Travel Agent scams thousands by selling fake vouchers

by Justin Delaney on

Avoiding the hustle is part of travel. You look for the good deals, and inspect the great deals with much scrutiny, hoping for it to shake out in the end. From $10 easyjet flights from London-Gatwick to free cab rides in Bangkok, anyone that has done either realizes rather quickly the high price of low cost. Whether it be wasting an afternoon at tourist traps or corralled like cattle onto a perpetually late and uncomfortably full flight, part of travel is finding the balance between value and comfort.

A woman in New Jersey provided neither value nor comfort as she executed a low rent Ponzi scheme peddling fraudulent Continental Airlines travel vouchers. Apparently, this woman – travel agent Victoria Scardingo, sold over 2000 fake travel vouchers for between $500 and $600 to well meaning rubes that assumed they were buying round-trip tickets to anywhere in the world. Instead of the bargain of the century, the buyers received a thorough fleecing. The vouchers were completely worthless.So what did she do with the money? According to CNN, Victoria had a penchant for Louis Vuitton and Coach bags, spending well over $15,000 at the two stores. She also purchased over half a million dollars in flights to keep the scheme running by distributing real tickets to the early adopters. In a Ponzi scheme, those that invest earliest are generally compensated with value gathered by later adopters. Eventually, keeping the scam alive was too costly, collapsing under the weight of customer demand.

“Now the only trip she will be taking is to federal prison,” says Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. Scardingo faces up to 20 years in the slammer and the cool million she deposited into her bank account is worth no more than one of her $500 travel vouchers.

flickr image via Magnus Bråth

Lufthansa contest offers free tickets on the world’s largest plane

by Justin Delaney on

Who wants to take a free flight across the Atlantic on a super-jumbo? Lufthansa is offering such an opportunity to travelers to commemorate the launch of their sixth A380. The new jet will begin flying between New York and Frankfurt on February 28, just in time to whisk you away for a much needed European vacation. The contest winners will clamber aboard the world’s largest plane, for free, and be treated to a behind-the-scenes tour.

The first contest, “A380 SeatTweet,” begins on February 16 and ends on February 19. To register, you need to select a seat on the Virtual 380 on the Lufthansa contest website, and a tweet will post to reserve your spot. Once all 526 virtual seats are filled, the day’s winners will be announced. A number of prizes will be distributed including four A380 prize packages. You can follow Lufthansa USA’s tweets @Lufthansa_USA.

The second contest is a bit more location sensitive and will be open to those in New York City. This contest is titled “Catch the 380 Crew” and involves clues and a bit of good old fashioned sleuthing. Starting February 25, @Lufthansa USA will begin tweeting clues about the contest. After the inaugural flight from Frankfurt to New York’s JFK airport on the 28th of February, 23 “crew members” will descend upon SoHo. Only one will be holding the golden ticket – a pair of business class return tickets to Europe. To successfully game the contest, you will need to pay attention to the clues and locate 10 crew members that will lead you to your destiny.

flickr image via JeremyKunz

The battle for your frequent flyer mile loyalty: Flyertalk versus milepoint

by Grant Martin on

For the last several years, frequent flyer nerds have had one place beyond their choice airline’s website to call home. That place was Flyertalk, a simple, web-based forum where users from around the world could get together and chat about various topics, from how to drop fuel surcharges from international tickets to the best way to earn miles for basically free by buying and depositing dollar coins. Founded by Randy Petersen, Flyertalk was the mecca for budget travelers around the planet, and Mr. Petersen, their golden calf.

As the the web medium matured and the dot com tidal wave surged, the offers started rolling in, and with a pull so strong, Randy Petersen sold out. The buyer? An innocuous sounding company called Internet Brands – that was purchasing communities left and right. Of course, the transaction involved a hefty sum of cash.

And this is where things get sloppy. Whether it was contractual misinterpretations or failures to uphold one end of the bargain (you can read some details about the lawsuit here), things turned south between Mr. Petersen and his owners, and at the end of the day, the fledging founder of Flyertalk left for greener pastures.Enter: milepoint.com. Currently in its beta stage (but openly accepting users here), milepoint has all of the virtues of Flyertalk (including the same forums and most of the same users) but it’s published on a different, more aesthetic platform.

So what’s the core difference? Technology is a key component to any website, but in a public forum, it’s the users that make the site function. And if the same users are using Flyertalk and milepoint then there’s no way to tell them apart. A legacy post in the American Airlines forum of Flyertalk, for example, is similarly covered over at Milepoint, while numerous threads at the latter have links back to the former. Asked about the difference over on twitter, Gary Leff, Mr. Petersen’s right hand man had little to reveal, so it’s possible that the brass at milepoint are hiding some new fancy tricks up their sleeves.

Other people involved in creating milepoint come from the FTawards – which were created after Randy Petersen quit organizing the Freddie Awards in 2009. End result – even though Randy Petersen gave up Flyertalk and the Freddie Awards, he didn’t waste time getting right back in the game.

The world of online communities is a relatively small one – which explains how milepoint ended up running on a brand new community server called XenForo. This new platform was developed by the programmers of VBulletin – which powers Flyertalk. VBulletin was purchased in 2008 by – you guessed it – Internet Brands. Still with us? But the lead programmer for VBulletin was unhappy with his new overlords and left Internet Brands to create a new company – which just so happens to be the one that powers milepoint. As we said – it is a small world. Of course, in keeping with tradition, Xenforo is involved in its own lawsuits with Internet Brands (at least according to Wikipedia).

Whether the current hardcore group of Flyertalk members will find enough value to switch to milepoint remains to be seen – but when we spoke to some of the new members, they were already unhappy to see previously banned members of Flyertalk happily posting on milepoint. In its current state, milepoint is little more than a smaller clone of Flyertalk, with a gregarious – some say eccentric – leader at its helm. And can one single person an entire community make? Maybe so. But like Joseph Smith led the Mormons away from Christianity, there’s no telling how divergent the community may grow.

Breaking: United grounds all Boeing 757 aircraft

by Grant Martin on

If you were scheduled on a United 757 earlier today and are wondering why it was canceled, we now know why. According to the Wall St. Journal, the airline is in the process of grounding its entire fleet in order to perform maintenance checks to air data computers that were modified earlier this year.

According to Gadling’s resident pilot Kent Wien:

There are two air data computers on every 757 and they’re used to take inputs from pitot tubes, static ports and temperature probes to determine the speed, rate of climb and altitude of the airplane. Any difference in the captain and the co-pilot’s side requires a quick determination as to which side is giving the correct data. In 1996 a 757 experienced a blocked pitot tube that caused it to crash off the coast of the Dominican Republic. While not the same problem as an ADC failure, the failures would look very similar to the pilots.

In this specific case, checks have acturally already been completed on the 96 767s; this round of study is in order to comply with Federal Aviation Administration requirements that were not followed at that time. Continental‘s 62 aircraft are not affected.

Each check takes less than two hours so the groundings should be brief. But operation on the aircraft will be disrupted for the rest of today and into tomorrow’s schedules.

Contacted for comment, United Airlines’ Charles Hobart confirmed:

We have about 25 cancellations. The maintenance checks are ongoing and will continue until completed. We expect minimal further disruption tomorrow.

Galley Gossip: Flight attendant training – from graduation to the first flight

by Heather Poole on

After graduating from flight attendant training, how much time will I get to go back home and take care of things before moving to my crew base? – Lorelei

Two hours after my silver wings were pinned to my blue lapel on stage in front of classmates, family and friends, I hugged and kissed my loved ones goodbye, stepped onto a bus, and headed to the airport with thirty of my classmates. Most of us boarded a flight departing to New York’s LaGuardia Airport, my new crew base. It was late at night when we landed and I only had three days to find a place to live before reporting to work for the first time.

Flight attendants hired by major carriers usually have three to four days off before their first trip, but one of those days is spent touring the airport. Therefore it’s very important to get all your business taken care of before you go into training because once it begins things will move swiftly.

When I started flying in the mid-nineties, flight attendants at my airline had to serve six months probation before obtaining flight privileges. In other words, our travel passes. This meant that unless I purchased a ticket like a regular person, or another flight attendant was kind enough to donate one their buddy passes, the only time I spent on an airplane was when I walked on board to work a flight. I won’t lie. It wasn’t easy being far away from home and working a job that’s unlike any other, but I struggled through the difficult time and six months later, armed with my passes, life changed for the better.

Before flight attendant training starts, the airline will send you a packet containing information regarding everything you’ll need to know from what to pack for training to how much money you’ll need to bring with you to your new base. It seems like just yesterday I was sitting on the closet floor looking up at my clothes trying to figure out how I could get everything I needed for seven and a half weeks of training inside two suitcases that could not weigh more eighty pounds, two suitcases that would then go directly to my new crew base. Good luck!

Photo courtesy of JFithian