News and notes from around the interweb:
- TSA knows its MyTSA app is useless. Meanwhile “FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States”
- South American oneworld member LAN, with a distance-based award chart and no fuel surcharges, has a 30,000 mile (48,000 km) signup bonus for its co-brand Visa in the U.S. (HT: Doctor of Credit)
- The club lounge at the London Heathrow terminal 5 Sofitel is now accessible via Priority Pass. Folks with unlimited visits could go there very day for the buffet, and this would make a great place to wait for arriving British Airways passengers. Surely this is one of the nicer Priority Pass options.
Sofitel Heathrow Atrium - A pretty hostile (but not really unfair either) piece on ‘not an OTA’ hotel booking site RoomKey.com. I’m just glad I no longer get popunder ads for it whenever I go to Hyatt.com.
- If you like getting just just over 1/10th of a cent per point in value, redeem your Club Carlson points for TSA PreCheck. What makes it worse is that these arrangements usually wouldn’t even have Club Carlson paying retail… (HT: Michael G.)
- Uber makes it easier to get a ride in the rain (HT: Marginal Revolution)
You know that FBI article is from The Onion… right?
Yes. I thought it was funny.
The TSA is a broken organization. I was in Denver a couple weeks ago. The news was warning of long wait times at TSA checkpoints, so I checked the MyTSA app when we got to the airport. Good news! At the A bridge – TSA Precheck , the app stated NO WAIT at 3:03 PM on a Monday.
So we schlepped over to the A bridge. Well, the myTSA app was technically correct. The checkpoint was CLOSED which was why there was NO WAIT. There was also no way to use the checkpoint. I suppose it was too technically challenging to show that the checkpoint was closed on a Monday afternoon.
I did too.
Most Priority Club lounges are terrible. Fortunately it’s free with my credit card because I would never pay for it.
Mark, I have to agree, most Priority Pass lounges are not all that! A few international are, but in the USA, not soo much. At SeaTac there’s an Alaska Board Room…pretty bad food. I would never spend the $29 for a lounge visit for a cup of coffee and piece of fruit.
Thanks for the heads-up, just had breakfast in the Sofitel lounge this morning in a mostly empty lounge. The food is a small but solid subset of the larger breakfast buffet in their Vivre restaurant. Access to the spa and gym area is a nice perk with this as well.