Bits ‘n Pieces for January 2, 2013

News and Notes from Around the Interweb:

  • The Pizza in Motion blog is giving away a free roundtrip ticket on American Airlines and also a choice of 25,000 United miles or 25,000 Hyatt points. A good blog, but one that gets less attention, which means chances of winning are likely to be pretty good.

  • Frequent Miler has a useful update on which retailers let you go through a shopping portal to buy gift certificates and earn points or cash back, and then go back through the shopping portal to make a purchase and earn more points or cash back while paying with the gift card — in other words double dipping, earning twice the reward for each purchase.

  • United will be featuring Chris Guillebeau’s $100 Startup as an audio book in its inflight entertainment March through June, which I think is pretty cool. I may have to take a United flight just to hear it, since the book features my award booking service.

  • Wandering Aramean notes that Kingfisher Airlines has lost its operating license. Undeterred they say they’re confident of getting it back, and also getting new financing. From the number two airline in India and on the cusp of joining oneworld to a question mark on whether it will exist going forward. Of course Air India failed to join Star Alliance as well. The Indian aviation market is a mess, with Jet Airways in many ways struggling but a possibility for Star in the future. A large population, lots of flying, lots of bureaucratic intervention (such as suggesting that Jet Airways couldn’t get an alliance boost if Air India didn’t get one first). This is a perennially promising and yet fiscally dangerous place to tread.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. “one that gets less attention, which means chances of winning are likely to be pretty good”

    Not anymore, at least not for this offer. Look out Pizza in Motion, 25K VFTW “InstaLaunch” coming at you. 😀

  2. Hope others are luckier than me, and I don’t mean just winning the contest. WordPress wouldn’t let me post there, required to win the 25K miles, because: “You are being asked to login {to WordPress} because {my email} is used by an account you are not logged into now.”

    Except, of course, I was logged in there, and had already gotten the confirmation of my sign up for the Pizza in Motion blog email list. PIM not quite ready for Prime Time? Or just another reason most serious bloggers don’t use WordPress anymore….

  3. Boarding Area is a WordPress hosted system? I don’t think so, since the PIM site has the W logo in its url, and a WordPress ad at the bottom. Whereas the Boarding Area ad at the bottom here leads to a page encouraging WP bloggers to switch over from WP to BA.

    Or do you also have a WP blog that I don’t know about, in addition to this one? I tried to Google for that, but didn’t find anything. Maybe under a different name? 😀

    I have never, ever, had any problems with Boarding Area blogs. But I have had continual problems, over a period of years, being able to comment on any site labeled WordPress. As I just did with Pizza in Motion, where WordPress would not let me post to enter the contest, insisting I was not logged into my Yahoo email address. Despite the fact that my sign up confirmation for PIM promptly arrived at that very email account. As far as I can tell, they wanted me to force me to sign up for a WP account as a pre-condition for posting a comment there. More trouble than I wanted to go thru just to enter a contest.

  4. @Robert Hanson – BoardingArea is not hosted by WordPress, but runs on WordPress software, at least I’m using a WordPress control panel as i type my reply to your comment right now!

  5. Ok, that clears it up. If I wanted to quibble, I’d say you don’t really “blog on WordPress”, you just use WP software. But I don’t want to quibble, 😀 certainly not with you. I’m just thankful that you are not directly hosted by WP, due to my long experience of frustration with them. My travel life would be much less rich without VFW !

Comments are closed.