US Airways has long been the black sheep of the American airline industry. I remember back when they were called UA Air, people referred to them as US Scare (They had a couple of bad crashes). Today it is all over the web. “Friends don’t let friends fly US Airways’ is the signature of a user on FlyerTalk.com. Do a search on US Airways on Twitter and you find tweets such as ‘I hate US Airways’, ‘US Airways is the worst’ and others I cannot repeat. But how much of …

Picking the right Frequent Flyer program can have significant impact on your ability to earn or redeem Airline rewards and to earn and enjoy Elite status. Most uninformed travelers start like I did – they take the credit for any flight they fly on the frequent flyer program of the airline they are flying. This results in miles scattered across multiple programs. That too miles that are not enough for any kind of award. And of course, they never qualify for any Elite status. The only thing worse than this …

An airline will usually ‘op-up’ an economy passenger to an empty upper class seat to create space in economy for people on the waiting list. … Aircraft come in 1 class, 2 class or 3 class configurations. 2 class configurations have Coach (Economy) and First. 3 class have all three, Coach, Business & First.

Continental Airlines is leaving SkyTeam and joining Star Alliance. Virgin Atlantic is considering joining Star Alliance after resisting joining any alliance all these years. Russia’s S7 airlines is joining OneWorld. Airlines seem to make a big fuss of Airline Alliances. Should you care? If you want to maximize your earning of miles and attaining Elite status and maximize your ability of redeem your miles for awards, alliances are something you need to understand and leverage.

Airlines enter in partnerships with other airlines thru two means. The first is a bilateral agreement …

I discussed Airline Lounges in detail in my previous post on this topic. This article is a follow up to discuss options available to get ‘free’ access to airline lounges. Now, for the disclaimer -
Just like there is no free lunch, there is really no free lounge access. But, there are ways available to get lounge access for no money spent.
Here are the ways I have used:
Be a guest: Every time someone gets access to an airline lounge – either on the basis of a paid membership or because of …