Frequent Flyer Master — A product review

by Grant Martin on

If you’ve ever heard of the brand The Art of Non-Conformity you may have heard of Chris Guillebeau. Self described as a man who “writes, travels and helps people take over the world,” Guillebeau is a frequent traveler, speaker, entrepreneur and all-around social maven out in the blog and Twitter sphere. Among his claims to fame are a host of online guides for purchase, speaking on topics from successfully working at home to how to make money as an artist.

His latest is called Frequent Flyer Master, and it’s a guide to maximizing your earned frequent flyer miles, or as he puts it, “democratizing free travel.”

Earlier this week Mr. Guillebeau asked me to take a look, so as a frequent traveler myself I accepted a free copy of the $49 guide for a review.

Am I now a frequent flyer mile guru? Has my life changed? Has abject foreshadowing already ruined my review? Find out more below.The $49, 40 page, downloadable Frequent Flyer Master is separated into three major sections: Strategy, earning and spending miles. Throughout the course of the guide, Guillebeau patiently educates the reader on how frequent flyer mile programs work, pointing out numerous strategies, tips and tricks of the trade and then following up with a significant Q&A and onward reading section.

Much of the content focuses on how to best earn your miles, from on-the-ground activities such as skymall shopping to airline promotions to credit cards. Once rife with miles, Guillebeau continues onto best strategies for redemptions, speaking on booking technology, airlines and other travel tech.

It’s a great wealth of information and without a doubt would be extremely useful to an everyday, pedestrian traveler looking to get educated on the industry.

The predominant suggestion of getting miles and travel for practically nothing, however, is a bit misleading. It’s true that subscribers to this guide will have the means to earn 25k miles or a free plane ticket, but this miles don’t appear out of thin air. Yes, one can get a pile of bonus miles from Lending Tree without setting foot in the airport, but one needs to get a mortgage (and at what rate?). Similarly, one can earn 90k miles from applying for multiple Citibank credit cards, but that requires multiple credit cards, purchases and subsequent cancellations.

Most frustratingly, almost all of this information is publicly available. At the end of the document, Guillebeau openly lists Flyertalk as a resource for further reading, and it’s true: the patient reader can find almost everything in the above 39 pages among those Flyertalk threads.

What Frequent Flyer Master really serves is a pinpoint demographic, a host of readers who only need a shortcut to a compiled list of best deals and strategies for the frequent flyer — all without sifting through sheafs of threads out on the web. Admittedly, to a novice traveler this $49 is a decent investment.

For the patient, ardent, frugal traveler who’s looking to get started in the frequent flyer mile game, an alternative recommended investment would be a trip over to Flyertalk.com.

How to spot fake (and real) hotel reviews

by Scott Carmichael on

Two decades ago, hotel reviews came solely from travel brochures and word of mouth. You’d see the fantastic photo of the property, and a brief description. The actual hotel would usually remain a surprise until you arrived. More often than not, the place would look nothing like what you had expected.

The Internet has changed a lot of that, and hotel reviews are usually refreshingly honest. That said, hotel reviews are also an ever growing source of fake and misleading information.

When anyone can post a review, you’ll run into overly positive remarks, as well as an abundance of negativity, most likely because people only tend to voice their opinion when something was bad.

AOL Travel has compiled a list of 10 ways you can determine whether a review is fake. Some of the tips are pretty logical (reviewers with no track record), while others are things you’d not normally think of.

Sites like TripAdvisor are adding warning messages to reviews that may not be entirely honest, and newcomers to the review market like Oyster Hotel Reviews are building their entire business around professional reviews.

So, next time you are shopping for a hotel, pay close attention to the reviews, you’ll be amazed how much misinformation there is out there.

UpTake takes the pain out of finding the best travel reviews

by Scott Carmichael on

The travel world is “blessed” with quite a few review sites. In recent years, millions of reviews have been added to sites like Yelp, Tripadvisor, Fodors and more.

Of course, this means that it can be hard to find the best place for an honest review, or a site with enough reviews to help you make the right choice.

Enter UpTake – this service takes reviews from all those sources, and displays them on their own easy to use site.

They cover it all – hotels, restaurants, activities and even shops, spas and beaches. In total, UpTake claims to provide access to over 20 Million reviews.

The site itself is a breeze to use, and since everyone has a different preference for how they search, you can access reviews and recommendations in several ways. The easiest is of course to just enter your keywords. Thankfully, the site lets you find stuff with plain English queries. You can also browse by state, activity and even by theme (romantic, budget friendly, girls getaway, pet friendly, family friendly and “just get away”).

Search results are presented in a very easy to use format. The information shows you a brief summary of recent reviews, any available ratings, a map of the location, the most recent price of the location and even a list of other things to do in the area.

Once you get a list of places based on your search, you can narrow the results down by changing the price, type of amenities and theme. The results update “live” based on these requirements, making it really easy to pinpoint exactly what you are looking for.

For example, check out their page for the Westin Michigan Avenue in Chicago. As you can see, you get a great amount of information, with everything from the number of rooms to the year the hotel was built, as well as links to most review sites.

Hotels can be booked directly on the site, and UpTake even takes the hassle out of finding the cheapest rate by providing prices from multiple booking sites.

The “themes” section on UpTake is equally impressive – once again, you can search by keyword (“Pet friendly things in Seattle“) or by clicking on the themes buttons on the main page.

What I really like about the themed search results is that they gather information from appropriate sites. For example; pet friendly destinations uses reviews from DogFriendly.com.

Finally, the UpTake Vacations section allows you to do one-stop-shopping for planning your vacation. You’ll find hotel recommendations, but also links to attractions and other activities. Of course, all these destinations link to the specific UpTake review page.

All in all I’m quite impressed with the site – it offers a massive amount of information, but the tools make it really easy to find things, and unlike some other review sites, you only really get the information you need, without making the results overly complicated or hard to read.

The site is technically still in “Beta”, but I did not come across anything that did not work correctly. That said, there are one or two things I would have liked to see added – with so much information, it is hard to keep track of the things you looked at. Unfortunately, UpTake does not provide a way to easily save your results. In an ideal world, you’d be able to add search results to a “virtual suitcase”, making it easier to plan your trip and do some true comparison shopping.

Can’t decide where to eat in a city? Urban Spoon to the rescue!

by Abha Malpani on

How many times have you randomly chosen a place to eat and it’s turned out to be a waste of time, taste-buds and money — when you just wished you had read a review or two before walking in? This happens to me ALL the time.

A quick skim through Urban Spoon before you choose where to eat and you might just save yourself from the agony of eating bad food or paying a ridiculous bill. Not only will you be able to find a plethora of options, but all of them have time-critical reviews and ratings pulled from various local news sources like Time Out, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post — depending on the city you choose. Alongside media reviews, you can also see reviews and votes from bloggers and friends. And, of course, they have your standard top 10 / top 100 lists.

The search for restaurants is pretty advanced: other than being able to find a place basis price, neighborhood and type of food, you can also pick a place basis whether it’s romantic, open late night, kid-friendly, vegan friendly, has home delivery, if the food is gluten-free, and even if the place has happy hour! Is that cool or is that cool!?

The site reminded me of MetaCritic, but for restaurants. However, unfortunately the site is restricted to cities in the US and Canada, but nevertheless it looks like a useful resource.