News and notes from around the interweb:
- Don’t miss my giveaway for hotel stays and Frequent Traveler University tickets. I’m looking forward to meeting everyone at Frequent Traveler University December 5-7 in DC!
- Canada’s Supreme Court ruled against allowing damages for the couple who wasn’t able to order an inflight 7-Up in French.
- Free parking when you fly out of Washington’s National airport.
- VOILA Rewards top tier elite status after just one stay.
- More success converting the Chase Hyatt Visa annual free night into Gold Passport points
- Accor’s offer of 5000 Aeroplan miles per one night hotel stay has been pulled early. Guess they realized it was too generous, probably pondered it while test driving a Cadillac.
- You can join the 40,000+ people who see these deals and analysis every day — sign up to receive posts by email (just one e-mail per day) or subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s free. You can also follow me on Twitter for the latest deals. Don’t miss out!
FTU is Dec 5-7 Gary…
Weird title. I know we sometimes refer to each other as the French or francophones and English or anglophones (I’ll spare you all the other cute nicknames) in Canada but the plaintiffs are not actually French.
@ryan hahahahaha
And what happened to the availability source?
Piece on Quebecois (yes they are no more “French” than Mexicans are “Spanish”) is amusing and I have relatives living in Montreal but I gotta say I sympathize with the position of the Francophones in Quebec and Canada in general. They are a minority surrounded and bombarded with the English language and US culture and they want to feel at home in their own country, where French is indeed one of the official languages. I wouldn’t resort to a lawsuit (except perhaps to make a point) but I’d be pretty annoyed if I couldn’t communicate in English with airline staff flying on one of the US carriers.
Gary, your headline is misleading.
The Supreme Court actually ruled in favour (with a “u”) of the plantiffs because AC violated the Official Languages Act, which requires the airline to offer bilingual service as a former government-owned company.
The court ruled they were not entitled to financial damages, however, because (a) the Montreal Convention limits the claims that can be made against airlines flying internationally, and (b) the official apology from AC was considered fair and adequate compensation for the offense caused.
BTW, while these two are obviously dicks for making a big deal of this in the first place, it was actually the government’s Commissioner of Official Languages who took the case to the Supreme Court on their behalf. Obviously there are larger legal issues related to bilingualism in this case or the SCOC wouldn’t have heard it.
@kanor the availability source i wrote about in my original draft — which i failed to take out of the headline when the post was published but had already been removed from the body of the post — is already unavailable. For the first time ever a blogger killed a deal before even publishing a psot!
The Hyatt award should convert to 15000 points not 10000.