United Discounts Award Travel to 4 Hot Spots

How much will you be charged for that hotel stay? The answer, of course, should be obvious: You’ll pay the published rate, plus government-imposed taxes and fees. Whatever that total turns out to be is your price.

It’s a fact of loyalty-program life: Airline and hotel programs periodically adjust their award prices. Of course, those adjustments amount to price hikes more often than not. And, all things being equal, higher award prices amount to an overall devaluation of the program.

As changes to hotel-program award prices go, the latest for InterContinental’s IHG Rewards are decidedly modest: Prices for award nights at 400 hotels will change by either 5,000 or 10,000 points, half moving up, half moving down. If it were just that 50-50 split, Rewards members might dismiss it as a wash and count their blessings. After all, “It could have been worse.”

Enter the United Airlines “Billion Mile Giveaway” sweepstakes by September 30, 2016, for a chance to win one of 100 grand prizes of 1 million United MileagePlus miles, plus $750 to cover taxes, each. Runner-up prizes include smaller numbers of miles. In total, 1 billion miles will be given away.

For U.S. News & World Report, the road from weekly news magazine to publisher of company rankings has been a long and winding one. The key, though, to its shift toward data-driven ratings of companies and institutions was its 1983 publication of “America’s Best Colleges.”

If you’re a member of the National Rifle Association, you may have gotten accustomed to enjoying member discounts from a number of prominent travel suppliers. If you check today, you’ll find that most of those NRA partner companies are no longer listed on the NRA website.

Predictably, the U.S. State Department has issued a travel advisory following yesterday’s terrorist attacks in Brussels.

Raising questions of both ethics and law, the chief executive of Donald Trump’s hotel company, Trump Hotels, has announced plans to significantly expand the company’s presence in the U.S.

How much is a monopoly worth? Plenty, for sure. But it’s no easy matter to precisely quantify its value in any particular situation.

In the airline’s first major initiative since replacing CEO Jeff Smisek with Oscar Munoz, United today announced details of a major upgrade to its international business-class product.

The traditional taxi business is far from dead, but the ever-burgeoning popularity of rideshare services like Uber and Lyft is a clear threat to the survival of the yellow cabs that for decades have been a mainstay of big-city transportation. It’s fair to say that the rise of Uber and its ilk have led to the erosion of taxis, and could eventually lead to their outright demise (or, perhaps, their radical transformation).

Got an AAdvantage credit card issued by Citibank or Barclays? Then you may be entitled to book American award flights for fewer miles.