Travel Trends tips

Airport lounge memberships are a luxury that most can afford but very few can actually justify. If you don’t fly at least semi-regularly, it just doesn’t make financial sense to spend almost $500 for an annual lounge pass. A $50 day pass, maybe. But even that’s a stretch.

On February 28, 2017, at the stroke of midnight, Hyatt’s current loyalty program, Gold Passport, will be terminated. That’s right: terminated. As in, the end. Kaput.

While it’s unlikely to ever become a standard hotel feature, flexible check-in and check-out is an obvious traveler-pleaser. Really, who wants to be locked into the hotels’ arbitrary definition of when a hotel stay can begin and end?

Dream tips like sailing around the Greek Islands or along the Amalfi Coast are only for the rich and famous, right? Not anymore.

Conde Nast Traveler gets a lot of mileage out of its annual Readers’ Choice Awards, slicing and dicing feedback from 300,000 travelers into a dizzying array of categories, sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories. Not only is there a ranking of the best cities in the world, there’s also the best small cities in the U.S. The world’s best hotels, sure. But also the top 10 hotels in Europe, and in Northern Asia, and in Eastern Mexico, and in Florence.

The recent history of travel is in no small part the story of online travel. And that story has yet to be better told than by Skift’s “The Definitive Oral History of On line Travel,” a collection of interviews with the key people associated with the startups of such iconic companies as Expedia, TripAdvisor, Kayak, Priceline, and the like.

It’s been a bad week for Hertz. And it could be just the first of many bad weeks to come.

Two fast-growing budget carriers that serve the U.S. from Europe, Norwegian and WOW Air, both recently announced cancellations of several transatlantic routes.

Yesterday, two of the world’s largest airlines got new presidents. What’s less clear is how, and why.

The merger of Alaska Airlines and Virgin America has left many travelers bemoaning the impending disappearance of Virgin, one of the industry’s best-loved airlines, as it’s folded into Alaska.

Unless you’re traveling in first or business class, and maybe even then, longer flights simply mean more discomfort. So while airlines take it as a point of pride that they operate long, longer, and longest flights, most flyers rightly treat long-flight boasts as more threat than promise.

The two biggest expenses when planning a trip are airfare and accommodations. What if you could skip one of those? While you’re unlikely to finagle a free flight without elite or airline-employee status, there are a surprising number of ways to score free lodging if you’re flexible.

Passport changes are coming, and if you plan on traveling in the near future—especially if you’re among the 49 million Americans whose passports will expire in the next few years—you need to know what passport changes are in store.

On March 1, Hyatt’s Gold Passport program will become World of Hyatt. Whether the change amounts to the introduction of a wholly new program or just a revamp of the existing program is more a matter of semantics than of substance. However how choose to look at it, though, the program is changing. And, according to many Hyatt loyalists, the change is not for the better.

On the landing page of a new website touting the consumer benefits of Alaska’s acquisition of Virgin America, which closed today, there’s this:

In yet another sign that the mainstream travel industry is slowly recognizing (if not wholeheartedly embracing) the sharing economy, Delta this week began awarding frequent-flyer miles for Airbnb stays.

It’s been a long time in coming, but PreCheck, the TSA’s trusted-traveler program, is now available to passengers flying on Frontiers Airlines.

AccorHotels is the latest hotel chain to make a concerted effort to curry favor with Millennial travelers. By 2020, the company will roll out 50 new hotels under a new brand named JO&JOE, described as follows:

Each year, the World Tourism Organization (a specialized agency of the United Nations) sponsors a day to highlight tourism around the world. September 27th marks World Tourism Day 2017. The agency designated this year’s as the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development to raise awareness for social, economic, and environmental progress with travel. Now more than ever, you should be thinking more about these values as you make your travel plans. Here’s why.

If you’re among the many air travelers who believe that the airlines have conspired to keep airfares high by restraining capacity growth, you’re about to have that suspicion reality-checked in a court of law.

It wasn’t that long ago that Southwest’s self-proclaimed identity as the Love Airline was a credible bit of branding, reflecting a virtuous circle of contentment among the airline’s customers, employees, and shareholders. For now, however, the love fest appears to be over.