Chase Freedom Double Sign-Up Bonus And Would You Give Up Your Carry-On Bag? The Best of the Rest For Tuesday, June 2nd, 2015
The Best of the Rest is my effort to summarize all the travel/miles & points stories that interested me on a daily basis but didn’t have time to write about in length. On a daily basis, I try to keep track of roughly 100 different blogs that have interesting things for you and I to learn from. This is your shortcut to find out what’s going on in the travel world without having to read dozens of travel blogs to get all the best info.
Here’s today’s version:
Chase Freedom doubles its sign-up bonus to $200 cash back when you spend $500. Mommy Points notes the card has no annual fee. This is a good starter card if you’re looking to dip your toe into this crazy world of miles and points.
Holy broken knees, Batman! Frontier to set what appears to be a domestic US record by putting 230 seats on an Airbus A321. As Terry Maxon points out, it’s about 50 seats more than American Airlines. But, the true measure of how bad this might be for customers is that there are 12 more seats on the plane than the notoriously stingy Spirit Airlines.
Lufthansa is challenging the GDS a la American Airlines, although with a slightly different tact. They’ll begin charging a 16 Euro surcharge per ticket issued via the GDS. That’s a pretty penny. Plain and simple, they want more people to book direct, since that’s a cheaper channel than that. Wandering Aramean has a little bit of an issue with it, though I wouldn’t call him strongly against it.
I have no issue with the proposal. If an airline wants to control their own inventory in this way, they might drop in the search results as a result of a higher fare. Based on my reading of this, the surcharge appears to be included in the displayed pricing. Whether it does or not, I’m fine with an airline deciding to make a choice like this. It’s their inventory and they can control it. While it might be less convenient for customers to not be able to book the lowest price possible through a given source, I don’t think there’s any burden on the company to provide such a feature.
Virgin Atlantic gold status from credit card spend, thanks to Frequent Miler’s find. But, you’ll have to work for it.
And, Doctor of Credit reports on a 10,000 bonus Flying Club miles from Virgin Atlantic for Kaligo hotel bookings.
You can now challenge for the best elite status in the hotel industry (Diamond status with Hyatt Gold Passport, if there was any doubt).
Southwest’s big fall sale is going on for the next two days, so says Deals We Like.
If you live in the US and want to fly the new Airbus A350, you’ll need to head to Philly or New York. Here’s some cool pics of the A350 when it was still just a promise with no planes delivered.
On the bats*$t crazy scale, the US Travel Association is floating a proposal to eliminate 5 major sources of revenue (taxes). They only want to get rid of the:
- Domestic passenger tax
- Tax on international arrivals and departures
- Domestic commercial fuel tax
- Tax on mileage rewards
- Tax on flights between continental US and Alaska and Hawaii
They also want to privatize the air traffic control system as opposed to having the FAA run it (and make it non-profit). I don’t actually see what that accomplishes, since it would still likely have government oversight. And, I’m sure the FAA will function just fine by eliminating all these taxes. And, I can bench press 500 lbs and run a four-minute mile. But, yeah.
Would you give up your carry-on bag so the airline could load it early for you? One Mile at a Time details Delta’s new plan to load some carry-on bags early to speed up the boarding process. I barely trust the airlines with my checked baggage. Now they want me to trust them to put my bag in the right place? Where I come from, there’s already a solution for this. It’s called priority boarding. Oh, wait. They already gave that away to
Lufthansa is challenging the GDS a la American Airlines, although with a slightly different tact. They’ll begin charging a 16 Euro surcharge per ticket issued via the GDS. That’s a pretty penny. Plain and simple, they want more people to book direct, since that’s a cheaper channel than that. Wandering Aramean has a little bit of an issue with it, though I wouldn’t call him strongly against it.
I have no issue with the proposal. If an airline wants to control their own inventory in this way, they might drop in the search results as a result of a higher fare. Based on my reading of this, the surcharge appears to be included in the displayed pricing. Whether it does or not, I’m fine with an airline deciding to make a choice like this. It’s their inventory and they can control it. While it might be less convenient for customers to not be able to book the lowest price possible through a given source, I don’t think there’s any burden on the company to provide such a feature.
The post Chase Freedom Double Sign-Up Bonus And Would You Give Up Your Carry-On Bag? The Best of the Rest For Tuesday, June 2nd, 2015 was published first on Pizza In Motion.
Don’t miss any of the daily travel tips, tricks and strategies found here. Follow me using one of these options:
I think carr-on bags shouldn’t be handled before. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s extra work and what if it’s lost? Then people will complain. So for me it’s a no go.