News and notes from around the interweb:
- Sneaky ways to cheat on your business expense reimbursements
- Is 7500 American AAdvantage miles for test driving a Cadillac worth your time? Battle lines are drawn.
- Secretary of State John Kerry’s plane went mechanical. I think this has happened before — recently. What I don’t understand is why they choose to fly him transatlantic in a 757 (hopefully they’ll get him a longer range aircraft for his trips in the Winter, or else he’ll refuel at one of United’s focus cities in Goose Bay or Gander). Someone ought to inquire whether he was booked onto the Austrian Airlines codeshare with United for his flight back to DC, to see if he was compliant with the Fly America Act..
- United has a new Premier status tracker on its website.
The new tracker is a personalized microsite, which clearly shows your Premier qualifying activity including waivers and exemptions, and how you are tracking against all Premier status requirements.
You can access the new site right now by going to mystatus.united.com and logging-in with your existing MileagePlus credentials. We will also soon add direct links from the My Account page on united.com (with no need to log in twice).
- The price of purchasing Avianca’s LifeMiles went up 10% last month. Sort of. Buying them outright got more expensive, but LifeMiles will let you buy up to 60% of the points you need for an award at the time of booking (‘cash and points’ awards). And they haven’t adjusted that price, you can still buy points at 1.5 cents apiece that way. Of course, their award chart got more expensive this week so that’s an across the board price increase, too, in a way. (HT: One Mile at a Time)
- A woman threw up on an American flight between Dallas and Chicago and was instructed to remain in the lavatory for the duration of the flight. American claims the flight attendants weren’t afraid of Ebola, and were just doing their best to take care of the passenger. ::cough::
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I don’t really get your point about John Kerry. It’s not like the government has a massive fleet of random intercontinental passenger aircraft sitting around and they’re choosing to shaft Kerry. There are a couple of 747s, a half dozen 757s, some 737s, and a few business jets.
Keep in mind that this is not a commercial 757 we’re talking about. It’s a C-32A military transport with various upgrades including extra 2,000 miles of range and the ability to refuel in mid-flight. That sounds perfectly adequate for a short trip to Vienna, even in winter.
You can argue the government needs to update its fleet, but no one wants to budget for new planes with the economy still recovering, particularly in an election year. Perhaps the government could tax miles and use the proceeds to buy new planes!
On business trips to NYC, I used to have breakfast at a counter place that would hand you two blank receipts when you paid your tab. Every time, without asking.
By the way, it’s not cheating, it’s stealing.
Eh, the lav is more spacious than Y. I’d be ok with that if it wasn’t too dirty and I had some mags or tablet.
“John Kerry Forced to Fly Commercial”
Wait, this is the same John Kerry that says that “Global Whatever” (insert the current nonsense word) is a bigger threat to the US than Islamo-Fascist Terrorism. And he is “forced” to fly a commercial plane instead of flying a virtually empty government plane. Meaning his “Carbon Footprint”, for at least one day, just got drastically reduced. And that’s supposed to be a bad thing?
As Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit says: “I’ll believe global warming is a crisis when the people telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it is a crisis.”
Tried the new United status site. Must be a beta version because it only had gobbledygook where the info should be
The US-EU open skies agreement has a provision that makes EU-carrier flights compatible with Fly America, no codeshare required (except for DoD business, but that’s not Kerry’s department).