point fu

Gary Leff has a hilarious story today about a self-proclaimed "social media influencer" who faked a letter from Cathay Pacific claiming she was entitled to free upgrades to Business Class due to her large number of followers on social media. Well, the staff at the airport in New York didn't buy it and straight-up kicked her off the flight . We've all seen these days how your follower count can greatly increase your chance of landing jobs, winning online contests, and even help you get acting gigs. Horror stories of entitled "influencers" abound, as do everyman hero stories of shops and inns who defiantly stand up to this entitlement. I feel like some of this social engineering is up wrapped around people's own egos – like it becomes a little game of measuring your looks and charm and popularity by how much you can get for free. There's heaps of crappy advice online about how to use this approach for free upgrades on airlines, but it looks l...

A quiet, 15 hour late-night flight with a spacious-but-hard bed. Great service, decent food. PROS new A350 plane with higher cabin pressure and humidity friendly and helpful staff seat design allows for a flat bed with lots of leg mobility and possible sleeping positions EWR is deserted at that time of night so it feels extremely calm and private good in-flight entertainment options good award availability flight is fairly well timed for anti-jetlag fasting, NYC traffic, and first HK airport train decent lounge with snacks and pour-your-own liquor   NEUTRAL food was decent but unremarkable   CONS no pajamas no air vents very hot cabin seat is quite hard, despite its nice design   TIPS avoid row 11 (first row of Business), especially the center seats there’s a second, smaller business class cabin that seems like it’d have less flight attendant foot traffic beautiful view of Montreal not long after takeoff HOW I DID IT 75,000 A...

We're going to Japan to ride the Shiki Shima train and I've booked the long legs of the trip : New York to Hong Kong and then Taipei to New York (we're bookending the trip to Japan with long weekends in two of our favorite places). But now we need to book the short legs between those two places and Japan. One of my weak spots with booking award travel is doing crazy-but-legal routings and stopovers. I'd used British Airways points for the Hong Kong leg, and BA prices all award travel by leg so there were no points to be saved by spending an hour on the phone with a call center trying to get an agent to book me a single flight with a multi-day layover in Hong Kong en route to Japan. ( TIP: There's a great online Avios calculator here ). Hong Kong to Tokyo I priced out the flights and found a lot of Ultra Low Cost Carriers (ULCC) offering this flight for US$150-ish (a.k.a. $350 once you pay the surcharges for seats, bags, oxygen, and toilets ), but we wanted t...

Jan 2015, seat 20A and 11A. My notes on how I booked  are here . Both flights leave around 10pm local time.  Pros:   Internationally-configured plane on a "domestic" transcon. Lots of premium seat availability on points. Amex Transfer partner. Great deals when booking via partner rewards on British Airways' website. Vastly superior service to UA/AA/DL's premium transcons.  Cons: No Wifi. No air vents. Hot. Redeye  The business class cabin is split in two : a big section behind the galley and a very small part in front of the galley, adjoining first class. I sat in the big section on the way there and in the small one on the way back... I thought there'd be a big difference between the two but there wasn't, really. The small cabin's potential "intimacy" is sorta disturbed by the galley being so close and the staff having to run back and forth between First and the galley.  The seats are really nice – nearly identical to the ones B...

I often use this blog as a place to store bits of my research for a particular ticket I'm trying to get – it's helpful for me (keeps me from doing the same work twice) and I feel like it also shows my thought process, so hopefully that means it's helping other people too. I'm sure it's just coincidence, but less than a week after I posted my Tokyo in Spring , another travel blog did a near-identical breakdown of how to use British Airways Avios points to book Japan Airlines flights between the USA and Tokyo. It's not a big deal, but they have a zillion more followers than I do and the last thing I want is a bunch of people competing for the same seats I'm trying to get! So, coincidence or not, I'm going to leave these types of posts in "Draft" mode while I work on them and only publish after I have my own ticket in hand! (Trip report is here ) With that out of the way... I need to go to Vancouver (YVR) for work in January. There are only tw...