Talking travel with frequent mileage expert John Lopinto

by Jerry Guo on

John Lopinto is one of those savvy frequent fliers who always manages to yoink that last upgrade from you (he racks over 100,000+ miles each year). But he also happens to be a top flier guru who helps travelers make the airlines work for them through his award-winning site, ExpertFlyer.com, the #1 destination for frequent fliers. He’s here to give some exclusive tips and insider info on getting the best deals on your next flight.

What Are the Most Effective Ways to Work the Upgrades Game?

The Holy Grail of air travel is flying in business or first class for the price of a cheap coach ticket. Short of “squatting” in a first class seat and hoping you won’t get caught (you will, so don’t try it), there are ways to use your frequent flier miles to score that seat in the front. If you are an “elite” status member in your favorite frequent flier program, you have a better chance than the average member, but if you are at the program’s very highest elite level, you have more options and better odds at getting that upgrade that sometimes can be free.

For the rest of us, however, using miles to upgrade is usually the easiest and can be booked at the time of ticket purchase. They also offer a better value for the miles used compared to using miles to “purchase” a coach award ticket. But upgrade inventory is always limited so it is best to book as far in advance as possible and for mid-week travel if possible. But if you can’t upgrade when purchasing your ticket, go on the wait-list. Most upgrades don’t clear until days or hours before departure.

What are Fare Buckets and How Can Flyers Take Advantage of them to Save Money?

Airlines don’t sell all their seats at the same price. In fact, on some flights there may be over a dozen different fares just for coach. In general, the further in advance you buy a ticket the more fare options there are. These are called fare buckets and the cheaper the fare the more restrictions and conditions there are attached to that bucket. If you are willing to agree to them the airline is willing to sell you a cheaper ticket. But there are only so many tickets in a given bucket that the airline is willing to sell at that price for a particular flight. That’s why just changing the time of departure, say from 7:00 am to 9:00am may find that a lower cost bucket still has seats for sale than the earlier flight. Sometimes just leaving a day earlier or later will help you find a cheaper fare bucket with seats.

What’s Your Stance on Fast-Track Security Programs Like Clear?

If you have elite frequent flyer status with the airline you are flying on, or traveling in business or first class, almost all airports have a special security line that has almost no wait to get to the TSA screening point. If this is the case for you, then programs such as Clear offer little or no advantage. However, if this is not the case and you are typically one who shows up at the airport at the last minute or have repeated security issues, then this may offer some value for you.

How Do You Find the Cheapest Flights

I actually use the airlines’ own website. I find their fares to be the lowest available and they may show many fare options, not just the lowest. Airline-independent sites like Kayak, Orbitz and others are good for surveying all the airline offerings at once, but one of the advantages of booking directly on the airlines’ site is that you have established the sale directly with the airline.

Although the fare may be the same, when flights are canceled or you need to be re-routed at the last minute it will be easier to negotiate an alternative with the airline agent if you had purchased your ticket directly with them. Also, some airlines now charge a fee if you want to simply change your seat assignment and didn’t purchase your ticket directly from the airline. You may also want to use an airline-independent web site that does not sell tickets that just lists all the fares and rules for all flights such as ExpertFlyer.com.

Is It Ever a Good Idea to Use a Travel Agent To Book Flights?

Yes, of course. Travel agents are professionals who have experience with the nuances of air travel. Unfortunately, today their commissions from the airlines are either very small or non-existent. So, they must extract a fee over and above the airline ticket price from the passenger in many cases. But if the itinerary is complex, especially for foreign travel, then a good travel agent may well be worth it. Also, they sometimes have access to special consolidator fares that are not offered directly by the airlines.

What About Consolidators?

First, make sure you book them through a reputable agent who normally deals in consolidator fares. Next, make sure you know all the conditions and restrictions associated with the ticket. What happens if you need to change the date of the flight? What are the cancellation penalties? What airline is being used? Is the fare eligible for frequent flyer miles or can it be upgraded? In short, they can offer a good value, but buyer beware.

Are There Any Secrets for Getting First or Business Class Tickets for Cheap?

If you fly Business class to Asia look into the CX Leverage program at cxleverage.com. This program offers up to a 20% discount on full-fare unrestricted business class tickets, and 5% off first class, between the US and Asia on Cathay Pacific, arguably one of the better airlines in the world. You only have to be a small business in the US and register your business on their site.

The airlines also offer discounted first and business class tickets with limited inventory on certain routes. The so-called I-fares are restricted business class tickets on certain routes that offer excellent value on some competitive routes. There are also consolidators that specialize in discounted business class fares. Also, consider using your miles to upgrade from a less expensive coach fare into business or first class.

Is There a Free Resource to Find the Perfect Seat on Any Plane?

There are two web sites to visit: seatguru.com and seatexpert.com. Both offer seat maps of most airlines and their individual aircrafts showing graphical layouts of the cabins and pros and cons for various seats on the plane as reported by passengers. For seat maps on specific flights that show which seats are occupied or not, try ExpertFlyer.com.

How to rent three cars and get a free plane ticket on Delta

by Grant Martin on

Got some free time over the next three weeks? Delta just launched a promo offering 9,999 miles for each rental with one of their auto partners Avis or Budget. Each qualifying rental gets you the miles, regardless of how long you keep the vehicle, as long as you book with Delta’s Car Search tool. You have until the end of the month to rent and you need to sign up to become a SkyMiles member first.

Sure, you may not be traveling three times in the next month, but do you need to? If you can get three car rentals cheap enough, the time and money invested in getting a car at the airport for 24 hours can easily be less than a domestic ticket that you could book with miles.

Rental car fees vary wildly across geographical boundaries, but almost every airport in the country has either an Avis or a Budget rental car location. And many of those rural locations have plenty of inventory (at damn good prices) available for the rest of July.

Here in Detroit, a car rental over a weekend night on Budget is about 55$. Times three is 165$ for 29,997 miles or an award ticket. In Kalamazoo, a more rural airport near where my parents live, it’s 24$. That’s 72$ for a flight.

Sure, you have to factor in what you’re going to DO with the car and what you’re going to do with YOUR car while you have the rental. You could always just take it home or to a parking lot and park it. Or park it on the lawn of the rental company.

But it’s not a bad way to rack up a few frequent flyer miles to use for future adventure on Delta Airlines.

What could you do with 25k miles or a domestic award ticket? You could fly from your freezing hometown in New Hampshire down to Phoenix next January to get some sun and play some golf while your coworkers freeze. You could fly to Colorado to get some kick ass skiing in next May. You could pay for your girlfriend to come visit you next time you’re in San Diego on business.

Sound like a good use for your 74$ invested this month?

US Airways to remove all movies from it’s fleet

by Grant Martin on

If you were one of the last six people in the country that thought that US Airways was cool, you now have a reason to jump ship: the Tempe, Arizona based company just announced that it was abandoning all of its domestic In Flight Entertainment (IFE) systems and that it will further scrap any plans of ever implementing any.

The culprit, they claim, is the five hundred pounds of extra weight that the systems add to each aircraft, thus taking more fuel to fly around the country.

US Airways: I know that your focus groups and business travelers don’t place that high of a priority on In Flight Entertainment because they like to work on their laptops or crackberry around. But this is AMERICA. Our favorite national past time is watching television. We love it. And the 90% of people that don’t have a laptop, Blackberry or Malcom Gladwell’s last piece of non-fiction are going to get PISSED when their TV’s go away. Do yourself a favor and save one of the last things that you had over the other legacy carriers with no IFE.

If you were still booked on an overseas US Airways flight, you can take down your craigslist posting for your tickets down and breathe a sigh of relief for now — only domestic IFE is going away. But at this rate, who knows how long the airline, proper, is going to last.

A note of apology to the helpful, dedicated flight attendants out there

by Jeffrey White on

Yesterday I posted about a disabled, wheelchair-bound woman whose husband was forced to carry her onto a Ryanair flight after the flight crew refused to help her when her Ambulift device failed to show up.

I began that post with this: “Everybody knows that flight crew members these days won’t help you lift a bag into the overhead compartment, even if you are a 90-year-old woman.”

While the overall post, rightly, is generating a lot of discussion and a degree of outrage and indignation, some readers, also rightly, feel my broad generalization of flight attendants in this sentence was off the mark. Reading it now, I agree.

I am not circling the wagon here — I feel that many flight attendants won’t help you these days to the degree they used to, say, 10 years ago. As one attendant, “Ann,” puts it: “Bottom line, you pack it, you stow it. If you can’t stow it, then check it.”

But another reader, flight attendant “Alexis,” has a point: “Not all flight attendants are uncaring and lazy.”

I have seen flight attendants refuse to help with bags on maybe a half dozen different U.S. airlines in recent years, all citing either union or company policies. Usually they find a passenger nearby to help. My 90-year-old lady reference was based on an experience from a NY-Denver flight a few years back when I saw, maybe four rows up, a woman easily in her 80s, and maybe a good deal older, struggle to get her small roller into the overhead compartment. She asked a passing male flight attendant, who was rather large, for help and he said, “I’m sorry, but I am not allowed to.” A man in the woman’s row quickly jumped up to help.

As in any job, there are lazy, malingering flight attendants. But I know there are many dedicated and hard working ones as well.

But my using a rather limited brush of personal experience to paint an entire group was wrong and I apologize for the overstatement.

Galley Gossip: Flight Attendants Walk off the Plane

by Heather Poole on

“Why in the world did you bid that!” I asked my mother, who is also a flight attendant (yeah, I know, it’s a bit of a freak show over here), when she told me about her nightmare trip from New York to Miami. “I haven’t worked that route in years.”

The New York to Miami flight is by far one of the worst trips to work if you’re a flight attendant, which is why, I imagine, when it comes to seniority, it tends to go a little junior.

“It looked good on paper,” my mother said, who is not all that junior, even though she is junior to me. And then she went on to tell me all about the irate passenger who freaked out when she, my mother, also a flight attendant, asked the passenger to put her very large purse (not that size matters) in the overhead bin, a purse that was lying on the floor in the bulkhead row, the same bulkhead row the flight attendant making the announcement kept referring to in her PA, the one that distinctly states carry-on items may not block aisles or exits and may not be placed on the floor at the first row of each cabin.

“You’ve got to stop working those flights!” I said, interrupting yet another story about another irate passenger. How many were there you ask? I lost count. I was too stressed out just listening to her talk to pay attention.

Really, I do not know what it is about that particular route that makes it so unenjoyable to work, but the New York – Miami crowd is tough, which is why I stopped working that flight as soon as I had enough seniority to hold something else, something better, something good, something flying west like San Diego, Seattle, Los Angeles, or San Francisco – simply put, something with a lot less drama. I take pride in being nice and polite to my passengers. I actually enjoy providing a good service. But that’s not always so easy to do from New York to Miami. Trust me, those flights can get ugly – very very ugly! And since I don’t do ugly, not anymore, it’s off to another destination for me.

Hey, just being honest here. That’s all

With that said, imagine how unsurprised I was to hear about the New York – Miami flight on Sunday night where the crew refused to work the flight due to the hostile environment. Apparently the crew was late to the gate. No where does it mention WHY the crew was late, but they could have been late for several reasons, like a late inbound flight they were working, or perhaps the original crew went illegal and this crew was called out at the last minute, who knows, but whatever the reason, they arrived on the scene over an hour late and passengers booed and things just got ugly.

Trust me, it takes a lot to make the crew walk off an airplane. I’ve never seen in it 13 years. Flight attendants, for the most part, are pleasers, which means they would never do anything that would put their job in jeopardy (like walking off a flight), so that hostile environment must have been pretty darn bad, much more hostile than you and I could ever imagine. And so they walked.

Of course I can’t help but wonder how far those flight attendants walked? Did they just walk off the airplane and go to flight operations or did they actually go all the way home? And more importantly, did they ever come back?

Honestly, if this were any other flight going to any other destination, I wouldn’t believe what I was reading either. But this was a New York – Miami flight, therefore I believe, I truly believe that things got so bad the flight attendants broke down and disappeared. Something tells me you might actually see those flight attendants still walking, walking in a daze down the side of the road, a rag tag bunch wearing navy blue polyester and pulling their Travelpros behind them. Poor things. So if you happen to see a worn out group of four or five dressed in blue, show the love and honk your horn!

BEEP BEEP!

And while you’re at it, go ahead and show the love to all of your flight attendants! And we’ll show the love right back. Happy travels to all and to all a good flight.