If you’re a routine flyer around North America, you may have heard today that United Airlines dropped a bombshell on its loyalty program members. But chances are you didn’t, because it seems that they chose to release the information at night. You know, during Halloween, when everyone is reading the news. The long and short of it is that many people with accumulated mileage, myself included, are facing a pretty severe devaluation of our mileage. On some international routes on other Star Alliance airlines, it will now take almost twice as many miles for the same flight. Their domestic routes fared ...

Given that I’m about to head out on my second round of travel this year, I thought it might be fun to tally a few metric from my travels so far. First, some quantitative metrics: Flight Segments: 15 Flight Distance: 51,908 (kilometers) Total Flight Costs: $4,240 Total Cost / 100 km: $8.17 Countries Visited: Six Next, some qualitative ones from this segment: Favourite Experience: Visiting a penguin rookery in Ushuaia, Argentina Favourite Restaurant: Lupita, Las Cañitas, Buenos Aires, La Cabrera is a close second Best Photography: Iguazu Falls, on the border of Brazil and Argentina Notable Drinking ...

I spent a few minutes checking out flight options this morning, and came up with a bit of an idea. Here’s part of the problem. Option 1: Book Second Leg Later Get a return ticket from Vancouver to Buenos Aires, possibly throwing the return ticket away in Buenos Aries and going somewhere else. The cost of that is about $1,500 right now, and then I still have to buy an expensive ticket to somewhere else when the time comes, which will probably be another $1,500. But at least I have a Vancouver ticket already booked in the event I want to come back. Option 2: Use Houston as a Hub Continental flies ...

For those of you who haven’t been following along, there are some new airline rules going into affect regarding delays that force aircrafts to sit on the tarmac. There have been many documented cases of passengers being stuck on the tarmac for extended lengths of time, often without any food or water, while waiting for clearance to depart. A recent example involves Virgin America and a plane that was on the tarmac (loaded with passengers) for nearly 4 and a half hours. The solution to this problem, in the eyes of the FAA, is the impose fines on the airlines in the amount of $27,500 per passenger ...