Links to stories #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, and #6. It’s been a long time since I last posted a travel story that had to do with race, but three incidents this past weekend inspired me to write this post. Incident #1: Random woman on the street (directed at me): “Ohayou!” Incident #2 (while waiting at…
I write a lot of trip reports. I mostly write trip reports because I personally find them helpful when I’m preparing for trips, and I enjoy reading well-written, well-photographed reports by other people even if I’m not. I’m not going to lie: it also helps for SEO, and some of my most frequently visited posts…
Dear loyal blog readers (all three of you), I need to go crawl into a hole temporarily. I promise I’ll be back soon, but I’ve got a lot of other things on my plate right now. Grosses bises, Edward [Really, I just need to reclaim some time for myself right now. Life is pretty crazy…
There was an article in the NYTimes Home section yesterday entitled, “When Blogging Becomes a Slog“, and I couldn’t help but draw parallels between the themes in the article about DIY bloggers and the current state of the miles/points blogosphere. While people like Gary and Ben aren’t losing steam any time soon and haven’t expressed…
I’m about to fly AA 137 from Dallas to Hong Kong on one of AA’s newish 77Ws in business class. I paid coach and applied a SWU, and my upgrade cleared way back when I purchased my ticket. But here are the seat maps for the flight about 1 hour prior to departure: While I’m super…
I recently flew Spirit and avoided most of the fees–I printed my boarding pass before getting to the airport, packed only a backpack that could fit under the seat in front of me, didn’t get an assigned seat until check in–but I didn’t avoid the online ticketing fee (aka “passenger usage fee) of about $17. If…
Summary version of the article: the A380 was the wrong choice for Airbus to make as airlines want fuel-efficient, long-distance aircraft like the 787. This has led to many fewer orders for the A380 than originally planned, which means that Airbus might not even fully recoup their R&D costs. The only airline to bet big…
One thing (of many) that I don’t understand is why so many travel bloggers seem to like sundaes on airplanes. The sundae is particularly pervasive on US carriers (well, at least UA and AA) who serve them as the only choice of dessert in premium cabins. The biggest issue that I have is that the…
The NYTimes posted an article about MoneyPak, discussing a lot of the ways that it’s used for fraud. A typical example is fraudsters getting victims to load money onto MoneyPaks at CVS or Walgreens and then sending the reload codes to them where they then disappear with the money. It’s also discussed as a way for…
I have a confession to make: I’ve only applied for one new credit card in the past 9 months. Last year, I got 11 new credit cards for nearly 500k miles and points and 4 free nights at hotels. This year, I’ve only gotten the Citi Executive AAdvantage card once for 100k miles. I’m not…
