point fu

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...

United announced 3 big crappy changes which are all general devaluations of their miles and their overall program. I never personally used the Excursionist Perk , nor the instant full-fare coach upgrades, but I get why people are sad they're going away. For us, the news that Mileage Upgrade Awards are becoming dynamically priced later this year sorta blows a hole in our current, Australia-heavy strategy .  As I'd already mentioned, the per-leg cost of: a $1000-ish coach fare  + $300-$450  co-pay + 30,000 miles   was already starting to add up, but if I'm suddenly paying, say, 60,000 miles per leg for an upgrade instead of 30,000 then it's time to look at other options.  No good points game lasts very long (check my similar gravy-train farewell from 2014 ), and while I'm grateful for the 2 years of togetherness (and back health!) it's afforded us, it's time to start looking around at other options. For my next Sydney visit in June, I decided to follow a Sea...

United announced some major updates to Polaris Business Class yesterday and it's crazy to think this blog has been around long enough to have my thoughts on Polaris ' birth nearly 10 years ago. Re-reading that post makes the launch of this new seat seem fairly trivial in comparison to that: the branding, the service, the lounges are all up and running now. Other than the door, the difference between the new seat and the old seat is fairly small - a lot smaller than the difference between the first Polaris seat and the Business Class seats that preceded it.  LOL a worker at the BK Navy Yard leaked the big Polaris reveal 24 hours early So yes, they're going to roll out an off-the-shelf seat (with doors!) that's been in use by Qatar and Hawaiian for a while now. A seasonal flavor will get added to the ice cream sundae cart. There'll be a new self-serve snack area. A bunch of the middle seats will have double-bed features ( including a shared mattress pad ). The new p...

Bank of America giving this card the bougie Out Of Box Experience (I'm adding updates in red to the original post as I learn) My credit card strategy for the past few years has been:  Churn a new card sign up bonus once or twice a year Use the Amex Platinum for 5x points on airfare and access to their lounges Use the Amex Gold for 4x on dining and groceries Use the Chase Sapphire for all non-airline travel and for dining abroad (Amex isn't as widely accepted and they have a nasty habit of not counting foreign charges in the right bonus category) Use the Business Amex for the 35% points rebate (the Dell and wireless credits largely cover the annual fee) Use the United card to top up Kelly's PQPs so he'll stay Star Alliance Gold I always told myself if my life became more complicated (like say for example I got a JOB), I'd probably just ditch most of my cards and get the BofA Premium Rewards Elite and charge nearly everything on there. Welp, that time has apparently c...

UPDATE (14 May 2025):   Well, I got it! A $402 check for my lost hotel night! We had checked out of our Madrid hotel and were waiting to board the AVE high speed train to Barcelona when a massive blackout took out power to the entire country of Spain and parts of its neighbors. It was a big mess, but we absolutely made the best of a rough situation and managed to arrive about 24 hours later than planned. This meant trying to find a hotel in Madrid (with no power and no cell reception) and a missed night of prepaid hotel in Barcelona.  next-day controlled chaos cudda been worse: my friends were ON the AVE when the power went out! Our hotel told us we should give Amex a call when we got home to see if their insurance would cover our added expenses. (FYI - the Barcelona hotel said if we'd booked directly with them, they would have immediately refunded the missed night, but because we booked with "Amex Expedia" they couldn't. ) Here's what I learned: After lots of ...