point fu

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.) 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 from Australia was in Polaris thanks to last year's PlusPoints). Keep in mind, I barely crossed the finish line for Gold this year (12,200 PQPs), and barely cross...

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...

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