point fu

Points experts always tell you to never hoard points because they're constantly being devalued. My old man brain sometimes gets stuck in 2013 and thinks "a million points is definitely hoarding!" But given the myriad devaluations of the past decade, the fact that there's 3 of us now, and the heaps of commuting we have to do between Sydney and New York, it's not as hoard-y as it used to be.  In 2026 I've been trying to spend down some of our points balances (while still getting good deals, of course.) I popped over to my spreadsheet yesterday and DANG! we've actually spent nearly a million miles (and almost $4k) in the first trimester of 2026 – just under half our total points balance. first 4 months of 2026 † While this is good and has saved us a ton of cash, all this burnin' means I have to start moving back into earning mode a bit. So what am I doing? asked Amex chat for a retention bonus on my Platinum card and got 15,000 free miles husband had to...

British Airways and Lufthansa have been charging Business Class users to pick their seats for a while now, so we knew it was only a matter of time before United's management flipped out that they were "leaving money on the table" and followed suit.  Plenty of sites are covering this latest enshittifcation , but long story short,  the new "Base" Polaris: includes 1 free checked bag instead of 2 requires you to pay to choose your seat has no ability to upgrade to the new Polaris Suite has United Club access, but no Polaris lounge access has no free ticket changes or refunds available We all know that this isn't going to magically create a cheap Polaris seat for those types who "just want a bed in the sky and don't want any of that other fancy stuff." While that's how this un-bundling is always presented -- "we're providing choices!" -- the reality is that the crappy new product will have the old price and you'll have to pay ...

So odd that on the very same day the United's CEO said he never eats the food on a long flight (because " hyyyyyydraaaation and sleeeeeeep ") they also announce a partnership with Chef's Table to bring legendary chefs' cooking to Polaris .  Of course my former-Californian soul jumped for joy when it heard the name Nancy Silverton, but then I remembered the old Anthony Bourdain quote " There's almost never a good reason to eat on a plane… Much better to show up in a new place and be hungry and eat at even a little street stall than arrive gassy and bloated, full, flatulent, hungover." And while I generally agree with that, ANA First exists as proof it can be done.  This has been tried  many times before , both in the 'celebrity chef as airline chef' format and in the 'we'll bring you a Shake Shack burger in the sky' format. I'm absolutely convinced that Nancy and her peers could design something delicious for in-flight dini...

Note to self: When planning a trip, I need to remember that if I find a good mileage fare to just book it — even if my plans aren’t totally finalized, even if it’s not exactly what i want. Points flights are usually free to cancel or change, so there’s no harm in grabbing a Plan B ticket while I’m still looking for Plan A.  I have a friend who constantly does this and I even gave her a drag name for it: Edith D. Itinerary. I tease her that she's not really happy unless she makes a substantial change to an upcoming trip at least once a week. I can definitely relate to the dopamine hit of clicking "Buy" on an airline website, so I get it! While I lovingly tease her for doing it too much, I definitely err on the side of doing it too little.   For this year's annual Sydney Mardi Gras trip I changed that, though! For whatever reason (general ennui?) I just didn't get around to booking it until 3 weeks before the trip. Yeah, flying to Sydney during its absolute peak tou...

It looks like United is launching a whole new sub-fleet within its A32X planes and calling them "Coastliners." Near as all the experts can tell, these Coastliners are a dedicated set of premium-configured planes to run between the coasts' largest and most profitable cities. The name seems a bit Amtrak-y, which immediately gives me fears that they'll be chronically delayed, but I digress… Back in the day (starting in 2004) United had fleet of 757s badged as "Premium Service," and boy do we (and many other plan nerds) have a some fond memories of its legendary, infinite-legroom Row 9. The whole thing sorta fell apart back in 2015 when they started moving heaps of their JFK traffic to EWR (they eventually left JFK altogether). This was right about the time that JetBlue stunned the American aviation market by launching its lie-flat Mint product, the first domestic planes with beds and closing door suites.  I'll be honest, the rise of Mint coupled with Unit...

UPDATE: According to some folks on the Reddit United Airlines forum, people whose home airport is Newark were targeted for this promotion due to the many operational problems United experienced there in 2025 (ATC moved to Pennsylvania, tarmac construction, etc.) UPDATE 2 (13 feb): You're never going to believe  this, but I got an email today telling me they were also doubling my starter PQPs from 900 to 1800!  22 Jan 2026 I just got back from our annual holiday trip to Australia and I'm sitting here at 7am jet lagged and slowly combing through 2 months of low-priority emails and notice there's a United Airlines survey to earn 500 miles.  Fine, I'll do it. "Did our recent email informing you that we've decided to extend your Platinum status through 2027 have any impact on yo---" WAIT, WHAT?!  Dig through my inbox and sure enough, on the 16th of January:  …and it's not just the status, I have 40 shiny new PlusPoints sitting in my account! (My flight home...

Not gonna lie, this guy's rant about being a Marriott elite slayed me. Don't skip the comments! Spent our 4th Hannuchristmas here in Sydney and I'm currently waiting for a nice email from Seats.aero to tell me it's found confirmable PlusPoints upgrade space on the flight from Melbourne to SFO/LAX next month. At the moment I'm booked into a confirmable upgrade seat on the new and not-yet-popular flight from Adelaide to SFO. I'd prefer to just fly directly from MEL (Tim and I will be there for Midsumma ) rather than have that extra leg in there.  Happy Holidays and a Peaceful 2026 to you <3 

 After Covid I was sorta hoping to have a decade or two of, well, precedented times but here we are. Before I begin, let me just say if you haven't donated to a food bank recently, please do. With folks having their EBT cut and federal workers not getting a paycheck, a lot of our neighbors are in dire straits. Also, check out this post from The Points Guy about donating unused credit card perks to food banks .  The shutdown continues and the transportation secretary has decreed that airlines need to cut their flights by 10%. Our flights for our annual Sydney holiday visit involved going from Newark to Seattle on Monday (10 Nov) for a few days, then to San Francisco for a few days, then onward to Sydney. Given the lingering trauma the three of us have from our Covid shutdown separation , my first instinct was to get out of the country as fast as possible.  But we decided to wait a day or two and see what would happen. Once the details were announced, we decided to just su...

I'm sure the "bring the iconic city restaurants into the airport" trend has been happening intermittently ever since airports first got restaurants ( c'mon Boudin's sourdough bread bowl at SFO! ), but I'm loving this latest little bit of tasty breakfast nosh: Montreal's Air Canada lounge is stocking bagels from the iconic Fairmount Bagel , and Delta is (was?) offering a Russ and Daughters bagel plate on their in-flight menu.  On the positioning flight for my Dallas – Sydney journey , Delta offered a Shake Shack burger and I gotta say it was pretty mid. The bun was sitting on the ceramic serving dish while it was being rewarmed, causing it to be sorta dehydrated, stale-tasting, and hard as a rock. I did get to witness a phenomenon I'd read about online: a grown adult having a meltdown because they'd pre-ordered a Shake Shack burger and there wasn't one for them in the galley. If he hadn't been such a toddler about it, I would have swapped hi...

I was thinking the other day about the whole "make sure you can travel with them before you date them" adage and it got me thinking about what my travel partner must-haves are. (It's a similar list for friends, but I think friends have a lower expectation of how close you'll be while on the trip.) Roll with the punches . After a lot of thought, this is king. Travel inevitably involves t hings going wrong . You want someone who's resourceful, organized, proactive and able to make the best of whatever situation you end up in.  Emotional intelligence . Know yourself, help when you can, communicate clearly. On one of my first trips with my husband I remember saying, "I'm frustrated and angry right now and I'm going rage for 3 minutes and then I'll be absolutely fine again, so just go for a walk and come back when it's over." And likewise, I've also been the one handling my travel partner's meltdown. But if I'm always the one hand...