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 fall I found several Marriott hotels sell their rooms for less on Airbnb than at Marriott.com. Marriott isn’t ok with this and cracked down on the specific properties I noted, but the practice continues and one guest even managed a successful best rate guarantee against an Airbnb listing.
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.
Delta now restricts access to travelers until 3 hours prior to their first flight’s departure. How is that working out to control crowds?
Some unscrupulous people request wheelchair assistance at the airport when they don’t need it, using their ‘injury’ for a whole bunch of benefits: skip the security line, early boarding, and even better better seats on board.
El Al is spinning off its frequent flyer program at a $500 million valuation. The entire airline, including the frequent flyer program, has a market cap of less than $180 million. They’re not alone. American’s frequent flyer program was appraised at up to $30 billion (and they borrowed $10 billion against it) while their market cap is less than $9 billion.
One piece of coverage of the new Bilt Rewards travel portal struck me as an odd stretch, that Chase’s travel portal is better because of Chase statement credits that have nothing to do with their travel portal. Say what?
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.
Bilt has launched a travel portal so that – in addition to transferring points to partners like American, United, and Hyatt – Bilt Rewards members can book their preferred trip (whatever it is) and pay with points instead of cash.
Each point is valued at 1.25 cents apiece when spent this way. That beats most credit card portal values, and matches Chase with its Sapphire Preferred Card.
One woman in Atlanta – 89 years ago, and just out of the hospital the day before – found herself stranded after a mix up on Delta Air Lines. She seemingly paid the pet in cabin fee but the flight wasn’t updated to reflect the pet in the cabin. Delta says the problem was her dog barked.
She was asked to leave the aircraft. She showed her pet in cabin receipt – but wasn’t allowed back on and she’d made the classic error of putting her medications in her checked baggage.
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 »
