fly. Their first big investor joined the board of the company. And he had two ideas for what they should do. Southwest would have been a very different company, and air travel in the U.S. would have been very different.
As a general rule airlines don’t let you change the name on a ticket. If you could swap names, you could resell tickets, and that would undermine airline pricing strategies that try to charge more for the kind of last minute travel usually purchased by business travelers.
That’s also why airlines started insisting on ID’ing travelers, to make sure their tickets weren’t being resold.
However name corrections are often possible. Here’s what to do.
The Ambassador program was a paid program, and you had to be a member to qualify for its invitation-only level Royal Ambassador. But when you made Royal Ambassador you used to get a referral certificate to gift the status to someone else. And they got a referral certificate to give to someone else, and so on.
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 »
