TBB Mission: To Entertain, Educate and Inspire. Aim to at least do one well!
The ridiculous race is on to get readers to click on the SPG Amex 30k affiliate links! Make fun of them and enter to win two AA Admirals Club passes! GREAT odds, only 18 valid entries! Say anything you want now to enter, the Milepoint people do!
If you like what you see here, please let others know by passing them a link to my blog, thank you!
TRAVEL
20 wonderful national parks and inspiring landscapes
Totally Awesome New York City Timelapse video! First found at Gadling.
MIDTOWN from Drew Geraci (District 7 Media) on Vimeo.
Mile Adventures has a nice series about traveling to places with…sharks! In this post, it is French Polynesia and Belize. Nice stuff.
The Transcon Wars: The Ultimate Airline Battleground. By Airchive. A very detailed analysis of this intense battleground. I know some of you are airline geeks, so have at it! (HT: Mileage Update)
Today’s post about Travel would not be complete without the buzzword of the day: Hyperloop
Yeah, one more list: The Best 25 Hotels in the World. Two ladies aggregate some rankings together and voila! Interesting list to stare at. I proudly say I have not stayed in a single one because TBB is a man of the common people lol.
Rapid Travel Chai in another post from his second trip to North Korea. I think he is doing a multi part post because he knows I am a sucker for North Korean stuff lol.
MILES/POINTS
Direct Flights from New York that can be booked with British Airways Avios points. By DansDeals. Good stuff. It’s mostly ok/tolerable when cc links are provided along with good content imho.
I saw Elysium last weekend. Did you know that you can get 200 Sony Rewards points per ticket? You need to log in, request it and then you need to take a pic of the ticket(s) and upload it. Not much but hey, this is an addiction:-) Oh, the movie is very good but not as good as District 9.
Travel is Free (is not) has an excellent primer on earning Priority Club IHG Rewards points. I remember earning almost 25k PC points from a two night stay at that Holiday Inn at the first Chicago Seminar!
Chris Elliott had another post out calling loyalty programs a scam. Don’t care much what he has to say, he is just looking for attention.
ON MY MIND
“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” – Seth Godin
ODDZ & ENDZ
Did you know that North Korea has a “hand-phone” manufacturing plant? Neither did we! Here, Kim Jong-un is touring one. The photo captions are hilarious! Check how they take notes by pen, lol.
The weirdest Guinness World Records
This is what happens online in 60 Seconds. Way cool (HT to Will Run For Miles)
How Google Search Works. This is extremely cool! Scroll…keep scrolling!
BLOG BUZZ
You know it is tough to come up with content daily when Million Mile Secrets does a post on how to add American Airlines AAdvantage accounts to Award Wallet. With pics and arrows, seriously? 🙂
If I started doing blog posts (with affiliate credit card links) for every card I get approved of, you guys will tear me apart! So, after the Bluebird affiliate link (can’t imagine this pays much!), View from the Wing tells us about his SPG Amex approval. Come on!
Sometimes I wonder if some bloggers go a full blog post without a single affiliate link…does it hurt inside?
Lenticular Travel decides to tell us all about his miles & points strategy. And flash us all with his creditcards.com links. Maybe I should take a look at that as everyone and their dog gets them now!
Travel-Summary and Travel with Grant are doing a local meetup in the Tustin District in Orange County, CA. What I found totally hilarious is how they added this as an incentive: “The Tustin District has a Target, a Walmart, and an Office Depot near by, as well as a CVS I frequently go to.” That made me smile…a lot!
The Noob Traveler decides to tell us all how the Starwood AMEX card can be better. Are you serious? And he gets called for neglecting to add that you get Gold status for spending $30k on the card. And he says he will edit the post. And he goes back to work on the creditcardwatchdog product. Expect another sighting to push some more cards very soon. Experts…smh.
Mommy Points has become so smooth in incorporating affiliate links to her content I feel a bit bad for calling her out on it:-) Last posts at least contained some decent content suitable to her audience.
LOL.
I hope we can use Avios on Hyperloop.
That would be awesome indeed…if the program is still around when this thing is built…if it will ever be built that is!
Excellent. I’ve always strived for ok/tolerable! Threw in a link to my 80K MR find for those willing to brave through the tolerableness 😉
Definitely one of those posts I should have outsourced to a ghostwriter before embarking, spent way too much time on it.
Flying from the home of Chuck Ramsey to the BBQ capital of the world on Sunday to be a judge at a kosher BBQ contest.
http://www.kckosherbbq.com/
Ribs.
Dan you mashugana you
I would love to be a judge in any BBQ contest!
Count me as a sucker for North Korean stuff, too. We all have such short attention spans online that I for this one I indulging is spreading it out among a number of posts, being there for the 60th Victory Day was incredible and I want to share the feel of being up close.
So, you sent me my check yet or is it in the mail? 🙂
After skimming past the 25 best hotels that you posted, I’m ready to compile a list of the best hotels under $150/night for the rest of us common travelers. That would be a fun one to research, though I’d want to do it first-hand.
Sounds good, be my guest;-)
Chris Elliott is the blacksmith making nails for people who have bags of hammers for brains. The comments on that article are good. Yes, please, no one sign up for loyalty programs. Leave all award seat inventory alone!
Like Mr. Red Slings and Yellow Arrows, he’s discovered a truism of American business: selling to the lazy and moronic is extremely lucrative. Just ask Richard Viguerie, Bernie Madoff, and Jim Cramer. People want something for nothing, and they want to congratulate themselves on their cleverness and thank the seller for the opportunity to be an “insider.” And if something goes wrong, well, it certainly wasn’t their fault, and could someone else please make things right? Some of Mark Twain’s most genuinely American characters are the Duke and the Dauphin.
Hey, George, want to ruin a deal? I have a possible lead/idea. I was booking friends’ honeymoon flights using miles on Saturday evening (successfully, but don’t tell Chris). It was multi-city, from a major US city to Yurup, A-B, C-D, D-A, late September.
I then went to the Little Squirrel to see what their flights would have cost in $$$ terms. The cheapest alternative was ~1200 per person, and a very similar itinerary to theirs was ~1500 per person. The similar itinerary was not exclusively Star, however. When I clicked through from Little Squirrel to Jean-Luc Picard’s father’s site, the price on checkout changed to ~$1500 for both for the entire itinerary. (They weren’t interested in changing, so I didn’t bother clicking through.)
Don’t know if this is a known flaw/trick or just a one-time deal. Don’t have time to play around with it. And not decoding it.
I’m flying today (ugh), or at least I was supposed to be flying. There’s a storm in New York so everything’s grounded and delayed from DC to Chicago. Some twenty-first century this is turning out to be.
And the DOJ moves to block the AA-US merger. I might end up getting some cheap USAir anniversary miles from Barclays after all. Suckers who used blogger affiliate links will still get nothing except another bill for the $89 annual fee; thank your local miles blogger!
The fact that I have friends working in the DOJ Antitrust Division has nothing to do with this. Nothing to see here, move along…..
Every time I read CE I shake my head. I must admit my head shakes more when I read him compared to Delta Points:-)
“Selling to the lazy and moronic”: oh boy, did you nail it or what. The crap my eyes see daily is beyond to what my eyebrows can tolerate. In fact, my eyebrows are turning white faster than Obama’s hair is turning gray!
TBB does not kill/ruin deals! I keep secrets for myself if I am asked to…guaranteed! Like no one will ever know about the Home Improvement card before all you guys learned about it and some got burned by it (no pity, this is dangerous game!). If I reveal the name I think my days are numbered:-)
Every time I see the crappy US Air cc offer pushed by a blogger I feel rage inside me. We have road rage and….blogger rage too!
Thank you for your undercover work in the DOJ Antitrust Division to push the brakes on the merger and make Dougie sweat a little. The timing of it certainly surprised everyone. Maybe I should hold on to my US miles after all!
High praise indeed as I highly respect Chris Elliott!
I respect him for his consumer advocate role. When it comes to royalty programs the dude sounds like a loose ignorant lunatic!
“Some twenty-first century this is turning out to be”
5th greatest bull market, ever!!! (based on S&P 500). Imagine where S&P will be by the end of the century.
I am not going to make it to the end of the century so I could care less:-)
Agreed. Mommy Points has becoming very smooth at shilling credit cards. Gone are the days when she would talk about a hotel devaluation and throw in the affiliate links or frame her inferior affiliate links as an “unique” opportunity…
I scan the whole blogosphere and every day I am amazed of the ingenuity displayed by so many bloggers to come up with yet more inventive ways to slip in them affiliate links.
“selling to the lazy and moronic is extremely lucrative. Just ask Richard Viguerie, Bernie Madoff, and Jim Cramer”
….. and Million Mile Secrets
Where is the AgendaGuy? 🙂
Glad to make the list again. We are going to have a restaurant poll for the Tustin District, my guess is In-n-out will win.
Maybe Chuckie Cheese would be more apropos.
That’s a good idea. I have a handful of tokens and tickets in my lunch box. Thanks Richard Gere’s Gerbal.