And with this post, http://viewfromthewing.boardingarea....ill-get-hosed/, the lights go out for me on VFTW. Not an award sale even applicable to Americans, which he doesn't note and even gives the impression is applicable to flights from anywhere but London, but an opportunity for ol' Gar to beat on one of his favorite whipping boys, BA.

RTFT&C, Gary.

I've gradually cut down going to his site...the shilling for AA and non-stop credit cards did it to me.

I'm slowly becoming a kokonutz airline agnostic.

Frugal Travel Guy posts today about 5 must-have card types for travel. Chase Sapphire Preferred and the Barclays Arrival Card get starred for being Chip & Pin; other lesser cards are noted for having Chip & Signature capability, which can often serve in a pinch.

Knowledgeable readers already know that the CSP card is, in fact, Chip & Signature, and that the Barclays Card is principally also Chip & Signature (with backup PIN capability).

Knowledgeable travelers, and even not-so-knowledgeable ones like me, know that this is not a trivial or minor issue. Is my card going to work in that train kiosk or am I going to have to brave that 45 minute line at the manned desk?

How can you run a travel blog and not know (or at least not care about) the basics?

The comments to the post, of course, picked up on all this instantly.

Who cares about stuff like this? What matters is conversions! :rolleyes:

And in that same paragraph she even notes that the Chase Hyatt card is Chip-and-Signature only, contrasting it to Sapphire Preferred.

The post was from 19 Nov and here, two days later and after comments calling out the errors, it remains uncorrected. It's even one of the rotating things on the FT home page. Amazing.

Disappointed that many times some bloggers just copy what other bloggers wrote without verifying them..

Can we include the bits of FT that present themselves in a blog-like way?

This appallingly lazy piece tells us that Lufthansa plans "global rollout" of their new Premium Economy to BLR-LHR and "every long-haul route in India".

+1 to both of these. To me this just shows how little travel these authors really do. There are a lot of hacks in the blog world that present themselves as knowledgable writers unfortunately.

I have been targeted three consecutive times spanning back to June, all my restaurant spend goes here. Screw First Friday :D

I went to AMS via HNL...but that was years ago when status mattered. Since 2012 I entered free agency and love WN for domestic trips on points! Now if I had a dollar for every time every blogger raved about the Southwest Companion Pass...easiest & most often used template ever!

I remember my first Ann Arbor DO in maybe 2007. I was LITERALLY the only guy there touting the WN Companion Pass, as maybe the best deal in all of FFland.

Everyone else told me I was completely insane. "WN sucks, no F, no meals, no reserved seats, no Europe, no Hawaii, ….."

I remember that!

I'd almost forgotten what it might be like if an adult posted about Delta's changes to SkyMiles: http://mjontravel.boardingarea.com/2...lines-reviews/. No moral outrage here; just simply a cost/benefit analysis that takes into consideration that a business has a right to make decisions as best they can in order to make profits. And that a customer has a right to dump a program that no longer serves him well.

Night and Day compared to the mess of 'content' on the DeltaPoints blog.

I generally agree with what MJ said there.

MJ on Travel is actually one of my favorite blogs, and frequently has truly excellent insight into what's going on in AA-land, which is great for a hub captive like me. I just skip the cruise stuff.

As for the other blog mentioned above, you know it provides some of us with practically endless entertainment, right?

I really like it when Gary tells airport authorities, hotels, and airlines how to run their businesses. It's sort of like a person who eats telling Thomas Keller how to run Per Se.

No pingbacks here because it's now something he does every day or so. And amazingly, no one in a position of authority seems to be listening to him. Shocked, I am, shocked!

In this respect, Gary is like every frequent flyer out there: he wants airlines to tailor their airline and ff program to HIS style of travel and preferences. And what has taken the biggest inflation: international FC award tickets.

Except in his case, he has the added pressure of not just wanting them to tailor those things to his travel preferences, but also to his business model (both blog and booking service).

I saw his fit of pique today, and it kind of made me chuckle. Look, anyone who took it on the nose when Smisek took over United and didn't realize that the days of milk and honey for nothing (lifetime status, benefits for miles flown vs. money paid, CC dumps, MS, etc) were nearing an end wasn't paying attention.

Unfortunately for us, airlines are starting to be run like BUSINESSES. And businesses care about only one thing: the bottom line. Period. EOS. No airline executive is going to go commit Hara-Kiri because they are taking decisions that they think will improve the bottom line.

I have long said, if I ran an airline I would:

- Prioritize the customers who give me the most money. That's how hotels have ALWAYS done it (points per dollar). It was the old way airlines did it/are doing it that was/is incompetent, from a business perspective...to our advantage, to be sure. But from a business perspective it was incompetent nevertheless.

- Price business/first class tickets at 'market' rates rather than inflated rates that result in premium cabins being filled with upgraders and corporate discounters. On my last three United flights, having paid for F, I was the ONLY person in the domestic first cabin who was not upgraded to that cabin (thanks United app). That's a stupid business model. 'Incompetent,' as some might say.

- Value those who pay for a premium cabin fare over everyone else. Check-in, boarding (yes, BEFORE military in uniform and even GS-type-level on a coach fare ticket), in-cabin experience including meal choice, etc. etc. Make it WORTH paying for business/first on EVERY flight.

- Commit 'fraud' with credit card miles: issue credit card miles like candy but then make them incredibly difficult to redeem.

I would do these things because my goal as an airline executive would NOT be to create the MOST loyal customers, but to cultivate the BEST loyal customers. @:-)@:-)@:-)@:-)

If I have nearly described Delta (with a couple of glaring exceptions), then it should be no surprise they are the most profitable of the 'big three.'

"I have dishonored myself, my family, and my company."
"I have failed. The program has to be changed."
"We need to bring back the idea of shame."

Oh the irony! :D

Given the real gaffes he has occasionally made in the field in which he has expertise, he would have shut down his own blog a long time ago--assuming he was willing to meet the same standard he wants to impose on others in today's post.

I almost thought that post was satire at first. Pretty laughable. And from the same guy that waxed poetic about how he still trusts AA after the no-notice overnight changes back in April....now he insists executives must resign because they make changes passengers don't like?

FFPs don't exist because airlines want to be nice to us out of the goodness of their hearts (to the extent airline executives possess hearts). For someone who seems to feel he's an expert on the airline business and everything else, I'm quite puzzled how he could go so far off the deep end.

As kokonutz said quite well:

An executive should quit if they screw things up that hurt the bottom line.

Though runner-up for horrible VFTW post recently has to be his mocking of the TSA employee of the year awardee. I know VFTW has a vendetta against TSA, and personally I oppose much of how they do things and would like to see the agency dissolved or changed.

But it was pretty low class to mock an individual employee like that who did their job well, even if it's a routine low level job. Plenty of comments called him out for it, rightly so. Such petty personal attacks do nothing to help the legitimate debate over TSA policies and practices, IMHO.

Very much agreed on this. Front-line TSA employees perform the job they were hired for (and paid pretty poorly for--by the way, I'd expect the hole in our security will eventually come because a poorly-paid TSA employee gets bribed to look the other way if something goes down). The policies they execute are developed at a much higher pay grade.

I'm not saying that the TSA does a great job. But laughing at front-line employees keeps ol' Gar from having to confront the real issues of what types of security measures, if any, should be followed in America's airports.

Geez, and while I'm bombing him for two posts today, I might as well take on a third, the one about the United award discount sale. The statement, "What’s interesting is that they’re offering this discount even though it’s hardly low season to many of these cities — ski destinations and sun destinations alike," is only interesting if you don't grasp that shortly after the first of the year into the middle of February is one of the slowest travel times of the year--people have crammed their breaks into the Christmas/New Year's period, lots of folks have lots of credit card debt from the holidays to pay off, business travel is somewhat down, and lots of tourist destinations are begging for customers. Travel tends to pick up towards the end of February as school spring breaks start to roll around and folks have paid off some of their holiday bills.

Of course, I'd only expect that kind of knowledge, sophistication, and analysis from someone authoring a blog specializing in travel.

Oops!

It is the holiday season so every day's like a new gift of comedy for me at VFTW. Today's episode, when is a devaluation really just a change? Every time, if you're AA or Hyatt apparently. . .

PH Maldives is now Cat7?!!?!?

HYATT HAS FAILED!
DISHONOR!
INCOMPETENCE!
SHAME!

VFTW must have an ample supply of Kool-aid when it comes to certain companies

A comment in yesterday's premium "deal" $165 OW with Virgin reminded me of another website that is a bit shady: Dan's Deals. It brought back memories of having to bathe after going to that place.

Right, because FT is just a bastion of morality.
Nobody talks about fuel dumps, tricked out cities, or hidden city fares here. No siree. :rolleyes:

I guess this isn't "advice" per se, but today VFTW posted about the DL employee in Florida who was busted stealing $80K worth of vouchers. He focuses on a quote supposedly from a "Delta spokesman"

VFTW's source is a site called www.travelpulse.com, which doesn't name the Delta spokesperson. Commenter LarryInNYC points out that the original source article from a Florida newspaper (which travelpulse uses for its article) doesn't contain any such Delta quote.

Not sure of the reliability of the Travelpulse site, but it might serve VFTW well to do a smidgen of fact checking on sensationalist posts/quotes

Edit 12 Dec: Gary eventually reached the author of the Travelpulse "article", who wasn't able to substantiate a source for the "Delta spokesman" quote. It's not clear how/why the quote ended up in the Travelpulse article but it's been edited now to remove it. Gary did post a correction today.

Travelpulse seems dodgy for having put the quote in - on its face the quote didn't really sound right for a spokesperson statement, and a company PR person making an official statement usually includes their name.

VFTW has so many typos and grammatical errors I can't take them seriously anymore.

Then again the shilling for AA and Uber had turned me off a while back.

I caught the initial article but not the followup since I'm not regularly reading his blog anymore. However, for the inventor of the term "SkyPesos," the article he quoted furthered his narrative about Delta. Didn't matter whether it was true although common sense would have set off the radar on the quote--that would be a pretty clueless Delta spokesperson who would say something like that so I'd want some confirmation of the identity.

And that's a pretty consistent problem for me with VFTW. Gary's not a dummy but his expertise seems too frequently drawn from "facts" he wants to believe are true.

TravelPulse is a publication geared to travel agents and travel industry personnel but mostly to travel agents.

And then, when VFTW gets into my field, he really shows how he wants the facts to fit his narrative: http://viewfromthewing.boardingarea....ngs-need-know/. It's a dissenting opinion where he finds his quotes, which is NOT the opinion of the court that decided the case. But, of course, it's not AA so ol' Gar feels free to bomb away.

No doubt UA wasn't given warm fuzzies by the majority (and kudos to Seth for communicating that subtlety that VFTW seems to miss), but courts generally couch language entering summary judgment in the most extreme terms possible since the legal standard for summary judgment requires accepting the plaintiff's best case as true, with no facts in dispute and all inferences that could be drawn from the facts resolved in the plaintiff's favor, in determining that the plaintiff has no chance of prevailing should the matter proceed to trial.

Maybe more legal analysis than you wanted this time of the year so Happy Holidays!

Gary basically admits in the comments that he wrote the article title as click bait. :td:

It looks like the title changed from "rules" to "says" ... still shows "rules" on boardingarea.com

Thing is, the story is interesting enough without having to click-bait/exaggerate.

It's click-baiting for the sake of click-baiting. :confused:

Someone should start a blog called "View from the Screen" and just give a daily top 10 list of best posts of BA blog posts and then a top 10 click bait stories. Litter the page with ads and credit card referrals.

The new trend on BA is to not write your own content... in fact... to limit your post to 2 sentences and a link to an article. Someone should just turn the tables on them!

This might suffice somewhat — and you get to click on any of the articles you believe should move further up...

How to Get Medical Coverage from Your Credit Card
http://www.frugaltravelguy.com/2014/...traveling.html

Grrrrr. Why did I click the link. This one can also go under click bait.

ugh

When I wrote on AMEX's premium global assist, I explicitly warned that emergency medical transportation is not, and thus should not be considered, an alternative to real insurance. Because, well, it's not.

Ironically, despite the glowing overview of the benefit:

AMEX will NOT cover any of the hypothetical scenarios mentioned earlier on in the post:

This is different from "bad" advice in other blogs because it is downright dangerous advice. I'd hate to think of any readers relying on AMEX for immediate medical attention, or being unexpectedly hit with exorbitant hospital bills because they thought they were covered.

edit

And the referral link is to the platinum card. Seriously ....