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 15,000 United ...

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 plane 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 Uni...

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...

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

I try to stay abreast of anything that makes traveling as a throuple / triad more appealing and dang this new " 3 person suite " from Swiss Airlines sure looks nice! Basically they're selling you the center, 2-person suite along with the single seat across the aisle. Their new Allegris interiors only have one row of First Class suites, so I think the idea is that the aisle space between the two suites is yours. I guess the staff must all be forced to use the aisle between 1K and 1E?  layout of the 3-person suite In all our travels I think the most special moment in the sky was when the BA First purser set up an empty seat so my husband and I could dine together. But like once the meal was done, I was happy to go back to our individual seats and generally not be in each other's way. I mention this because: one, you wouldn't really be able to have a 3 people dining together experience; and two, I don't know that I'd want to be fidgeting on a video game while...

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...