News & Notes For Sunday, August 4th, 2013

Some nuggets from the world of travel:

Alaska Airways is rolling out boarding from both the front and back doors of their planes at some airports. This is probably a tougher policy to maintain in Seattle with the number of wet days they have overall, but makes sense at airports like San Jose and Long Beach.

View From The Wing talks about quintuple dipping with Marriott Rewards. I’m not a Marriott fan myself but good strategies here if you are.

Boeing is buying used Airbus planes from customers in order to get those customers to buy new planes from Boeing. They’re mostly buying old 747s but did buy some A340s last year. Yes, as the article says, it’s kind of like a Toyota dealer taking a Nissan as a trade-in. But, I don’t think Boeing will be parking the Airbus on the front of one of it’s runways anytime soon looking for a buyer.

My friend Delta Points talks about getting a rock from his favorite airline. Beats a sharp stick in the eye. Oh, wait.

CLEAR is coming to both Houston airports this fall?

Why the question mark? Here’s the odd thing. They don’t seem to have bothered to put this announcement on their website. And, since they only have a small handful of airports signed up for the new CLEAR, you would think they would do that pretty quickly. I got this e-mail 4 days ago. Weird.

I like CLEAR, especially the new setup in Denver where CLEAR feeds right into PreCheck. But, I’m not sure they’re going to survive if they can’t add more airports soon. A lot. Really soon.