2010

Daily gear deals – $5 Skype headset, Garmin Wi-FI GPS and more

by Scott Carmichael on Nov 8, 2010

Here are the hottest gear deals for today, Monday November 8, 2010. Remember, these deals are often valid for just one day, so act fast before they are gone.

Today’s first deal is for a Logitech Internet phone headset. The ClearChat headset features a boom microphone and an in-line volume control. On sale for just $4.99 from Dillyeo – with free shipping! Click here for this deal.

Next up is a bargain on a Kodak digital camera. The C190 camera features a 2.7″ LCD display, 5x optical zoom and runs off regular AA batteries. On sale for $53.99 at Tanga.com.

Today’s third deal is for a 120GB Western Digital portable hard drive. This may not be the largest drive you can get – but its $32 price tag does make a great bargain for people looking for some extra storage space. Click here for this deal. Be sure to check for the cheapest seller in the right hand column.

And finally in today’s lineup is the Garmin Nuvi 295W. This GPS receiver is from the newest generation devices, and features Wi-Fi, a 3MP camera and more. On sale for $84.99, down from $249.99. Click here for this deal.

Ten ways to prevent your frequent flier miles from disappearing

by Scott Carmichael on Nov 8, 2010

After reading the story of Scott Kelby, you may be interested in some tips that can help keep your airline mileage account alive. Thankfully, not everything that earns miles has to involve taking a flight.

Mileage expiration dates vary from airline to airline – some provide a relatively generous 18 months between activity, others only give you six months.

So, here are ten tips that will save your miles, and prevent those hard earned points from going to waste. Many of them are really easy to accomplish, and some may keep your account alive without spending more then ten bucks.

[Photo from: Joshua Davis/jdavis.info]
Always add your frequent flier number to your flights

This really is the most important one. Always make sure you provide your frequent flier number when you book your tickets. When you book through the airline site, this is almost always automatic. But booking through a travel agent or a third party booking site is where it is easy to forget adding the number.

If you have a ticket without your mileage account included, head over to the airline site and add your flight itinerary to your profile. In most cases, you’ll only need to supply your confirmation number. When you get your boarding pass, always make sure your number is printed on it. If it isn’t, check with a gate agent and have them check the system.

Don’t forget partner airlines

If you are not flying your usual airline, this doesn’t always means you can’t earn miles on your regular mileage account. With so many partnerships, airlines participate in all kinds of reciprocal mileage programs. For example – United Airlines lets you earn partner miles on 33 different airlines.

One big advantage of using partner miles is that it prevents you from spreading miles around between too many accounts. And the more you keep on one card, the quicker you’ll be heading towards a free ticket.

Miles for dining out

Do you regularly eat out? The Rewards Network offers miles for eating at thousands of restaurants around the nation. To enroll, you provide the site with the credit and debit cards you use – and when you present those cards, you’ll earn miles. It is that simple. You don’t need to carry your mileage card, and before you know it, you’ll have surprise miles showing up in your account a few weeks after you’ve had a nice dinner.

Be on the lookout for mileage shopping promotions

Shopaholic? If you are making online purchases, always check to see whether the online retailer has a mileage mall. You’d be surprised to see how many companies have partnered with shops to offer free miles in exchange for purchases. Big retailers like Best Buy, The Home Depot and JC Penney participate.

One word of advice – always double check that you enter the store through the mileage shopping portal of your airline. If you don’t, you’ll lose the miles and there will be absolutely no way to reclaim them later.

Open an airline credit or debit card

If you are worried about losing your miles, and you are not regularly flying the airline, consider an airline branded credit or debit card. Even if you only use it once a month for gas, the purchase will create mileage activity, and will keep your account alive.

If you really don’t want yet another credit card, consider one of the new airline branded debit cards. These usually link to your checking account, and when used for purchases (when no pin is entered), they earn up to 1 mile per Dollar spent. Fees on the debit cards are also lower, around $25/year.

Always read airline emails and turn on alerts

When your miles are forfeited, most people will probably be completely taken by surprise. Don’t be one of those people. Airlines may be strict, but most of them do send out warning emails when miles are set to expire. You can prevent nasty surprises by making sure your email address on file is up to date, and giving ten seconds of your time to all emails from the airline. Not all of it is junk.

Check your account regularly

Just like in the previous tip, regularly checking your mileage accounts is very important. Make a habit out of a weekly glance at your activity, and try to keep records of flights you took and whether activity is missing. Despite all the technology that keeps these programs running, airlines regularly “forget” to apply miles.

Use online and mobile tools to monitor activity

If you are too busy to log into your airline or hotel site once a week, consider outsourcing the job to an online or mobile tool. To monitor my accounts, i use PageOnce software. This iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry application is free, and can monitor almost every airline and hotel site out there. The application lets you know when miles have been added, and can show account balances in an instant.

Another handy tool comes from UsingMiles. This new service combines mileage management with online award booking tools. With this free site, you can not only keep an eye on your miles, but you also get a great amount of tools to help use the miles. UsingMiles is currently invite only, but if you use this link, you should be able to get in right away.

Always keep boarding passes and tickets

I’m just going to go ahead and say it – airlines can be really mean. When the time comes that you realize you forgot to add your mileage account number to a ticket, the airlines will want a crazy amount of information about your trip. Even though THEY are the ones that issued the ticket, and somewhere in their computer systems are all the records about your trip, they want to know exactly where you flew, when, your airline code and your ticket number.

If you have lost any of these, some airlines may be able to help, but most just don’t care. To prevent this – always hold on to your boarding pass and other ticketing paperwork.

Oh, and once you add the information, actually adding the miles may take 6-8 weeks, because somewhere in the world is a large building where people use adding machines and telex printouts to manually add those miles. Anything to inconvenience their customers!

Find recurring mileage promotion earners

Do you read a newspaper? Sucscribe to magazines? Use phone service? Register domain names? These are all mileage earners that could turn into recurring promotions for your account. The number one advantage of these is that they earn miles for you without having to do anything (other than check that the miles actually appear in your account).

As usual, head on over to your airline web site and check for all their mileage earning options.

Is airport security a waste of time? Ten Gadling readers’ shocking answers

by Annie Scott on Nov 8, 2010

The other day on the Gadling Facebook page, we asked what some might consider a loaded question:

“Do you think airport security is important or a waste of time? Why?”

We got a variety of responses both in the pro and con camps, and plenty of rants about how foolish airport security has perhaps become. Here are the top ten comments — a great litmus test of how airport security and the TSA is perceived by regular travelers.

1. “Huge waste of time. I think a lot of pilots agree on this. Bottom line: ineffective measures that have morphed into mindless procedures performed by (mostly) moronic TSA agents that yield no increased security and impact travel time. Even more, recently airlines issued statements that security regulations for flying into the US are expensive and unnecessary.” — Raul

2. “Have flown twice to Asia in the last few months … inconsistencies galore … have a friend that always carries this tiny box cutter in her purse … she forgot about it and now realized she has flown several times with it not being discovered … but they have taken her bottled water that she purchased in the airport.” — Kathleen3. “What Raul said. I was just at LAS flying back to NY and I forgot to take my liquids out. They didn’t even mention it and let me go right through. Also, plenty of plastic (non-metal detecting items) can be used as tools or weapons. Pathetic. Israel’s method of profiling is much more efficient.” … “Pilots shouldn’t have to go through the security the rest of us do — if they are compromised they can take the damn plane down! They don’t need explosives or anything else to do that.” — Alyson

4. “Different airports have different requirements or strictures. If it’s not allowed at one airport, it shouldn’t be allowed at ANY of them.” … “Airlines don’t like security when it impacts their bottom line, but they’ll be the first to admit that having a plane go down due to an unchecked bomb hurts their bottom line even more.” — Jennifer

5. “It is important but they need to seriously streamline it and take a page out of the European countries airport security systems.” — Lori

6. “After a pat down I always have to ask ‘Should I tip you?‘” — Rob

7. “It’s called security theatre.” — George

8. “Honestly, I think the whole thing is designed to keep the sheeple calm because there really is nothing ‘they’ can do to keep us safe. If terrorists want to take down a plane or use it to take down buildings (again? puh-lease, that is so 2001, the terrorists are up to bigger and better things) they will. with these ridiculous so called security measures, the terrorists have won — we have changed our way of life because of them.” — Alyson (again)

9. “I’ve never worked out why 75 year old ladies need to take their shoes off when they’re only flying internally within the UK. The issue is not whether security is important, it’s whether security checks are valid and efficacious. I don’t believe they are. We should be profiling, rather than searching laptops and shoes. The terrorists will always move on. They must be clutching at straws if they’re putting 300mg of HE into toner cartridges on cargo planes; or perhaps the ‘terrorist’ was simply a nut-case.” — Stewart

10. “Security is important. It needs to be beefed up, tho. I was a flight attendant for 42 years with 2 airlines. I remember when we didn’t need it. Now, we need it.” — Vicki

Got additional comments? Want to join in the conversation? Visit Gadling on Facebook.

[Photo by redjar via Flickr.]

Forfeited U.S. Airways miles are a reminder to keep your frequent flier account alive

by Scott Carmichael on Nov 8, 2010

Photography and Photoshop professional Scott Kelby is making the rounds on various blogs this week with a story on how U.S. Airways took 81,180 miles from him, all because his travel agent forgot to add his frequent flier number to two of his past trips.

Without the account numbers attached to those trips, U.S. Airways decided there had been no activity, so they basically threw his miles away. Normally this would be another of those valuable life lessons, but U.S. Airways didn’t really get rid of them for good – they are merely holding them hostage.

If Scott Kelby wants his miles back, he can fork over $300, open a U.S. Airways credit card, or take a paid first class flight on the airline. This sounds more like blackmail to me. Lets look at the facts for a moment – U.S. Airways wants activity on their mileage accounts every 18 months. This is about the same number you’ll find on every airline. Activity is a very broad term – this could be the addition of 250 miles through grocery store purchase, or a flight on a partner airline. When there had been no activity, they simply dumped his miles. At an estimate value of 1.5 cents/mile, U.S. Airways stole just over $1,200 from Mr. Kelby.

The reason airlines have these rules is simple – their frequent flier program is a loyalty program, and someone who doesn’t fly the airline for two years can not be considered loyal. But more importantly, miles are a liability to the airline. The more miles they have doing nothing, the more it costs them in their books. Their accountants love getting those miles out of the books, and what cheaper way than using rules to simply throw them away.

Picking sides in the loss of miles is a tough one – Scott Kelby obviously screwed up when he forgot to have his U.S. Airways Dividend Miles number added to his flights. And then he screwed up again when he didn’t check his account regularly. Then he screwed up again when he didn’t call within a year to have the mileage applied retroactively.

How did U.S. Airways screw up? They screwed up when they picked their rules over customer satisfaction. In picking rules over customers, they created a tidal wave of bad PR. And in stories like this, it doesn’t really matter who is right or wrong – because the big bad airline always ends up looking like the bad guy.

If you want some tips on how to keep your mileage account intact, check out these ten tips.

Five American-style North Korean restaurants for foodies

by Tom Johansmeyer on Nov 8, 2010

This may not have been the case a few years ago, but Pyongyang is definitely on its way to becoming a culinary destination … well, maybe not. Nonetheless, it is pretty wild that the self-isolating regime has let slip some pretty wild information about the dining options available in the capital. If you can finagle a way into North Korea and somehow get yourself a bit of freedom to move, there are now some interesting restaurants for you to visit.

Swing an eating trip to Pyongyang, and you may find yourself munching on the familiar. There are several western-style restaurants popping up in this strange city, so eating like a local may mean eating like you’re home.

Let’s take a look at five restaurants in Pyongyang and how you could scarf that grub in style:1. Okryu Restaurant: just opened last week, this soon-to-be hot spot garnered a mention by the Korea Central News Agency, which means its launch was intended to be made public. The claim is that this place can accommodate thousands of customers, so live on the edge and skip making a reservation.

2. Samtaesung: a relatively new addition to the Pyongyang culinary scene, this burger joint is open 24 hours a day and still recommends making reservations to pick up your food. This is a place to see and be seen, especially if you’re tight with the regime: Kim Jong-il‘s sister, Kim Kyong-hui, is said to benefit personally from all the cash spent there.

3. Pizza (no name given): dine on pies with ingredients shipped in from Naples and Rome. The first North Korean pizza parlor is said to have been created at the request of Kim Jong-il himself, so you know the quality is going to be top notch! So, without a name, how can you expect to find the place? Ask where the pizza joint is; it’s not like there are dozens.

4. Beach (outside the city): get outside of Pyongyang, and you still have some options. In Wonsan, at the beach, you can find even more pizza. Just remember to wait at least 20 minutes before jumping back into the waves!

5. Cubby’s: this is the restaurant that never happened in Pyongyang. Originally the dream of a New Jersey BBQ joint owner, plans to expand Cubby’s to Pyongyang were explored. The owner, Bobby Egan, befriended some North Korean diplomats assigned to the United Nations in New York City and even took a few trips over to his buddies’ homeland. Alas, according to his recent book, the plans for a DPRK franchise never came to fruition.

[photo by John Pavelka via Flickr]