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Most people have gotten back to normal. That includes the airlines, judging from the photos all over twitter of dirty planes. Pandemic travel waivers are over, and basic economy fares are back.
You can earn 25,000 Etihad Guest miles per 3+ day Avis rental. This is in addition to the usual base miles earned renting cars.
Don’t let the fact that the offer is for Etihad Guest miles stop you. Etihad miles are easy to get since the program is a transfer partner of American Express, Capital One and Citibank.
Delta has doubled or in some cases even tripled those higher prices. It’s possible to spend 650,000 miles roundtrip on a simple business class partner award to Europe.
United is expanding at Chicago O’Hare and increasingly American is the number two carrier there. Years ago the city had a sprawling international route network, selling flights to Moscow and Delhi. Now American’s flying from Chicago is mostly domestic.
At an internal meeting earlier in the month led by Chief Commercial Officer Vasu Raja, an employee asked about the draw down in Chicago flying and in particular why American isn’t flying from Chicago to Hawaii.
Bilt Rewards, the loyalty program which lets you earn points for paying rent and which offers probably the single best no annual fee rewards card in the market (the Bilt Mastercard), announced a growth round of $150 million in new funding at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation. Their round was led by Left Lane Capital and included Smash Capital, Wells Fargo, Greystar, Invitation Homes, Camber Creek, Fifth Wall, and Prosus Ventures.
These things can be somewhat challenging to date, but it appears to me that Bilt Rewards is faster from launch to unicorn status than Square, Instacart or Twitter were. And there’s two reasons this strikes me as important.
Saudi Arabia is starting a new mega-airline meant to counter Emirates and Qatar. They already have Saudia, based in Jeddah, and they aren’t expanding it. Instead they’re starting from scratch with a $30 billion warchest to launch “RIA” based in Riyadh. They’re hiring away the CEO of Etihad, and they’re about to place a major order for new planes.
A woman went into labor today on American Airlines flight 87 from London Heathrow to Chicago O’Hare. The plane diverted to Reykjavik for the mother and child to receive medical attention. After just under two hours on the ground in Iceland, the Boeing 787-9 aircraft took off from the Keflavik airport bound for Chicago.
The airline took delivery of new Boeing 787-9 aircraft with the old seats, even after the start of the Polaris project. Seats can have a long lead time. However now, at the end of 2022, United has stopped operating 787-9s with old seats.
Just as United is preparing to decide on new business class seats, they’ll finish putting Polaris seats in the planes which operate their longest flights, like Sydney and Singapore.
There’s a moment at the start of any Singapore Airlines flight in first or Suites class, after you first board. A flight attendant approaches you and offers you champagne. If you accept they will stop, and with a mix of smugness and pride, ask “would you prefer Dom Perignon or Krug?” That classic question is about to change.
Etihad has been posting odd clues in advance of a Wednesday announcement. One of those, discussed below, surely had to be trolling given the past speculation about the carrier joining Star Alliance. I do not know what tomorrow’s announcement entails, but I am told officially by Star Alliance that it is not their joining the global partnership.
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 »
