point fu

Twice in one week I get to watch the same tight international connection drama play out -- once with my husband returning from Poland, the other with the dog-daddies of the little Corgi I'm dog sitting. I'm writing this as I'm watching their FindFriends dot traverse the airport in Amsterdam cheering them on! In both cases, they were booked onto Schengen zone intra-Europe flights with a 1-ish hour connection to a flight bound for the US (meaning they have to re-clear security). They were also both on the last flight of the day for their respective airlines at that airport.  They've got 15 minutes to get to that gate (and re-clear security!) – RUN! In both cases their first flight was delayed, causing them to have to sprint for their connecting flight. In my husband's case, he received an email from Lufthansa informing him he'd been moved to the first flight of the next day and they'd already booked him an airport hotel for the night (he was flying in Business...

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 ...