point fu

Tim is flying back to Sydney next week and has a PlusPoints upgrade to Polaris pending. He's United Gold and flying in Premium Economy, so his chances are as good as we can make them. Normally the upgrade list doesn't become visible until ≈72 hours before your flight. In years past, I've occasionally called in a favor from a friend at United to get a peek at this list early so we could make some alternate arrangements if our chances were looking grim.  I'd heard United was going to roll out a new Beta feature to allow early viewing of the upgrade list and sure enough, Tim was selected for inclusion in the Beta. Last week he was looking at his flight in the United app on his phones and saw this: He's flying out in 8 days and there are 7 seats left. He's 4th in line for those 7 seats. Last week he was 4th in line for 9 seats. Keeping in mind that all airlines these days will do anything to earn incremental revenue, everyone in the back of the plane will get some ...

So many people are speculating on what Amex is going to do with the Platinum card when they refresh it on Friday! People are scouring foreign Amex domains, looking at old staging servers, all in hopes of breaking some big news that most people can already guess: fee hike, some new coupon credits, some old ones will go away, some new design for the card. *Shrug* This image was leaked today and my first comment was "Wait, aren't you supposed to use the Amex card to chop and rack the coke lines ON a mirror?" and of course Tim shoots back, "No, apparently that's what the new Sapphire card is for..."

It's that time of year when people start thinking about next year's frequent flier status . While I tell myself that we're free agents (hey, I flew Qantas this year!), the reality is that we're United gals if for no other reason than they have so many flights to Australia versus their competitors.  I'm going to end up with Gold without really even trying, mostly due to all of the United Mileage Upgrade Awards that Seats.aero found for me this year. Kelly flew some great bargains on AirEuropa and Alaska this year, but he'd like to be Gold if for no other reason than getting Economy Plus at booking time (his work usually books him in Economy domestically). He's not sure he'll make it over the line, though. If you go to United.com, then to My United, then click View Premier Status Tracker, you can see your progress toward the various tiers.  It's all pretty clear and self-explanatory save for one thing. If you click Future Flights , you can see where ...

A bunch of folks jumped onto that Chase Sapphire offer to get a free 5000 mile certificate from Air Canada. I just redeemed mine and here's a couple of tips. I did this entirely on my desktop computer; buying via the app might be a different workflow I could not book a 2-person itinerary and redeem the certificate. It really wanted me to have a certificate for each person. I ended up buying us separate tickets .  Once I was booking for just myself, I had to log in to Air Canada's website, navigate to My Aeroplan and then click Benefits to find my cert. My Aeroplan > Benefits Once I'd clicked through there, I searched for the flight I wanted. When the search results loaded, a small popup appeared at the bottom where had to click to apply the 5000 mile cert. The prices in my search results updated to reflect the discount. Use this popup to apply the cert

I try to stay abreast of anything that makes traveling as a throuple / triad more appealing and dang this new " 3 person suite " from Swiss Airlines sure looks nice! Basically they're selling you the center, 2-person suite along with the single seat across the aisle. Their new Allegris interiors only have one row of First Class suites, so I think the idea is that the aisle space between the two suites is yours. I guess the staff must all be forced to use the aisle between 1K and 1E?  layout of the 3-person suite In all our travels I think the most special moment in the sky was when the BA First purser set up an empty seat so my husband and I could dine together. But like once the meal was done, I was happy to go back to our individual seats and generally not be in each other's way. I mention this because: one, you wouldn't really be able to have a 3 people dining together experience; and two, I don't know that I'd want to be fidgeting on a video game while...

I wasn’t gonna write this report, but Asiana has “been gonna” be absorbed by Korean air for like a decade now but it still hasn't happened yet, so maybe this will be of use to someone. It was flight OZ 224 and I was in seat 10K (upstairs).  How I did it 179,000 Amex points (this is the total after the now-moribund Pay With Points 35% rebate) for SYD-ICN-JFK Pros A380s are amazing. Huge and so quiet inside.  There's a big front lounge and you'll likely have it alllll to yourself. It's better than a private jet in some ways  Huge front bathroom  Perfect side storage bins  Espresso  Friendly and competent service  Good food  Decent airport lounge with Washlets   Split boarding (two jetways is important for such a big plane) Transiting Seoul means no clearing Korean customs  JFK (not Newark) Bathrooms have toothbrushes and lotions and mouthwash so you don’t have to open the amenity kit to get just one thing out of it.  Cons No Wi-fi (a...

I think the E word was the word of the year at some point recently and yes it's cheesy in the same way the word "adulting" is cheesy but dang if  enshittfication  isn't the theme of the late stage capitalism we're living in right now. I'm sitting here very unsuccessfully trying to check in for my Delta flight and ruminating on the fact that mobile apps replaced thousands of airline customer service agents saving airlines billions of dollars and yet their corporate masters just can't resist the urge to outsource and penny pinch the IT millions that make those billions possible. The Points Guy was doing a bunch of retrospectives for his anniversary and this one  really drove home for me how much decay is just baked into our societal expectations now. Amex (and Delta) built some gorgeous new lounges built on the idea of quiet, calm, luxurious travel and yet we're paying a $700 ( and rising !) annual fee to have an hour wait to get in, no seats when f...

I wrote this on the 17 hour, no-wifi flight and boy with what's going on in Los Angeles and Tehran this sure as hell reads like fiddling while Rome burns. Got a coffee in Sydney and the barista hears my accent and says 'my god, are you guys ok?' No, we're not…   This was my first-ever trip on Qantas (!!) and, in short, it felt like United Polaris on a good day – pleasant staff, comfortable bed, decent food. 85,000 Alaska miles (topped up with my BILT card). It's a well-timed flight: take off around 10pm, eat dinner, go to bed, wake up, have breakfast, land at 6am in Sydney. I didn't even have time to watch a movie, just a couple games of Balatro ;) *gay gasp* 👎 As already mentioned, no wifi . I’ll forgive LATAM for not having it, but for a carrier with this pricing and reputation it’s unacceptable. Full stop. That said, it’s an overnight flight completely designed around maximizing your sleep so it just wasn’t that big a deal in practice.  There's a staff...