Breaking Down Two Mileage Runs for 30,000 EQMs to get AA Executive Platinum Getting a Chinese Visa Planning a Mileage Run to Shanghai Vegetarian Economy Meals on American Airlines Hotel Review: Crowne Plaza Shanghai Eating in Shanghai Getting a Chinese Massage aka Tui Na First Class Lounge (No. 69) Shanghai Pudong PVG Concluding Thoughts on…
One of my friends is headed to Budapest, and he asked me for some advice about navigating Budapest, given that I lived there for a time during college. And my biggest recommendation is to learn these three magical phrases: 1) Jó napot kívánok 2) Beszél angolul 3) Köszönöm szépen These mean “hello”, “do you speak English”, and…
In a previous post, I talked about why travel is a good use of money, which is largely because people tend to underinvest in experiences and overinvest in material goods even though experiential purchases tend to make people happier than material purchases. Taking this another step, I’ve realized that it doesn’t really make sense for me…
When calling airlines to make or change award bookings, you usually need to tell a phone agent a confirmation number. And it’s often necessary to use some sort of spelling alphabet (e.g. “A” as in “alpha”) to communicate the letters of the confirmation number to the phone agent as it’s very easy to confuse letters…
(I realize that this post is mostly just preaching to the choir, but I have a future point in mind) Most of us are lucky enough to have at least some discretionary income to spend on whatever we choose. One question this leads to is what’s the best use of this discretionary spending. Should we…
If you happen to be flying on your birthday or are otherwise flying on a special occasion (e.g. honeymoon, anniversary) on some airlines, you or someone else can call the airline to request special services like a birthday cake. This list isn’t meant to be at all exhaustive, but just a sampling of what certain airlines…
While I know that this article is supposed to be humorous, I found the NYTimes article “How Many Miles Do I Need to Murder the Head of the Airline?” by Joyce Wadler to be more misguided than anything else. So many people feel like their miles are worthless–or worse, don’t even collect their miles–because they’re misinformed….
Since every other travel blogger has posted multiple times about this, I might as well throw my hat in the ring as well, but I’m not going to talk/speculate about the devaluation itself so much as write about things tangential to the devaluation. 1. So many blogs posted about the supposed devaluation, which I guess…
Breaking Down Two Mileage Runs for 30,000 EQMs to get AA Executive Platinum Getting a Chinese Visa Planning a Mileage Run to Shanghai Vegetarian Economy Meals on American Airlines Hotel Review: Crowne Plaza Shanghai Eating in Shanghai Getting a Chinese Massage aka Tui Na First Class Lounge (No. 69) Shanghai Pudong PVG Concluding Thoughts on…
I’ve written before about my dilemma on whether or not I should mileage run for American Airlines Executive Platinum status, and I pretty much concluded that it’s not really rational for me to do so. I would be booking incremental (i.e. not already planned/largely unnecessary) trips to get the status, and since I don’t have…
