by Robert McGarvey

I was looking at the trio of wall-mounted dispensers in my hotel’s shower – truth is I was trying to decipher which was body soap but the typeface was too small and eventually I conceded and went out to the bedroom to retrieve my reading glasses.  

And then a memory popped up.  I recalled a conversation I had with a onetime client, maybe 15 years ago, and he was telling me his company, which managed dozens of hotels, reaped a huge advantage against stand alone properties because of its bulk buying of staples such as soaps, toilet paper, coffee, towels, the stuff hotels use in mass quantities.

Nothing special in that and then he said something that really caught my attention: “Of course I don’t use the in-room soaps. I bring my own.”

This was after TSA had decreed we travel only with miniature bottles and therefore he carefully poured his preferred shampoo, conditioner, body soap into little bottles before a trip.

Turns out he may have known something important long before I tumbled to it.

It was about that same time when big hotel groups began the phase out of individual mini bars of soap and tiny bottles of shampoo.  I remember them telling me this was good for the environment. Don’t forget they said that.

They didn’t say this but the shift to giant bottles could also save a few pennies of a housekeeper’s time because those big dispensers need less attention.

By about five years ago, the transition was over. Big jugs had won.  

That victory became all the plainer in 2019 when California passed a law prohibiting big hotels from using little toiletry bottles.  The flashpoint was a desire to decrease plastic waste, so out went single use tiny bottles.

Should you in fact use the big bottles in the shower?

Maybe not.

The hotel managers leading the conversion didn’t say those big jugs can spawn all manner of nastiness, which a onetime hotel manager took to TikTok to warn about.  She said she had seen bodily fluids in refillable shampoo and conditioner bottles and advised never to use them.

She added: “I’ve seen Nair and god knows what else in there.”

This should come as no real surprise.  One reason the capsule coffee machines have become standard issue in hotel rooms is that too many of us were using old fashioned Mr Coffee type carafes to make ramen, wash underwear, and who knows what else.  Personally I won’t use those carafes that still show up in some hotels even tho I am a big coffee drinker and I have developed a real fondness for hotels with giant coffee urns in the lobby.

If guests can use coffee makers to clean their socks, why wouldn’t I expect some would use in-room bulk toiletry dispensers for mischievous purposes?

Hotels aren’t ignorant about such worries. Many now boast that they use “tamper proof” containers and probably that will become the norm, just as tamper proof bottles rule the racks in our drug stores.

But removing that worry doesn’t necessarily deliver the win for the big containers.

That’s because there’s also an environmental argument against those bulk dispensers. Remember, this shift was purportedly fueled by environmental concerns of big hotel operators. That may be utter malarkey however. Per the Washington Post, “the greenest option is an old-school bar of soap made from plant oil or animal fat and lye, without many extra ingredients. Simple bar soap cuts greenhouse emissions by about a third compared with liquid soap, according to a study from the Institute of Environmental Engineering at the Swiss university ETH Zurich.”

Perhaps more curiously, research shows that many of us use more of the stuff that’s in those big bottles than we do with smaller bottles.  “Most of the studies show that people believe the product is less efficacious, meaning it doesn’t work as well, when they share it with strangers rather than friends,” UC Riverside marketing professor Thomas Kramer said. “Then, in some studies, it shows that it actually leads to them using more to make up for that perceived low efficacy.”

It’s in a big bottle and so we think it’s cheap (which probably it is) and, therefore, we use more of it to compensate for its inferiority. Multiply those greenhouse emissions.

Bottomline: my hotel executive/client was right. Bring your own toiletries. Ignore the giant dispenser on the shower walls and, whatever you do, don’t ever use an in-room coffee care except to wash underwear.

by Robert McGarvey

Sustainable jet fuel is a wonderful idea. US and European carriers all say they will reach zero carbon emission by 2050 and that hinges on use of lots of sustainable fuel. This matters in a world of climate change and, yes, air travel contributes just 2.5% of carbon emissions but it’s 2.5% that may not be necessary, both because a lot of business air travel is absolutely pointless (as many big companies realized during the pandemic) but also because there may be ways to drive emissions down to that zero goal.

Just listen to the carriers. Everybody in commercial aviation talks a good game when it comes to net zero carbon. But words are cheap.

The realities, in Europe and the US, are starkly different.

Tune into what is now happening in Europe where the European Commission is holding the feet of 20 carriers to the fires, saying they are simply greenwashing their actions.

Europe by the way has set ambitious goals regarding aviation and sustainability. Per POLITICO, “By 2025, 2 percent of the fuel powering aircraft in the EU has to be green, rising to 5 percent in 2030, and then increasing every five years to 70 percent in 2050. Airplanes currently use only a tiny amount of SAF, which is much more expensive than kerosene.”

It’s a fact that sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) – which is made out of things that aren’t petroleum – would dramatically reduce carbon emissions but there just isn’t much of it. In 2022 the US produced 1.8 million gallons of SAF, not even 0.1% of fuel used that year, a year where air travel in the US remained deflated by Covid fears. SAF also costs around 10X more than traditional jet fuels and, sure, as production scales prices will come down but nobody knows by how much.

Even so, all the major European carriers are busily defending their environmental efforts. Which are? Read the Politico piece which neatly sums up what they say they are doing. (Hint: they aren’t doing much substantive beyond talking.)

The upshot: European consumer groups now say the carriers are simply fibbing about their environment gains. The European Consumer Organization (BECU) has been especially pointed in its criticisms. Said BECU’s director general, Monique Goyens, “It is unacceptable that airlines have freely lured consumers into offsetting their flight’s emissions, sometimes at a high price. One can never be sure that the trees planted to compensate a flight’s high emissions will capture the carbon back into the ground – if they are planted at all…. Greenwashing is no longer acceptable, and the fact that aviation is one of the most highly polluting sectors makes it even more intolerable. Today’s crack down on greenwashing is encouraging at a time when consumers are expected to shift to more sustainable lifestyles.”

Which brings us to the big question: exactly what are US carriers doing?

Well, Delta, for instance, has been saying for several years that it is “carbon neutral.” But a lawsuit insists the claim is hooey because it hinges on carbon offsets that don’t do much good.

United has been hit with a similar suit alleging “false and misleading” statements.

But mainly we are silent about what the US carriers are (not) doing.

Where is the US government in this brouhaha? I don’t know, do you? Yes, the feds have ponied up tax credits up to $1.75 per gallon for SAF, but that’s not much claimed because there simply isn’t a lot of SAF on the market.

The White House also have unveiled a Sustainable Aviation Fuel Grand Challenge that is about as exciting as the program’s name. There doesn’t appear to be substantial financial backing for the program but it certainly is rich in telling how grand it will be when aviation is sustainable.

Which maybe puts the ball in our court, that is, the passengers and for us there are “carbon offset” programs. Most airlines now offer such programs and they seem swell. Pony up a few bucks to plant trees and, shazam, your carbon from the flight is canceled out. Except it doesn’t work that way.

Reported the New York Times: “A carbon offset is a credit that you can buy to make up for your emissions. So if you fly from New York to San Francisco, releasing around 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, you can purchase an offset, funding a project that will remove or store that same amount of carbon dioxide elsewhere, often by planting or preserving trees.

At least that’s the idea. But many scientists object to the principle, on the grounds that we need to sharply reduce emissions, not just try to cancel them out.”

The Washington Post is more withering. Here’s the headline: “Airlines want you to buy carbon offsets. Experts say they’re a ‘scam.'”

That puts the shoes back in our own hands. The best step: fly less. Of course.

When that’s not an option, fly in economy. Pax up front contribute a lot more emissions.

Then there are lifestyle changes we can make such as driving less (walk more!) and driving an electric car.

All these are small steps, yes they are, but right now it’s up to us to make a personal difference because we simply can’t count on the airlines or our government.

by Robert McGarvey

Senators Jeff Merkley and John Kennedy want to make you wait in very long lines at airports.  That is a fact and the senators are seeking to amend the FAA reauthorization bill to include language to severely curtail use of biometrics to identify people at airports.

What Merkley-Kennedy ask for is to block expansion of biometrics at airports until 2027 and to make clear that passengers can opt out of it.  

That would call halt on the TSA plan to expand biometrics from today’s 25 airports to 430.  

Just what technology is involved? Per the New York Times, “Using kiosks with iPads affixed to them, passengers have their photographs taken and matched to an image from an ID, eliminating the need for workers to make such a match with their eyes.”

For his part, Merkley apparently believes it’s a god given right in the US not to have one’s photo taken without permission.  He is obviously oblivious to the many, many cameras built into people’s doorbells, for instance, but this is a guy who as a state legislator in Oregon fiercely opposed red light cameras

“The TSA program is a precursor to a full-blown national surveillance state,” said Senator Merkley. “Nothing could be more damaging to our national values of privacy and freedom. No government should be trusted with this power.”

Note: I did not make up that quote. It’s the Senator’s.

As for Senator Kennedy, he fumes that “Unless Congress reins in this program through our amendment to the F.A.A. reauthorization bill, I fear bureaucrats will start seizing and hoarding the biometrics of millions of travelers without explicit permission.”

Kennedy added: “Every day, TSA scans thousands of Americans’ faces without their permission and without making it clear that travelers can opt out of the invasive screening.”

I have to admit that when I’ve been aware of biometrics in use at airports I’ve applauded it.  Things just seemed to go faster, more smoothly.

I’m not alone. Far from it. Over half of us in the US use biometrics daily.  I know I use it multiple times a day, usually on an iPhone and in lieu of typing in a password. I much prefer to use biometrics and admit to scratching my head when I see the luddite idiocy from Kennedy and Merkley.

I’m not alone.

The U.S. Travel Association, a trade association involving many of the industry’s biggest players, bluntly says of the Merkley-Kennedy language: “According to a U.S. Travel Association analysis, the proposed amendment could result in travelers waiting an additional 120 million hours in TSA lines each year by significantly slowing both TSA PreCheck and standard screening lanes.”

The U. S. Travel Association adds: “Further, the senators’ proposal threatens national security by effectively banning TSA’s use of facial recognition technology for non-PreCheck passengers–which mal-intentioned individuals could exploit.”

Alexa C. Lopez, a T.S.A. spokeswoman, told the New York Times that photographs were not stored or saved after a positive ID match, “except in a limited testing environment for evaluation of the effectiveness of the technology.”

Besides, if TSA wants to hold my photo, have at it. Dozens of pix of me are readily found on the Internet. That privacy genie long ago fled the bottle.

“This proposed legislation threatens to turn America’s airports into the equivalent of college bars where fake IDs rule the day,” said Geoff Freeman, CEO of U. S. Travel Association. “TSA, to its credit, is innovating with the latest security technology and members of Congress are threatening to stand in its way–at the expense of the travel experience.”

At a glance, the Merkley-Kennedy language did not survive in the Senate’s latest version of the FAA bill. But don’t assume it’s RIP. Know that this Kennedy-Merkley language has been floating around the District for six months and it isn’t going away.  Like the Terminator it will come back even when you thought it was killed off, mainly because Kennedy and Merkley seem sincerely to believe the luddite bilge they spew.

Also know that over 18 million of us pay to use biometrics associated with Clear and that’s because they believe it speeds their way through the 55+ plus airports where it’s in use.

The winner in this battle already is known. But luddites got to do what luddites do, even when it is a hopeless mission.  
Write your senator and tell him/her to ignore Kennedy-Merkley. 

by Robert McGarvey

Money talks, you know what walks.  

On May 24 the Biden Administration announced final rules regarding refunds on flight delays and ancillary fees. You already know what it requires: refunds when a flight is delayed more than three hours domestically (six internationally).Refunds when baggage is significantly delayed. Refunds when paid for services aren’t delivered (WiFi, seat selection, inflight entertainment).

The reaction in the frequent flier community has been a yawn.  The refunds are ok as far as they go. But in the EU they go much farther in providing compensation to passengers; the US refunds are a pale carbon copy.  Yes, they are much better than the nothing we had (which was whatever the airline judged fair and we got it only when we jumped through all the hops an airline required) but the Biden package is a watered down disappointment.

In my view.

The trade group Airlines for America sees matters very differently. A statement said: “Unnecessary regulatory rules issued without collaboration will lead to three things: confusion for consumers, reduction in choice and a decline in competition, which historically drives up prices. Very simply put, a one-size-fits-all approach is anticompetitive and anticonsumer.”

Wait, requiring refunds for delayed flights is anticonsumer? This will drive up air fares?

There are moments, aren’t there, when today’s arguments seem like discarded scribbles from a rough draft of 1984. 

Yes, most consumers who understand what the DOT ruling requires wish there was more – but they also know that a slice of pie is better than the nothing airlines traditionally have handed out.

And then the stuff that walks got cranked up to an ear splitting volume by Ted Cruz and a few fellow travelers who want to erase the new DOT requirement that airlines make it easy for a consumer to ask for a refund (as opposed to the old, opaque processes that very probably nobody understood because it was never the intent that anyone actually use them).   

Cruz and his gaggle are cobbling together a bill to make this reversal happen.

The New Republic outlined what’s up here: “The bill would essentially make refunds only available to people who have the time and resources to navigate whatever processes an airline sets up. Plus, contacting an airline has never been easy to do. This would also seem to defeat the purpose of Biden’s new rule: hassle-free payback to inconvenienced travelers.”

What is interesting about the Cruz gaggle is that it is bipartisan, something that never happens in 2024 Washington DC. But, wait, remember our opening line. Jacobin tells what Cruz et. al. have in common. “All of them take substantial airline industry donations.”

Jacobin continued: “The lawmakers are four of the six largest congressional recipients of campaign cash from the airline industry in the current election cycle, according to data from the government transparency group OpenSecrets.”

Joining Cruz are Maria Cantwell and Rick Larsen (both Democrats from Washington where, um, isn’t Boeing headquartered there?) Sam Graves (R – Mo) is also in the group.

Much of the draft bill is plain vanilla, little to object to.

And then there’s a curveball: “Sets Clear Right to Refunds: For the first time, passengers will have clear standards in law for refunds when an airline cancels or significantly delays a flight.  A refund will be required if a domestic flight is delayed 3-hours and if an international flight is delayed 6-hours. Airlines will be required to display easy-to-find refund request buttons on their websites.”

That sounds good. It isn’t. What it does is undo the DOT rules and puts the burden for action back on the passenger, many of whom long ago gave up fighting with air carriers because it’s akin to trying to put an egg back into a cracked shell.

Usually, nobody except a low level aide would actually read such a routine document from Cruz et. al. That’s why it’s a perfect place to insert mayhem. 

But in this case clumsy Cruz stumbled and others took notice.  For instance: “Congress is using the latest FAA Reauthorization to weaken the DOT’s hugely popular new rule requiring automatic cash refunds for flight cancellations and delays—a watershed achievement issued just last week to protect passengers against too-big-to-care airlines,” said Morgan Harper, Director of Policy and Advocacy at the American Economic Liberties Project.

What can we do? Write your Senator and get this legislation stopped..

Sure, the Biden rules are disappointing…but they are better than the nothing burger Cruz et al are serving up.

by Robert McGarvey

In a typical year, maybe 25% of us redeem credit card rewards for travel – but about the same number don’t redeem their card rewards for anything in that year.  Some probably are accruing points to redeem for a splashy something but others probably will never redeem the points. Keep that indifference in mind as you read on.

Meantime, both Visa and MasterCard have entered into a consent decree that will reduce so called swipe fees (aka interchange) by some $30 billion.  Merchants paid around $72 billion in interchange fees in 2023  so that $30 billion is a big chunk of the money that’s involved.

But there would be still more cuts if Senator Dick Durbin’s Credit Card Competition Act were enacted into law.  

Here’s what the CCC would do: “The Credit Card Competition Act of 2023 would enhance credit card competition and choice in order to reduce excessive credit card fees. It would require the largest credit-card issuing financial institutions in the country—those with assets over $100 billion–to enable at least two credit card networks to be used on their credit cards instead of just one, and at least one of those networks must be a network other than the Visa/Mastercard duopoly.”

Big merchants – WalMart – like the CCC and very much want to use low fee pipe to process card charges. 

Durbin of course is an enemy of long standing of airline loyalty programs which he sees as contemporary variations of the three card monte that used to be played on tourists in Times Square.  Said Durbin a couple months ago: “For years, airlines have profited from employing deceptive and unfair practices within their frequent flyer and loyalty programs.” Ouch. But what he says is true.

And now the U.S. Travel Association – a lobbying organization funded primarily by huge travel companies such as Amex, Marriott International, Visit California and United Airlines – has produced data that, reports Travel Weekly, “shows that even a 10% decrease in travel booked via credit card rewards would mean 1.5 million fewer trips and $4.3 billion in lost economic activity for local travel businesses.”  (Note: The USTA has not taken a formal position on the CCC.)

What’s missing here? A good argument that if a significant chunk of credit card processing were switched onto low cost rails that generate less fee income for credit card issuers card rewards would significantly decrease. That causality is assumed…but there’s absolutely no proof it would happen. When Europe moved to shift more card processing to low cost rails a decade ago, the same fears were trucked out by travel groups – airlines in particular – but the rewards continued, said the National Retail Federation in a March statement.

There’s no reason to think that, were the CCC enacted into law, that, poof, the credit card rewards we accrue and use would instantly vanish.  They won’t.

Might awards begin to require more points (or miles) and be harder to claim? Almost certainly that’s probable – but that’s because in every recent years good rewards (such as international flights) have gotten pricier.  That’s happened without CCC.  It will continue happening because, remember, we are playing three card monte with a dealer who never loses. Never.

Fear mongers point to the 2010 enactment of other Durbin legislation that capped debit card fees. Said Brian Kelly, founder of The Points Guy, at a Washington DC event sponsored by the US Tourism Economy Alliance to stir up opposition to CCC, “Debit card rewards disappeared, literally overnight.”

True enough but, again, there’s no proof that what befell debit cards would happen to credit cards which are entirely different financial instruments and that produce a variety of income streams for financial institutions that issue cards – such as interest income on card balances and annual card fees. In 2022, according to CFPB, card issuers pulled in $130 billion in interest and card fees.  The issuers won’t be hurting if their interchange income is cut a bit.

Bottomline: put away your worry beads.  Legislation won’t take away your credit card travel rewards.

In March this blog featured a piece Will Shrinking Credit Card Swipe Fees Mean the End to Rich Rewards for Us?  That piece looked at the expected impacts on rewards of the Visa/MasterCard cuts of interchange fee – slim to none in my estimation. 

by Robert McGarvey

Rip up that script from “The Graduate.” You’ll remember the scene where a middle aged man takes Dustin Hoffman (the graduate) aside and offers him one word of career advice: Plastics. That was 1967 and, indeed, plastics has had a great run – but now it is demonized as worse than air travel.

Read that last sentence again because many of us have begrudgingly embraced the belief that air travel is poison to our planet but now a new report has come out from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that says – to quote the headline in The Hill – “Plastics industry heats world 4 times as much as air travel, report finds.”

The Guardian added: “‘the plastic industry is ‘undermining the world’s efforts to address climate change’, said Heather McTeer Toney, executive director of the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Beyond Petrochemicals campaign, which helped fund the new report.”

The aviation industry contributes just 2.5% of the planet’s carbon emissions.  The rub is that only a tiny percentage of the globe’s population flies and so the whole planet suffers because of the few who fly.  Even so, flying does not contribute that much to global warming.

Not when compared to plastics.  Reported The Hill: “if plastic production remains constant, by 2050 it could burn through nearly a fifth of the Earth’s remaining carbon budget — the amount of carbon dioxide climate scientists believe can be burned without tipping the climate into unsafe territory.”

The Hill added: “emissions [from plastics plants] are equivalent to those of about 600 coal plants — about three times the number that exist across the U.S.”

Plastics have another toxic payload besides air pollution: “Plastic accumulating in our oceans and on our beaches has become a global crisis. Billions of pounds of plastic can be found in swirling convergences that make up about 40 percent of the world’s ocean surfaces. At current rates plastic is expected to outweigh all the fish in the sea by 2050,” according to the Center for Biological Diversity. 

So plastics are fouling our air and our water.

There’s now  a dust up between environmental groups – that want to see much less plastic on our planet – and the plastics companies who insist that recycling can fix many ills.  

But there’s also evidence that plastics recycling can create additional planetary toxicity.  Reported the Washington Post: “A recent peer-reviewed study that focused on a recycling facility in the United Kingdom suggests that anywhere between 6 to 13 percent of the plastic processed could end up being released into water or the air as microplastics — ubiquitous tiny particles smaller than five millimeters that have been found everywhere from Antarctic snow to inside human bodies.”

Plastics recycling is also something of a con:  Reported NPR: “The vast majority of plastic that people use, and in many cases put into blue recycling bins, is headed to landfills, or worse, according to a report from Greenpeace on the state of plastic recycling in the U.S. The report cites separate data …which revealed that the amount of plastic actually turned into new things has fallen to new lows of around 5%. That number is expected to drop further as more plastic is produced.”

Where does all this fit into a traveler’s life? Many of us have guilt about flying. Of course we can seek to fly less and every flight not taken – with a Zoom call substituting – indeed cuts carbon in the air. I still recommend that and seek to practice it myself.

But chew on this:  it may be as – or more – impactful if we also seek to dramatically cut our personal plastics consumption.  And we use lots of the stuff. According to the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems, “At 139 kg per capita per year (not including fiber and rubber polymers) North America has the highest per capita plastic consumption in the world.”

Remember this too: plastics are made from fossil fuels.  

The Hill closed out its piece with this: ““While global leaders are trying to negotiate a solution to the plastic crisis, the petrochemical industry is investing billions of dollars in making the problem rapidly worse,” said Neil Tangri of the University of California, Berkeley….“We need a global agreement to stop this cancerous growth, bring down plastic production, and usher in a world with less plastic and less pollution.”

So next time somebody grumbles at you about flying tell you have one word for them: Plastics.

by Robert McGarvey

Is it time for me to shuffle my premium card?  For longer than I remember Amex Plat has been my premium card but a headline in the New York Times caught my eye: “Now Arriving at an Airport Lounge Near You: Peloton Bikes, Nap Pods and Caviar Service.”  The subhead elaborated: “In recent months, a handful of exclusive credit card lounges have opened in airports in the United States. More are coming this year.”

The storyline of course is that now Plat has competition, particularly from Chase Sapphire Reserve ($550 per year) and Capital One Venture X ($395 per year).  Amex Plat is $695 per year, the priciest of the bunch.  Is it still worth keeping?

Probably the key premium card benefit is airport lounge access and, frankly, as I mentally scroll through recent flights I struck out at Denver Airport (the wait time for Centurion entry was longer than I had), at Love Field (no clubs), and walked away from a couple of Delta clubs because the lines seemed too long.

But that does not add up to an instant Amex Plat fail. The calculus is more complicated.

For starters Amex has many more Centurion clubs (14 including one in Phoenix, my home base) than Chase (3 – JFK, LaGuardia, Logan) or Capital One (3 – DFW, Denver, Dulles). Plat and Sapphire Reserve both throw in Priority Pass which I’ve found useful in Europe, not so much recently in the US.

Only Plat is currently in Phoenix – a huge plus for me – but Sapphire says it has a Phoenix club on its roadmap.

Amex also includes Delta club access if you are flying Delta (which I often am) and, yes, a 10 visit limit kicks in next year but I pray I won’t need that many entrances anyway.

So far I see Amex Plat retaining a big lead over the competitors, at least regarding club access.

That may not mean so much. As I noted above, when planes are packed as they are nowadays, so are airports and that especially means the clubs.  In the past year or so I’ve flicked a mental switch and no longer need club access.  If I get it that’s a plus but if I don’t, I shrug and carry on.

Then, too, I honestly don’t give a hoot that Capital One apparently is equipping its clubs with Peletons – which I have never used and don’t plan to. Nor am I salivating about Sapphire’s private suites – with caviar service! – $2200 to book! In a war of shiny objects look for me on the sidelines.

With Plat there also are useful benefits in addition to club access. There’s a $200 annual Uber credit ($15 per month, with $35 in December) and a $240 annual digital entertainment credit which pays for my NYTimes subscription.  There’s also free Walmart+ access ($12.95/month), a $200 hotel credit, and a $200 airline fee credit.  Right there, the annual fee is covered and my wife’s $195 card is paid for with a $100 Saks credit and $189 for Clear.

Could I make out as well cashing in perks at Chase Sapphire or Capital One Venture? Very probably.

But if my Amex Plat fees are in effect reimbursed in credits, why would I bother switching?

Another Amex Plat plus is the ease with which Membership Rewards points transfer into Delta miles.  

There simply isn’t a good reason for me to switch cards.

The real question is if you don’t have a premium card, do you need one?  My advice is to work through the fees and perks of the three leaders, factor in your specific needs and location and take it from there. Look at all three cards, sure. Your main goal: get the premium card for free once available perks are cashed in – and be realistic about the perks you’re likely to grab. Yes, there’s a $300 annual Equinox credit for Plat cardholders are I know I’m not going to use it so it’s value to me is nil. Many credits are cool but will you really use them? Be realistic – nay, ruthless – in assessing the real usefulness of the many perks that come with premium cards. You’ll never use most of them, I know I don’t.

But I still find real value in Amex Plat. Your mileage might vary.

by Robert McGarvey

Business travel is back.  According to GBTA, global business travel spend will hit $1.5 trillion in 2024, surpassing the $1.4 trillion notched in 2019 in a pre pandemic world.  GBTA says it will hit $1.6 trillion in 2025.  

But there are important changes in how business travelers travel.  The massive change: sustainability and employee wellness are now key factors in shaping corporate travel policies.  Bean counters are on the sidelines as other priorities rule. 

“Duty of care is everywhere now,” said Claire Steiner, the UK Director of the Global Travel and Tourism Partnership (GTTP).

What does that mean in concrete realities? According to Ryan Haynes in a Hospitalitynet article, it’s that “a company’s business travel policy might say that if an employee is travelling for more than four hours, they can book premium economy or business class on a plane. Rules like this recognise the impact of travel on wellbeing, and also on how productive and motivated employees can be when they are tired from travelling.”

I grinned as I read that, remembering my own initial business flights in an era where if a flight lasted longer than two hours we booked in the front of the plane.  Always.

But that era had long passed and in recent years I too often have flown coach on business trips and a promotion into premium economy indeed is a lovely thing.  

Another change, according to Haynes, is that “people take longer business trips. This is so staff can be more productive and incorporate more into their business trips, plus add on some leisure time too.”

Yes, that trip will be a day or two longer – but it will be less stressful and probably less tiring than many of yesteryear’s trips where I remember flying in the early a.m. from EWR to Houston, maybe having a business dinner there, waking early for a full day of meetings, catching a late afternoon flight back to Newark and getting home late at night.  Truth is, for most of that trip and maybe the first day back home I was operating at significantly less than full speed.

Give a worker more time on the ground and very probably overall productivity will go up along with employee satisfaction.

Add it up and the wellness related steps may be small but they are to the good for traveling employees.

But what about sustainability focused efforts which are becoming widespread, says Haynes: “According to Trainline Partner Solutions, 52% of businesses have already set targets for reducing their emissions from business travel, and 82% intend to improve support for employees to choose low carbon business travel options.”

Here’s the rub. It’s fine – indeed laudable – to set goals to build more sustainability into business travel but probably this will mainly be lip service. Air travel, especially front of the plane, is polluting. Period.

That’s why many European countries – Spain, Germany and France among them – are urging business travelers to use trains instead of planes. It’s a good suggestion but it’s also true that domestic travel in those countries involves many fewer miles than in the US and there’s also a good rail network in much of Europe but what we have in the US is old and rusting and slow.  It takes around two hours to fly from Chicago to NYC. It takes 10 times longer to go by train.  

From Phoenix to Chicago via train appears to take two days and nine hours. A plane flight is three and a half hours.

I’m not going to be booking via Amtrak soon and doubt you will either.

What about carbon offset programs for air passengers? When the New York Times looked into this it said forget about ‘em.  Here’s the headline for the Wirecutter story: “We Wish Buying Carbon Offsets for Your Flight Helped. It Doesn’t.”

The only real fix is to fly less which brings us back to where we started. More of us are now flying more for business and if we genuinely want to deliver sustainability goals the only way is to fly less.

Are we ready for that? The data say no.

But just about as certain businesses will talk up their ambitious sustainability goals.

Will they be achieved? To quote Jake Barnes, ”isn’t it pretty to think so?“

By Robert McGarvey

On Tuesday Mastercard and Visa dropped a bomb on their swipe fees that had been long expected and yet now we’re left to sort out what it means and, in particular, for those of us who pursue credit card rewards so we can live the high life for less.

You might think this is much ado about small change but the National Retail Federation says the pennies add up fast.  “Applied to millions of transactions each day, swipe fees are most retailers’ highest operating cost after labor, driving up consumer prices by more than $1,000 a year for the average household and hurting retail sales because consumers buy less when prices go up. Swipe fees have grown from about $20 billion a year when NRF began tracking them in 2001 to $160.7 billion in 2022.”

A lot of hands grab change out of this till. Northwestern’s KelloggInsight sums up what happens: “The merchant bank…pays a fee to the network and a fee to the card issuer called an ‘interchange fee.’ The issuer, meanwhile, pays its own fee to the network and delivers rewards to the consumer—rewards funded by interchange fees.”

Those credit card rewards add up of course.

In my case I have bought pairs of tickets from Phoenix to Madrid three times in this decade with points and also a pair of tickets to Dallas. There’s also cashback, I don’t know how much I’ve gotten in recent years but I can tell you I’ve accumulated $1098 in Bitcoin with a Venmo rewards card and that’s just one of a half dozen cashback cards in my wallet.

And then there’s the Visa/Mastercard explosion. What they did, to settle a class action suit, is agree to cut so called swipe fees 20% which will save merchants some $30 billion over five years.

That *may* result in lower prices at retail although there is skepticism in many quarters that we’ll see this happen. But a reality is that merchants of course do pass on swipe fees to consumers, just as they pass on their electric bill and their shoplifting losses and a loud complaint has been that it’s America’s lower income folks who pay with cash who pay the bills that fund our rewards.

So why aren’ merchants cheering this move by the two big card networks?  And they aren’t. “The settlement does nothing to actually bring competitive market forces to swipe fees or change the behavior of a cartel that centrally fixes rates and bars competition,” Christopher Jones, a senior vice president of government relations at the National Grocers Association, told the New York Times.  

But the reality is that the credit card industry will have less cash to toss around and so they will be looking to make cuts in costs and a likely place to look is at credit card rewards.  Will there in fact be meaningful cuts there? Is the era of free flights over?

Well…the era of free flights is largely over anyway except for power players who scoop up card sign up bonuses that indeed can be rich.  Trying to accumulate enough points via spending alone is downright difficult.  Ditto for just accumulating honest miles via flights.

Personally I believe sign up bonuses will continue to be rich as card issuers battle it out to gain top of wallet status in our pockets.  Issuers may make it harder to qualify for their cards but the cards will be out there despite this settlement.

I also believe that airlines, because they know they have issued immense numbers of miles, will continue to raise the tariff for redemption.  When coach tickets to Europe in peak summer months can and do fetch 100,000 miles you know that winning the game has just gotten harder. And it will get still harder.

Another wrinkle to the settlement is that merchants will now be able to charge different fees to process different cards.  Reported the NYTimes, “Merchants will also be permitted to adjust their prices based on the costs associated with accepting different cards, while letting customers know why some cards — typically business cards and those with more rewards and perks — cost more than others.”

Does that mean much? Too early to say. Some merchants are grumbling that implementing a range of charges for cards adds complexities to retail that may not be easy to implement.  Others also worry about consumer grumbles when their favorite card with rich rewards now involves a higher fee for use at retail.  But we already see a version of that where many merchants decline to accept Amex, complaining about the fees.  And we have survived that.

Bottomline: it’s too early to panic about losing out on credit card rewards and it’s pretty much a certainty that this small settlement will not trigger huge cuts in credit card rewards…just as it’s unlikely to produce cost cuts at checkout. 

We may have to shuffle our card use preferences but hasn’t that been an ongoing practice for some years already?  Probably we do need to pay more attention to cards and perks right now, as the impacts of the settlement play out.

But there’s no reason, not based on this settlement, to toss in our cards and stop playing.  Not yet.

By Robert McGarvey

We all know that travel today is different and so is the traveler who in many cases, simply is much younger as Millennials and Gen Z elbow aside Baby Boomers.  A generation that for essentially its entire life has always been catered to suddenly isn’t the prime target, not in the eyes of many businesses, hospitality very much included.

So just who is the guest of tomorrow and how do travel providers need to respond?

Remember a key fact about the two prime generational cohorts, Gen Z and Millennials: they have grown up with cell phones, which became commonplace in the US in the fading years of the 20th century, and also with smartphones (introduced in 2007) and tablets (the iPad debuted in 2010). To them, ubiquitous technology is just part of life, it’s not “technology,” but how things get done, from ordering a delivery meal to summoning a car and driver or booking a haircut.

Deloitte UK decided to dive into what’s happening and issued its findings in a report.  Remember that the UK is in recession – the US isn’t, in fact the economy is the strongest among the G 7.  Fallout from Brexit may also mean that there aren’t happy days ahead for the UK.  

Probably the most interesting element in Deloitte’s musings is this: Technology enables the luxury experience.  This is a wake up call for those in hospitality who continue to think that plush fabrics, fawning staff, and lots of golden items are integral to the luxury experience.  They aren’t.

Technology has the potential to give each of us more of what we want.

Deloitte offers a sharp for instance: “using technology to tailor services to the unique demands of guests will be expected, for instance, by calculating average wait times for food delivery at airports to notify passengers who might be rushing to catch a flight.”  Haven’t you walked away from a busy airport counter because a delivery delay meant the food wasn’t going to be ready on your timetable?  And there is no good reason why a well run airport restaurant can’t calculate how long it will take for your order to reach you.

Multiply that idea out to hotels and the same principles apply.  I still remember the single worst hotel room service meal I wished I hadn’t had – I won’t name the pricey Manhattan hotel because this was 15 years ago and similar may no longer happen there – and that’s because it took an hour for the coffee, scrambled eggs and toast to reach my room and, even more staggering, everything on the tray was cold.  I pushed it all aside because I remembered there was a Starbucks a half block away.  (No, I haven’t stayed in that hotel since and won’t.) Service catastrophes of this magnitude just are unacceptable today and, hey, Mr. Hotel Man, if you can’t deliver a room service breakfast within 15 minutes at least tell the guest who has the right to curse and cancel the order. You must be able to forecast with some precision delivery times. Period.

Remember, Uber and Waymo tell you how long the wait for a ride will be and they generally are pretty accurate. If they can do it, even when confronting so many variables not in their control, surely restaurants and hotels can.

Another key idea from Deloitte is this: Creat[e] agile strategies that cater to future travellers and adapt to new market trends is crucial for the industry.

New is the magic word in that. When I reflect back on a half century of business travel I don’t see much difference between what I experienced in 1975 and what I experienced in 2000. Very little had changed.

Go from 2000 to 2024 and, wow, there are innumerable changes from the death of the taxi industry to the sharp rise of Sunday as a key business travel day and of course the generational shift. New is everywhere in travel now.

Deloitte’s point is smart however: don’t take what we see today for granted as tomorrow’s reality. It probably won’t be but what will prevail remains very fuzzy. Anybody who tells you they know what travel 2025 will look like is wrong and if he/she says they know what 2035 will look like they need psychotropics.

As for where Boomers fit into all this, do you remember that phrase that popped up everywhere from 1965 to 1975, don’t trust anyone over 30? (The phrase, incidentally, is attributed to U C Berkeley student Jack Weinberg who was not in fact a Boomer and who turned 30 in 1970.)

In 2024, I‘m expecting to start regularly hearing, don’t trust anyone over 60. Why should they