Tag: United Posts

How To Fly For Free And Earn Elite Status

Mileage

I started my long-term travel adventures in January of 2011, almost 2.5 years ago. Looking back, I really had no idea how the airline systems worked: I wasn’t really collecting any sort of air-miles, didn’t know how to fly for free, nor was I trying to get to any type of elite status (I didn’t even really know how to be honest). After 2.5 years though, I’ve finally hit my travel groove. So lately I’ve been dedicating efforts towards taking advantage of some of the cracks in the system to make the most of my travel adventures and to fly for free around the world as much as I can going forward. Here are some of the tricks I’m using. Using Rewards Cards To Earn Free Flights Or Vacations Everyone who travels often should also have at least one travel rewards card – not only do these also let you […]

United Sticks It To Their Loyalty Program Members

 Travel

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 much better, but anyone using United miles to fly on partner airlines is now facing a large increase on many routes. I asked United about it on Twitter, and here was their response. They further clarified the information they gave me with this information tweet to this guy. Another […]

Flying With A Guitar

Tips

While I own several guitars, I previously have never attempted flying with a guitar. A quick Google search on the Internet reveals a lot of confusion about the process, as well as a few horror stories about damaged or stolen guitars. An infamous story of breakage ended in a viral internet video known as “United Breaks Guitars”: When I was in Argentina in 2011, I ended up having more free time than I thought I would have. In those moments, I really missed having access to a guitar that I could pick up and play. I went down to a local guitar store thinking I would buy something cheap, but it’s definitely hard going from a $1,000 – $2,000 guitar back down to a $100 one. Plus, I didn’t really want to deal with selling it when I was leaving. So for this trip I decided I would bring a […]