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Foodie tourist traps, highbrow and low
Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed… museum campus? The Big Mac Museum is open for business. Not your speed? How about the uber-bombastic Napa Wine Castle? Sounds like the supersizing of wineries. (Thanks, Dr. Vino!)

“Secrets From the Tower”
Fox News Chicago has a short “tell-all” report featuring a former Chicago O’Hare air traffic controller. My favorite snippet: “ORD controllers still use slips of paper to control traffic.” But take heart, the controllers take delays “as personally as you do.” (Thanks, Steve!)

Delta starts a blog
Corporate blogs are actually remarkably rare in the travel business. (Of the biggies, Bill Marriott has a blog, and Southwest has their blog.) Delta Airlines now joins the fray. Welcome to the blogosphere!

The re-mystification of myths
The TSA keeps trying to play “Mythbusters,” which I’m sure has the folks at the Discovery Channel doing cartwheels of excitement, seeing their brand name attached to the TSA. The problem is, the myths aren’t really busted. Here’s their attempt to refute the ban on liquids. But as Chris Elliott busts the supposedly busted myth, you can’t just say that liquids are dangerous “because we said so.” There are plenty of others who disagree, after all, and who come back with science-based arguments. (More here, for example; or read most anything Bruce Schneier has written in the last six years.) The TSA simply has lost its credibility, and it’ll take more than a few decontextualized videos of stuff going “Boom!” to make me feel water is dangerous. Their mythbusting efforts? Busted.

Down the memory hole
A China Airlines plane recently blew up (no one was injured) but what does the airline do to manage their image? They white out their name and logo from the plane. China Airlines explosion? What China Airlines explosion? Full story and before-and-after photos here.

Upgraded, finally: Lufthansa economy-class entertainment
Lufthansa’s calculus has always seemed to be, “Should we give placate people in economy class with decent in-seat entertainment, or should we liquor them up for free? Let’s go with the liquor!” (Other airlines, say, Virgin Atlantic, have managed to do both, but let’s set that aside…) They’re finally reconsidering the entertainment options, if only on three routes. Still: Thank the heavens. My favorite real-world example of bad Lufthansa inflight video, broadcast on those overhead screens: A decade-old episode of the German crime drama “Derrick,” with an episode title that translated to “Rose on a Dump.” I’m not making this up. (Couldn’t they have shown the episode “Pornocchio” instead?)

Upgraded: Airbus A380 delivery dates
Singapore Airlines, the first airline to take delivery of its Airbus A380 mega-jumbo, is officially taking delivery of the plane on October 15, 2007. The first flight, from Singapore to Sydney, is scheduled for October 25.

Downgraded: The real Virgin America story
Virgin America knows how to play the PR game. No news there. But when the chips are down, they still need to figure out their schedule and customer service. But hey, the entertainment is decent. Mark Johnson of Jaunted flew a PR-free flight with Virgin America last week, and has the full report.

Downgraded: Charlotte security
Upgraded: Charlotte’s ability to bounce back
Charlotte Airport TSA agents let someone through security without screening. Flights delayed, passengers inconvenienced, etc., etc. But one thing I can tell you: The delays weren’t long-lasting. Later that same day, I caught a flight from Charlotte to LaGuardia, and it was all fine.

Downgraded: Hotel bathroom amenities
The China recalls keep rolling in. And now, hotel amenities are due for the seemingly inevitable report of poison. Gilchrist and Soames toothpaste is conveniently flavored with antifreeze. (I’ve seen G&C products, but never their toothpaste. My loss.) Better check that bag or box of mini-soaps, shampoos, etc. that the frequent traveler inevitably has stashed in their home. Toss the ‘paste.

Downgraded: Bellsouth/AT&T
It’s hard to blog without an internet connection. The BellSouth idiots first mistakenly shut down our dial tone but kept the DSL running. We called for service. They came, turned on dial tone, and shut down the DSL. Thanks. Great. Not once — not once — has BellSouth (now merged and rebranded AT&T) gotten one thing right on this phone line on the first try.

Last summer, Raed Jarrar was harassed by jetBlue employees for wearing a shirt with Arabic lettering on the front. In his ACLU-led legal team’s words, here’s what happened:

JetBlue and a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) official, identified as “Inspector Harris,” would not let Raed Jarrar board his flight at John F. Kennedy Airport until he agreed to cover his t-shirt, which read “We Will Not Be Silent” in English and Arabic script. Harris told Jarrar that it is impermissible to wear an Arabic shirt to an airport and equated it to a “person wearing a t-shirt at a bank stating, ‘I am a robber.’”

Lovely metaphor. Added bonus: Jarrar says that, after he relented and donned an additional shirt, jetBlue tore up his boarding pass, which had him seated near the front, and gave him a new boarding pass to sit at the very back of the plane. How nice of them — and how symbolic.

Jarrar threatened to bring a lawsuit. Consider it brought.

A discrimination lawsuit charges federal officials and JetBlue Airways with racial profiling for refusing to let an Iraqi man board an August 2006 flight at Kennedy International Airport because he wore a T-shirt inscribed with an Arabic phrase.

The incident is part of a discriminatory pattern at U.S. airports since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, with officials targeting people perceived to be of Arab descent — particularly those displaying their ethnic background or religious faith, two civil liberties groups said Thursday in filing the lawsuit.

I say go get ‘em, Raed. It’s important to push back against fearmongering hysteria that erodes our civil liberties. He’s doing us all a favor, and representing what the country really stands for, by standing up to this sort of small-minded censorship.

Related:
- Would an anti-Tony Blair shirt get me in trouble in the U.S.?
- Short hops - August 23, 2006 - JetBlue rewards one flyer a free t-shirt (in exchange for his civil liberties)

Best list of posted rules ever.
(I want to know the rest of the rules!)

Christopher Elliott has apparently been reading my mind. I was going to write up a post regarding the stupidest rules in the travel world, the rules that need changing, but he’s beaten me to the punch.

He offers five great ones: 1) the prohibition against changing the name on an air ticket, 2) the rule against bottled water at TSA checkpoints, 3) the ban on throwaway and hidden-city ticketing, 4) rental car early-return surcharges, and 5) hotel resort fees. Go read the whole thing.

All good rules to grumble about. Chris nabbed some of the biggest ones. I’d add a few:

Anything can be blamed on the weather.
Airlines’ contracts of carriage generally offer some compensation if something under their control causes a flight to be canceled. (A maintenance related issue, for example.) But not if it can be blamed on the weather. And airlines have gotten very, very loose with what constitutes a weather delay. But, as a passenger, try getting sympathy if you missed your flight because it was raining hard when you left your home. (Try invoking the words “We had a flat tire” instead.)

Phone charges
If it’s impossible to book a flight on the website, I shouldn’t be charged $10, $15, or $20 “convenience charge” to make that booking over the phone with a live person. Codeshares or partner-airline awards fall into this.

Prices that don’t include all taxes
Don’t quote me the rate of a hotel room. Quote me the rate of that room plus all taxes, fees, convention center reconstruction surcharges, etc. Ditto airlines and rental cars. If a charge is mandatory, tell me what my total price will be.

Retroactive rule changes and expiration dates.
Things like United’s mileage expiration policy, which not only changed the lifespan of miles from 36 to 18 months, but started the expiration clock six months before the rule went live.

There are more, I’m sure. Which rules annoy you most? Hit the comments!

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A short piece in Travel Weekly, the industry trade magazine, points to a potential problem for U.S.-based travelers and consumers:

[Travel industry financial-services bigwig Airlines Reporting Corporation] has been working on an incentive program that would reward travel agencies when corporate travel buyers switch from credit cards to cash when paying for airline tickets.

Under the plan, ARC would pay a rebate to ARC-approved travel agencies and corporate travel departments if they switched air accounts of $1 million or more from credit card to cash payment. The amount of the rebate would be less than the fee the airlines pay to credit card companies.

The plan reflects an ongoing concern among carriers about credit card merchant fees. Airlines see those fees as the next distribution cost that must be tackled, following on travel agent commissions and GDS costs.

Uh oh.

Bottom line: Airlines don’t want you paying with a credit card, since they give a small percentage of each sale to the credit card processing company. Naturally they’d love to keep that money.

Europeans, for example, are already accustomed to this. Take Ryanair, which charges 2.50 euros per flight per passenger if booking with a credit card. That adds up fast. Other airlines have less onerous policies, but there’s still a “convenience fee” added on for using plastic.

But credit cards aren’t just a convenience for shoppers. (And I’m not just talking about earning miles or points.) Credit cards carry important consumer protections that would be lost if airlines and agencies started preferring cash or debit. When there are schedule irregularities or airline bankruptcies, credit card companies can get you your money back. And cards come with insurance coverages that cash never does. (During our honeymoon, my Visa covered all our expenses when a tropical storm delayed our departure by a full day. Try getting that with cash.)

So as a consumer, and as a red-blooded American, I love my plastic. I’m not alone. It may be hard to get Americans to switch to cash, but it sure looks like the airlines are going to try.

Update: The ARC cash “discount” program has been shelved, for now. But the idea remains in circulation, even if this specific proposal didn’t work out at this time. “The airlines’ concerns included technical ones and ‘political issues,’ namely their relationships with credit card companies,” according to TravelWeekly. This is an idea that will come up again. Consider yourself warned.

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As a longtime aficionado of roadside kitsch and a longtime (and now former) resident of Chicago, it is with great sadness that I read that the Spindle, a sculpture consisting of cars stacked on top of each other like a shish-ka-bob, will be torn down, to be replaced by a Walgreens.

A Walgreens? Anyone who’s been to Chicago knows that you can’t spit without hitting a Walgreens. They make Starbucks seem scarce and far-between… and that’s an accomplishment.

The 1989 sculpture was perhaps most prominently featured in the movie “Wayne’s World.” It’s in a shopping center at the corner of Cermak Road and Harlem Ave. in the suburb of Berwyn, if you’re keeping score or want to pay your final respects. It’s a shopping center that incidentally is chock full of late 1980s art. It’s an odd place in its own right. But the Spindle really makes the mall special. (As special as a strip mall can ever be.)

The fact that the sculpture, which features at least three models of car that my family owned at one point or another, will be removed, and likely destroyed, is bad enough. That it will be replaced with a Walgreens is unconscionable.

Save the Berwyn Spindle!

(image: Matthew Kulcsar, via Google Earth)

Upgraded: Seat pitch regulation?
Chris Elliott notes that European regulators are considering rules to require minimum seat pitch, though it’s not clear what that minimum would be. Some of the ultra-cheapo carriers have legroom below 30″, which is horrendous. (Skybus-esque, for an American equivalent.) The reason for the regulation? Deep vein thrombosis, or DVT, a.k.a “economy class syndrome.” Maybe they should invest in this guy’s airline seat design while they’re at it.

Upgraded: Free wireless calling
Looking to cut down on the cellphone minutes? T-Mobile (aff) customers can sign up to make unlimited free calls with a compatible cellphone, if they’re in range of a T-Mobile wireless HotSpot or if you enable your home or office wireless router to link up with your phone. Brilliant. I’m a T-Mobile wireless customer myself, and I’ve been extremely satisfied with their service, both in terms of their network and their customer service. A few years ago, when wi-fi was less common in hotels, I sometimes traveled with a router and plugged it into the hotel jack, creating my own in-room hotspot. With T-Mobile’s new service, I’d strongly consider carrying a cellphone-linked router with me once again.

Upgraded: Paris Wi-Fi
Another city goes wi-fi. This time, it’s Paris. David Ourisman reports on the new arondissements electroniques.

Upgraded: American Airlines to London… Stansted?!
With open skies a reality between the US and Europe, airlines have been announcing new and expanded routes across the Atlantic. American Airlines announced a route from New York-JFK to London-Stansted, the airport that Ryanair made famous. This is interesting, since it’s the first (corrected below) a major network flight between the US and the more obscure Stansted Airport. (Maxjet and Eos fly there, yes, but American’s use of Stansted is big.)
Update: Joe Brancatelli writes in to point out that American Airlines has actually flown to Stansted in the past, with a Chicago-O’Hare to London-Stansted flight that launched in 1992. So now, with Maxjet and Eos eating American’s premium-cabin lunch on the London route, American makes its (triumphant?) return. Thanks, Joe!

Downgraded: Check-in? (or is that Upgraded?)
Jared Blank picks up on Spanish airline Clickair’s promise to eliminate the need for check-in. No real details, but it reminds me of train service, where you get on and have your ticket punched by the conductor. I’m too tired to figure out how it might work, but first come, first served seating is nothing new, and “shuttle” flights have existed for years, so there’s no reason this couldn’t work on heavily-traveled, high-frequency business routes.

Downgraded: Alitalia
Could Alitalia be downgraded any further? Already plagued by bankruptcy, strikes galore, and general incompetences for years, the Italian flag carrier is killing its frequent flyer program. And from its ashes will be reborn a new program, but you’ll only keep your miles if you fly the airline twice in the first half of 2008. Gary Leff has the story. I share his disdain.

Upgraded, in theory: Designer airlines that may never fly
From a Newsweek article on how the ultra-rich are finding ways to burn through their substantial cash: “Brands like Versace, under new leadership, are moving beyond red-carpet dresses into areas like interior jet and auto design. Last year Donna Karan went a step further, researching the launch of a branded airline.” Donna Karan Airlines?? Would the name of that airline perhaps be DKJFKSFO? DKDFWPHX? Yeah, sure. The ultra-rich don’t fly commercial. Good luck with that venture…

Upgraded: American Express’ Starwood card
I’ve long been a proponent of the Amex credit card that’s linked with the Starwood Hotels program. Several e-mails in my inbox have alerted me to the recently upgraded bonus offer: Get 10,000 bonus points with first purchase, and (here’s the upgrade) 15,000 bonus points for charging $15,000 in the first 6 months. Nice bonus, if you can get it. Click here for the latest bonus offer. (aff)

Upgraded: Boeing’s 787
With much fanfare, Boeing rolled out its first 787 Dreamliner yesterday (on 7/8/07, har har har). The plane has a lot of potential to revolutionize air travel, and I’m excited at the prospect of actually flying in one someday. Sure beats the regional jets I’ve sat in lately… MSNBC’s photo page of the 787 rollout is here.

Speed round of Upgrades and Downgrades
Upgraded: Zeppelins! (Beware if Christopher Walken is on board.)
Downgraded: Airport showers at LAX.
Upgraded, as much as possible: Regional jets.
Upgraded: Latin America; Downgraded: Easter Island.
Downgraded: Traveling bulldogs.
Downgraded: Business class meals at the hands of a NYT food critic. Shocking.

If you want to stretch your dining dollar while on the road, try lunch.

True, many business dining events are oriented to the evening. But that’s often on the company’s tab anyway.

On a vacation with your partner or family, splurging on lunch can have many benefits. First off: money. Many top restaurants offer lower prices for lunch than for dinner. As I blog from Paris, a quick scan of some top spots shows the spread: Taillevent has a 70 euro lunch compared with 140 or 190 euro dinner menus. At the summer dining room at the Hotel Bristol, there’s a 90 euro lunch menu as opposed to a la carte in the evening. And at Pierre Gagnaire, it’s 90 euro prix fixe lunch vs 225 for dinner.

You might have noticed that this is still dropping over $100+ on lunch–and we haven’t even gotten to the wine yet (but tax and tip are included!). But I chose these high-end restaurants because they illustrate the cost-savings that are available at many restaurants in Paris and beyond.

Having your finest meal of the day at midday also provides the advantage of being to walk off the meal during the afternoon. Viewing art at museums burns calories, you know.

And if you have your little ones in tow, lunch may be your best shot at breaking out of a string of pizza joints. Fellow diners might be more accommodating at lunch. And many outdoor spaces such as terraces might be only available at the noon hour, providing some additional space.

And perhaps the best thing about having a nice lunch while you’re on vacation is that there’s no rule saying you can’t have a nice dinner too.

Tyler Colman, Ph.D. writes about value vino on DrVino.com.

Downgraded: Odds of seeing pole-dancer art on London-Gatwick approach
First it was the Kentucky Fried Chicken ad featuring a Colonel Sanders image visible from space. Now, a website’s advertisement featuring a giant chalk outline of a poledancing stripper is causing controversy in the UK. The image, in a field below a common approach path for flights to London’s Gatwick Airport, is only visible from the air, but is still causing an affront. It’s likely to be removed soon. But thanks to news reports and posts like this one far more people will see it online than ever would see it from a plane. (Yes, I’m guilty of supporting their marketing machine… I know…)

Upgraded: Kayak.com introduces alliance-based search
Aggregator Kayak.com tweaked its search tools ever so slightly, allowing you to sort by alliance (Star, oneworld, Skyteam) and not just by airline. But you can only sort it that way AFTER you’ve the basic search. (You can search preferred airlines up front, so why not alliances? Meh.) Orbitz has allowed alliance search for some time, but this is the first aggregator that I’m aware of that’s doing this.

Upgraded: Hertz’s environmentalist credibility
Last September, Hertz rolled out its “Green Collection” of rental cars and I was thoroughly unimpressed. Buick LaCrosse? Come on. Where were the hybrids? Well, it took nine months, but Hertz finally got around to buying more genuinely eco-friendly vehicles, with a purchase of 3,400 Toyota Priuses (or is that Prii?). That’s more like it.

Upgraded: Wine in coach. Viva jetBlue!
JetBlue is serving up some slightly more interesting wines than usual the usual coach fare. Thanks to a partnership with Best Cellars, the airline is giving their all-economy class passengers a slightly better guzzle. Choosing wine for coach can be challenging, since it has to be a) cheap, b) in tiny ready-for-sale bottles, unlike in premium cabins, and c) pair-able with a wider range of foods. I hadn’t thought about that last one before: After all, the wine in business and first can presumably be paired with the menu (though that’s not always obvious). But in coach, a wine demands “versatility in pairing with a wide assortment of airport meals people bring on planes, including pan pizzas from Pizza Hut and Taco Bell burritos with chicken and mole sauce.” (Taco Bell has a mole sauce? Really?) Either way, good for jetBlue, and good for their wine-imbibing passengers. (Thanks Tyler!)

Downgraded: US Airways right to serve any wine
Unlike jetBlue… US Airways, which got into trouble for selling booze without a license in New Mexico a few months ago, and which has been serving the sauce with a temporary scrip since then, was denied an extension of its license this past week. Tough break. BYOB, anyone?

Upgraded: Marriott; Downgraded: Ian Schrager (or is it the other way around?)
Look, I happen to like Marriott hotels for what they are: Consistent, clean, competent, and overall comfortable spaces to spend the night. (4 C’s!) They usually don’t have too much bling or pizazz, though some of their big-city properties have that 1980s glitz that has an odd appeal to my mid-to-late-30s, graying-gracefully, receding-hairline self. So when I hear that they’re teaming up with Ian Schrager, king of the boutique hotel, to create a new boutique-y brand, I’m skeptical. It seems like a late-to-the-game attempt to create a “W” chain within a chain. If it adds a little funk to the Marriott decor, great. (Bye bye brass fixtures, please!) But it also smacks of desperation. And isn’t Ian Schrager past this? Seems like he’s here to cash in while the cashin’ in is good.

Upgraded: WestJet’s honesty; Downgraded: Little old ladies’ pensions
Canada’s WestJet (hearts) little old ladies. Not because they’re nice grandmas, but because they’re walking piggy banks, and the airline’s got a hammer. Consider this nugget from the airline’s president:

“There would be a little old lady coming up and she’d have a table and she’d have a chair and she’d have six or seven bags and we’d say ‘Yeah, take it on the plane. No problem.’ Now we’re actually going to charge a little bit of money for taking that table and chair and those extra bags on board. And that incremental revenue that we extract from that little old lady is very, very profitable to us. Some 85% goes to the bottom line.”

Good for him, for saying publicly what other airline executives discuss privately. So I guess the business traveler isn’t the company profit center; the rarely-traveled senior citizen is. Bank it.

Upgraded: Amputees and their TSA experience
Got a prosthetic? The TSA wants to make your security checkpoint experience kinder and gentler. Good! On the other hand…

Downgraded: Sippy cups, and TSA cinema verité
A former Secret Service agent reports that she was harassed when she accidentally carried her child’s sippy cup of water through security. Stupid enough, but it gets more absurd: The TSA actually released a silent security tape of the incident, labeled “Mythbusters,” in their own defense. Feel free to view the videos, read the incident report, review the embarrassed mother’s story, and decide for yourself.

Upgraded: Demolition
Let me make myself perfectly clear: I want to help destroy this hotel. I’ve never been to it, but I want to help Spanish hotel chain NH Hoteles wreck the Alcala Hotel in Madrid. The company is holding a contest to see who can take a sledgehammer to the joint. Only 30 lucky few will get to play rockstar-cum-wrecking ball. Let the spirit of Keith Moon guide you.

The New York Times’ David Pogue got up one morning, packed ten different noise-canceling headphones into his carry-on bag, went to the airport, got onboard a flight, and proceeded to freak out his seatmates by pulling out each pair of headphones and testing them out. All in the name of science.

But we benefit from his socially awkward experiments. The winners in the test: Unsurprisingly, the Bose Quiet Comfort 2 (~$300) and Quiet Comfort 3 (~$350) ranked highly. But perhaps more impressively, Panasonic (~$100) and Audio-Technica (~$140) produced similarly high quality noise reduction at a price that blew Bose out of the water. A third of the price of Bose, for cryin’ out loud!

Notably missing from the experiment: the Shure earbuds, such as the e4c or e5c models. Not cheap, either — heck, the e5c’s cost more than the Bose. Also missing: the Sony models, whose clever advertisements (like the one pictured above) have been plastering airports for the last couple years. I don’t blame Pogue for not testing every headset on the market — a man’s carry-on can only hold so much — but it would have been interesting to see how they stacked up.

Products mentioned:
- Bose Quiet Comfort 2 (Amazon.com — aff)
- Bose Quiet Comfort 3 (Amazon.com — aff)
- Panasonic RPH-C500 (Amazon.com — aff)
- Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7 QuietPoint (Amazon.com — aff)
- Shure E4c (Amazon.com — aff)
- Shure E5c (Amazon.com — aff)

(Thanks Dr. Vino!)

Getting paid to eat airline food?
Malaysia Airlines had to pay the equivalent of US$5,700 to a vegetarian who ended up eating chicken on board one of the airline’s flights. The payment covers “depression, shock, mental anguish and humiliation” that the man, an Indian Brahmin, suffered. Insert airline food joke here.

Flight attendants pan United’s “bill of rights”
United Airlines’ pathetic attempt at warding off the passengers’ bill of rights was slammed last week by its own flight attendants. No surprises there. After all, they’ll bear the brunt of the policy: Upset passengers tend to take their anger at the company out on the staff.

Resort fees revealed
One of my longtime pet peeves has been resort fees — the generally unadvertised yet mandatory surcharges on top of published hotel room rates. They’re the definition of customer-unfriendly. They’re usually unadvertised. They’re often mandatory. They’re sneaky, in that they make rates look cheaper than they actually are in online searches. And they charge you money for amenities that should either be standard to the room, or that you should be allowed to opt into. Grr… Anyway… Some destinations are more infested with the plague of resort fees than others. Hawaii is one such place. Now, via SmarterTravel.com, comes this handy list of resort fees in the 50th state. You’ll see the cost, what’s included, and whether or not it’s mandatory. Check it before you book.

Who’s on the No-Fly List?
CBS’ “60 Minutes” obtained a copy of what is allegedly the entire consolidated No-Fly List, and found numerous errors, including long-deceased revolutionaries, the 9/11 hijackers, and the president of Bolivia. The list contains 44,000 names, plus an additional 75,000 names of people who are required to undergo secondary screening. Honestly, I assumed the list would be even longer, especially when you consider that some people appear several times, with spelling variations (e.g., Usama and Osama bin Laden). (via Benet Wilson, whose blog just moved to new digs and got a new title)

Spend a day in Jamaica for $179
I get peppered with e-mails promoting all sorts of travel-related products and services, but this one struck me as sufficiently bizarre to warrant a post. Sandals Resorts is luring honeymooners by offering one-day trips to their Royal Caribbean Resort in Montego Bay, Jamaica as a “test-drive.” For $179, you fly down in the morning, get their sales pitch (with lunch and a spa treatment seemingly included), and fly back in the evening. Mileage run on Air Jamaica, anyone? Have fun explaining that one to the passport control on your return.

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Upgraded: More trans-Atlantic business class
Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic is planning to launch all-business class flights across the Atlantic. They’re joining the fray with Maxjet, Eos, Silverjet, L’Avion, not to mention British Airways, Lufthansa, KLM, and Swiss, which each fly (or plan to fly) all-biz flights on particularly lucrative routes. Virgin’s plan involves a wholly new airline, not just flights within the regular schedule. But with all these new business class seats coming online, can business class price-slashing be far off? Supply and demand, after all…

Downgraded: Thai Airways miles
Yet another frequent flyer mileage program loses its value. Star Alliance founding member Thai Airways is hiking the number of miles necessary for award seats. Gary Leff has more.

Upgraded: Competition, luggage allowances
This is something we don’t see in the United States: In an effort to compete with its competitors on service and not just on price, SriLankan Airlines is raising the luggage allowance for flights out of Qatar. Admittedly, that’s a niche market, and they’re not raising the allowance across the board for all flights in the system. But it’s still interesting to see someone trying to differentiate their product, and not just compete on price.

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