point fu

Given how the pandemic affected the major rental car companies and American travel patterns, it's been a rough year for people trying to rent a car. Some tourists in Hawaii got so desperate they were renting U-Hauls to drive around the island! In our case, we've not seen a single available date in all of 2021 at our favorite car rental place (the one in Albany that's inside the train station). Eleven years ago, I did a long-term consulting gig for a tiny company called Turo . They were aiming to be the AirBnB of cars and given that they're about to have their IPO, I'd say they've succeeded. Despite their huge growth and the current pain surrounding traditional car rentals, I'm surprised more people aren't familiar with them. The true genius of Turo wasn't the idea or the technology, it was the insurance. They were the first ones to figure out a way to cover the driver (ie, the renter) for accidents without passing on any liability to the car owner (...

United's latest entry into the "if the airline is encouraging you to do it, it's probably a bad deal for you" contest. Even with the special transfer discount, it's $456.00 to transfer 38,000 miles – 1.2¢ per point for points that are very rarely worth more than 2¢ each.  If you know the person well enough to give them points, why not just save the money and buy the ticket for them with your miles? Like aside from the ill-informed, who uses this? Maybe like someone dies with a million miles in their account and their heirs all want to split up the miles? No idea  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  See also: United selling you points during a flight purchase checkout for an inflated price (see the last section of this story for details)  

To say the world is a different place than when I made my last post (dated April 2020) is an understatement. I lost half a dozen friends to Covid. My family is still agonizingly separated by Covid border restrictions in Australia. Airline travel is tense and weird and ever-changing so doing a "review" of a flight just seems so pointless. At some point you have to give yourself permission to take a break from the mind-numbing, time-warping Covid life. I'd just gotten over a Pfizer breakthrough case in mid-July and decided "well, if I was ever going to be super duper extra immune to this thing, now's the time." So we booked a last-minute long weekend in one of our favorite North American cities – Montreal – a week after the border reopened.  I use this blog as an auxiliary memory bank for the increasingly-senile grey one between my ears. To that end, I wanted to make a record of the hoops we jumped through to get there and back under the Summer '21...