gpapadop

Should be "shocking" to read all that but it's not smh.

chad75

A modern day Frank Sinatra

funcha

The CDC recently recommended that people test before traveling domestically, however, View from the Wing posted an article today saying that "CDC Now Says You Need To Get Tested For Domestic Travel". I don't even understand how you make the leap from "recommends" to "need". Now I don't have confidence in his reporting and will need to check the original source.

gpapadop

The world would be much better if everyone stopped clicking on clickbait crap!

Adam1222

I guess if you try to start a competitor to Flyertalk with House of Scams leader Randy, but it fails, you didnt technically sell out.

gpapadop

Bloggers keep linking/asskissing this dude who posts clickbait crap like this only because it gets clicks...... What is wrong with people who click on this crap??

Social Media Star Catches Creep Photographing Her Feet on Delta Flight
OnlyFans Model Dries Her Underwear on Southwest Airlines Flight
Throw in Elon Musk with sexual favors and selling the latest cc and...this guy only writes about stuff that interest him, right?

Disgusting...

kokonutz

Gary hates Airbnb. No, he really REALLY hates Airbnb. And he's got some mean tweets to back it up.

Seriously, though, his vague rants about Airbnb must be good SEO/clickbait because he keeps making them.

GUWonder

The hotels have affiliated loyalty program credit cards that the miles and points blogosphere can peddle to run up the card referral income the blogs get from the banks. Does AirBnB have anything like that?

Hotels dislike AirBnb, and who really wants to bite the hand that feeds?

gpapadop

VFTW: Wow: Citi Offering 80,000 Points With New Premier Card Accounts

OMAAT: Wow: Citi Premier Card 80K Bonus Points Offer

Posted almost at the same time.

When your ghost writer gets lazy and...you keep insisting to your readers you write your own content smh.

kokonutz

Airbnb has an affiliate program. Qualifying for it is notoriously difficult and by invitation only. During the height of the pandemic in May 2020, though, they loosened the requirements with what they called an 'Associates' program to the point where I had an affiliate link. Since I and people like me were still traveling and staying in Airbnbs, I made about $1k to $1.5k per month in affiliate revenue from that program. Most of any program I've done. They ended that program March 31, 2021 and now it's back to an invite-only arrangement.

But I don't sense that Gary messes around with affiliate stuff other than credit cards. He could be making bank on Booking, VRBO, Expedia, etc. Perhaps the relatively smaller returns are not worth the hassle for him. Same with ads?

In any case, becoming and Airbnb host has proven to be a FAR more lucrative AND passive revenue stream than blogging is.

jamesinclair

Both blogs just posted almost identical posts decreeing the proposal to allow merchants the ability to process Visa and Mastercard transactions over different networks because it will hurt the points game.

Supposedly, as a libertarian, Gary should be 100% supportive of this. Hilariously transparent industry shilling instead. Both blogs feature the same tired talking points


IE:

• Big businesses often save significant money with credit cards, as they’re able to get lucrative co-brand credit card agreements that bring their fees pretty close to zero

vs

• Big merchants have been negotiating lower fees. Amazon just reached a new, less costly deal with Visa. Costco pays next to nothing for credit card processing in a Visa deal.

(The legislation is supposed to help small business, so both of them pointing this out isnt helping)

• Merchants benefit from credit cards. People who spend with card spend more, and the cost of processing credit cards is far cheaper than case because employees pocket cash, they make incorrect change, having large amounts of cash drives up insurance costs and it attracts outside theft.

vs

• For better or worse, people spend more when paying by credit card than when paying by cash
• Yes, merchant fees are a significant expense for small businesses, but the cost of handling cash is also expensive, in terms of loss, theft, banking, etc.

No one is shocked that Lucky would post this, but wouldnt it be nice if the libertarian guy could be consistent at least once?

Adam1222

I think you're forgetting the biggest motivating principle of Gary's school of economic libertarianism: whatever gets me richer goes. Credit cards have paid him more than his Koch-funded day jobs ever have

Raffles

I suspect the reason that Amazon and other cross border firms get good deals is that they see the 0.3% fees they pay in Europe and Australia and would happily fund lobbying to get them reduced in the US. But if they can get them reduced just for themselves, with their competitors stuck on 2.25%, even better …..

SanDiego1K

Gary is exiting the award booking space. His partner in this endeavour, Steve Belkin, has stepped back. He suggests that people use the following service:

Fortunately I’ve found the only folks to work with that I both trust and that have the capacity to deliver at scale: point.me. One Mile at a Time‘s PointsPros service merged with JuicyMiles to create both a tool to efficiently search award space yourself and a full service booking agency, and I’m thrilled now to join as a senior advisor.

Point.me has well-known investors including founders of ITA Software (now Google Flights); the founder of Dropbox; Jeffrey Katzenberg; and Bethenny Frankel (Shark Tank).

https://viewfromthewing.com/update-on-my-award-booking-service/

GUWonder

Belkin too seems to have seen the writing on the wall: earning miles from flying to spend on mileage tickets is not rewarding like it used to be and has become an increasingly frustrating course for the FFP members and manual award booking agents too.

Airlines going into overdrive with devaluing the accumulated miles/points in FFP customer accounts drives laborious manual award booking services toward a lower to negative return value proposition when providing such services.