Category Archives: Uncategorized

Since I was just in the process of planning a transcon trip, I had a chance to look into saver availability across the major carriers for the next couple months. United and American didn’t have much – maybe a few days scattered here and there on United, and slightly better on American. Still, 32,500 AAnnoying miles for business and 50,000 for first class is kinda steep… although nowhere near as steep as Delta, which somehow believes its Delta One transcons should command 75,000+ miles each way. (In fairness, some of those flights are on 767s with all-aisle access, which the other carriers don’t normally offer in business. Still, Delta isn’t so great that its cheapest fares are worth 1.5x what United charges for standard awards.)

However, post-merger Virgin America awards are wiiiiiide open right now at 25,000 Alaska miles each way. I don’t know if this will stick around very long – I remember there was an availability bonanza on United right after they switched from JFK to EWR that I got in on, but it dried up pretty quick. There are clearly going to be some inventory headaches to sort out as Virgin figures out how to integrate a fixed-value loyalty program and a traditional distance-based one. In the short term, though, it’s open season.

It’s an especially good deal given that most of those seats are at least $700 on Virgin America, which means that they’re going for at least ~34,000 Elevate points. With the current transfer ratio factored in, you could instead transfer 19,000 points and some change to Alaksa and get the same exact flight. Here’s the calendar for four people in first class. You’ve got options.

I don’t want to bombard you with screen shots, so take my word for it that this isn’t limited to SFO-JFK. I looked at LAX/SFO to JFK/BOS each for 4 people, and availability was roughly the same, in either direction. SFO-BOS is almost as long as some transatlantic flights from the East Coast, so it’s a fantastic value however you slice it.

What leads me to believe this may not be permanent is that not every flight shows 25K availability, so some inventory is being loaded at saver level and some at standard. You’d think that Alaska will eventually tweak their inventory, especially since there are a lot of extra Alaska miles floating around right now. Consider: I just transferred 60,000 Elevate points over to Alaska, which generated 18,000 additional miles. Since I had both an Alaska and an Elevate account, I also got 10,000 bonus miles just for being an awesome dude. That right there is enough for a transcon in first class, and Alaska pretty much dropped it in my lap.

They probably know what they’re doing, but little wrinkles like this pop up from time to time during what I like to call “corporate irrops”… Or maybe they want Alaska members to get to experience Virgin’s first class in order to build loyalty to the combined carrier. Who knows. Either way, points and miles collectors win.

One last thing: I know Virgin isn’t as nice as other airlines’ transcon service. They have the best domestic first class except on transcon routes. However, let’s not all become such primadonnas that an oversized leather reclining seat with a leg and foot rest is somehow slumming it for 5-6 hours. Sure a flat bed would be better, but Virgin gets you pretty damn close. And the service and food are usually better too. The only reason I didn’t jump on this when putting my transcon together is that I really wanted to try some new products, so I burned most of my JetBlue miles on a Mint suite and then snagged a seat on United’s new 777 (a post about this is coming soon).

This is maybe the most ridiculous post you’ll ever read on a points and miles blog, given that it concerns a review of a lounge I visited fourteen months ago. As a result, everything about the lounge could be different by now, and I wouldn’t know, since I haven’t been there in fourteen months. Why am I even bothering to review it? Who knows. Let’s dive in!

Furnishings: Pretty nice and modern, I gotta say. With the big 3 airlines upping their lounge game considerably, the overall Admiral’s United Sky Club experience is getting less drab and monotonous, but if you’re craving something different, A&L is a good option. Oh, they have art on the walls, too. 8/10
Cookies: I came in during breakfast, and there weren’t any. I don’t want to give it a 1, though, because they probably put some out later in the day. Let’s say a 5. 5/10
Snacks: I had a bagel with peanut butter and it was pretty good. However, the day before, I chipped my two front teeth biting down on a fork and had to have my dentist put in two fillings before rushing to catch my flight. As a result, I could only bite into the bagel with my molars, which caused me to get peanut butter all over the side of my face. Also, the little eating area of this lounge is pretty cramped, so I can imagine it being crowded during normal meal times. 7/10
Alcohol: They actually had a few different white wines chilling in an ice bucket, so you wouldn’t miss your morning mimosa if that’s your thing. 7/10
Views: None, unless you count the art on the walls. Do you like art? This was the kind of art you’d see in an upscale hotel. Not generic hotel art, but obviously they aren’t going to mount a Cindy Sherman exhibit here or something. 2/10
Bathrooms: Basic, but not gross. I went in to wipe the peanut butter off my face. 6/10
Outlets: Pretty easy to find. 7/10
Other amenities: This lounge is before security, so you have to weigh how much you care about that. My story is that I had flown into EWR and gotten in late at night, so I just grabbed a cheap hotel by the airport. The next morning, I took the free shuttle to the airport with the intention of catching the Airtrain into New York. Since I had my Priority Pass card with me, it occurred to me that I could get a free breakfast at this lounge. So in this one case, the lounge being landside was a bonus. However, my feeling is that the lounge should always be the last place you go before your gate. The whole point of the lounge is that you get through security, buy your duty free whatever, and chillax until your flight. Having to go through security (at EWR no less) means you can’t easily time when to leave the lounge and will either have to be stressed in the security line or at the gate way before your flight. For that reason alone, I’d probably skip this lounge in the future unless I happened to be at the airport way too early. It’s a nice concept and the whole “art” aspect is novel, but if you strip out the cool furnishings, it’s a pretty basic lounge outside security with no views. 3/10
Final score: 45/80

Edited later to add…

OH MY GOD YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS VIDEO I FOUND ABOUT ART & LOUNGE. Unfortunately, I’m not paying WordPress enough money to embed videos in my own posts, but check it out on YouTube. I promise you’ll love it.

My favorite things, in order:
1. The fucked up sound that makes it sound like a contemporary jazz trio was forced to perform under water.
2. The ambiguous and vaguely sinister promise to “brands” about how they can brainwash a HIGH-END CAPTIVE AUDIENCE. Seriously, Art & Lounge considers you captive! It’s like they know EWR is a pile of shit are just daring you to spend time in the terminal before your flight.
3. The phrase “Unraveling unique art exhibitions.” They use the word “unveiling” on the next slide, so you know they know the word, they just didn’t want to use it twice.
4. The fact that they barely show any actual photos of the lounge, and the slide about the innovative cuisine is clearly made up of stock photos.
5. The video has 43 views (as of this writing)!!!

 

I thought I had stumbled upon the glitch of the century while putting together a trip to New York this spring… If you don’t have millions of points, New York hotels can be tough, since even the mediocre ones are high-category hotels within the loyalty program. I had planned to cash out my IHG points on two nights at an Even hotel, and then drain what’s left of my Hyatt balance at one of the many category 6 hotels in the city. Because I don’t have cash available for this trip, I’m willing to accept less-than-ideal returns on both of these (although the IHG one is almost coming up at $.01 per point, which is actually pretty good for them).

Anyway, I logged in to my Gold Passport account and looked at award availability, and something curious popped up:

 

One, I didn’t expect to see points availability at the Park Hyatt NY, since they almost never have basic room availability. However, what really got my attention was the free night showing up, since this is the one I earn through the Hyatt card, and it’s supposed to be limited to categories 1-4. I selected it and tried to complete the booking, although it kept throwing an error on the final step, telling me that the rate rules prevent me from booking the room online and suggesting I call the service line. I know exactly what the service line would tell me – that the free night doesn’t apply to the Park Hyatt and would I please stop trying to bend the rules already. I tried in a couple browsers just to see if I could make magic happen, but it was to no avail. What a tease, right? I was also getting cha-ching eyes thinking about how I could write about yet another Hyatt glitch, and I think I might even be more disappointed about losing out on all that potential sweet blog traffic!

At that point, I was considering transferring in an extra 5000 points and trying out the Park Hyatt, but after my last two Park Hyatt experiences, I don’t know if it’s worth it. I mean sure, the hotel looks gorgeous, but the PH Chicago and PH Vendome looked amazing too, and I wasn’t blown away by either. Instead, I slunk back down to category 6 and booked the Andaz 5th avenue, which I’m to understand is halfway decent. (I love the Andaz Wall St., and they even had upgraded rooms available for the normal 25,000 redemption rate, but the location just doesn’t work for this trip.)

Am I crazy for giving up the Park Hyatt luxury lifestyle to save a paltry 5000 Ultimate Rewards points? I thought the Andaz was a reasonable compromise, given that the only cheaper options were a Hyatt Place and Hyatt House for 20,000 points each, which seems really high for what you get. I still have time to change my mind in either direction, though, so if the Hyatt Place is amazing and the Andaz is just meh, I might downgrade. Likewise, if the Park Hyatt blew your socks off and you had to buy more socks because of how much it kept blowing your socks off, let me know. I’ll also see if I can find your socks.

That’s a rhetorical question. I stumbled on this gem today while looking for flights to NYC in April, and I was originally trying to get there on miles. As is usually the case, United had no availability at the saver level, so I started looking at standard awards. I know! But I’m kind of hard-up for cash these days, plus I really don’t want to do a transcon in economy if I can avoid it, and both of these are triggers that lead to me entertaining dumb mileage redemptions… such as 50,000-per-leg domestic business class awards. That’s when I saw that United was flying a 777-300ER on the SFO-EWR route, which would definitely be an upgrade over the normal 757 p.s. seats they usually offer.

After talking myself out of spending 50,000 miles on a 5-hour flight, I searched for revenue fares and found fares on that flight for a semi-reasonable $687. Between the United gift registry credit I have from my two Amex Platinum cards and the $250 airline credit from the Citi Prestige that I haven’t canceled yet, I can just about get there. I think I’m gonna do it! I’ve never flown on such a new plane before, and I think it would be neat to check out Polaris after all the hoopla United has built up around it.

From what I could tell after digging around on United, transcons on the 777-300 start February 16th and run through May 1st (availability varies by day, since there are flights in both directions). That’s a pretty big window to try out the new seats before they go long-haul only. I also don’t know if any other cities are getting the plane, since I’m pretty selfish and only research flights that specifically interest me.

EDIT: Uhh duh, The Points Guy wrote about flights starting on 2/16 a long time ago, I just forgot about it. There goes my scoop. I don’t think TPG had anything about when the flights would end, though, so I’m good for something at least.

One note: this flight isn’t marketed as a Polaris flight, so my assumption is that it doesn’t include entry into the Global First lounge at SFO (which will become a Polaris lounge sometime soon). I also don’t know how much of the soft product will actually be included, although I’m mostly curious about the seat anyway, so I won’t be disappointed if they don’t offer any of the normal long-haul amenities. (Plus, I’m flying Global First this summer, so I’ll get to see the ORD Polaris lounge and all the fancy Saks Fifth Avenue stuff pretty soon anyway.)

Anyone have plans to try out Polaris seats on this route? I’m pretty excited to book my flight, and I promise that I’ll wait 6 months to write a review of it, so it’s no longer timely by the time you read it.

I’m not supposed to say this, but I haven’t really felt like blogging the past few days, given that the President of the United States is now Donald Trump. Looking through my Facebook feed, which is mostly stuffed with pictures of people marching in protest of one of the biggest pieces of shit in the world now being the President, the posts from The Points Guy about which credit cards offer the best hotel perks seem pretty inconsequential. I mean, sure it’s great that TPG just flew Korean Air in first class, but my hometown library was just defaced with pro-Trump Nazi graffiti, so… not quite six of one.

That said, I also don’t want to give up on my interests just because we’re living in interesting times, as the proverb goes. I know this stuff is froth on the much deeper issues that are affecting people in this country (some more than others), but it also helps me stay sane and avoid falling into a black hole of despair. I also don’t want to stop caring about stupid, inconsequential shit just because some fleshy orange mass is the ruler of the free world. Stupid shit may be all I have left in a few years. And plus, we may need those points to escape the country should Trump spread its metaphorical cheeks and invite Putin in to stay a while.

With that disclaimer in mind, I wanted to write a post about credit card prioritization. This was spurred by a reader who emailed me asking for my thoughts about how to balance maximizing return on spend with the mental energy required to wring every last drop of return from each dollar spent. And this guy is a real professor, so the fact that he came to me for advice should speak to how much my opinion on this issue matters. The answer is different for each person, of course – some people love the game and will play it to a mind-numbing degree, while others just want to earn some rewards but not put that much thought into it. My brain kind of turns off when I read Frequent Miler posts about extreme stacking, and most forms of manufactured spending seem like too much energy to me. (The funny thing is that I was really heavily into reselling as a form of extra income 10 years ago, but I didn’t think to combine that with churning. Now that I have a steadier job and don’t need the additional scratch as much, I don’t really bother with reselling anymore.)

When I talk about credit card prioritization, I mean the process of figuring out which parts of your own spending have the most potential to move the needle on your rewards earning. Here’s an example: when I first got into this stuff, I printed up a little reminder card to keep in my wallet that had a list of situations and what credit card to use for each. One of the situations was shopping at Home Depot – because there was an Amex offer for 2x membership rewards points at Home Depot, I needed to make sure to use my Premier Rewards Gold card. However, I never went to Home Depot while the offer was active, so it was a waste of mental energy to think about it, and it was a waste of space in my wallet to carry that card around, when I didn’t plan to use it on anything else. This situation repeated itself somewhat in the fourth quarter of last year, when I made sure to keep my Freedom card with me at all times in case I needed to pop in to a CVS… even though I spent around $200 at CVS during the three months it was a 5x bonus category.

Of course, this differs for each person. If you’re a contractor, the Home Depot would have a major impact on your overall earning, so it would be a good idea to consider which card you use there. Same as if you’re a… uhh… really sick person who always needs medicine from CVS? I don’t know. The point is that there are diminishing returns when you try to capture the best return on every last dollar. I spend a lot on dining, so remembering to use my Sapphire Reserve in order to earn 3x points is worth doing. Same with trying to remember to use the Amex Platinum on airfare. However, if I’m at a random store that doesn’t take my preferred Amex for unbonused spend, I’ll use the Sapphire Reserve and earn one point per dollar – even though I have a Freedom Unlimited at home. I know I’m missing out on 1/2 of a point per dollar on that purchase, but I’m also not making myself crazy carrying 10 cards around with me.

I look at it as an 80/20 split. I want to focus on how to best maximize 80% of my spending and leave the last 20% to chance. That might mean I end up with 5000 fewer points at the end of the year than I otherwise would, but that’s probably not going to make the difference between being able to take a vacation and having to stay home. For an example, here’s my everyday card strategy. This represents the extent to which I’m willing to think about this stuff on a day-to-day basis.

Mandatory:

• Groceries: Amex Everyday Preferred. (Since I eat lunch at a grocery store deli every day, I can get to 30 transactions per month without having to think about it.)
• Restaurants and Travel: Chase Sapphire Reserve.
• Unbonused spend: Amex Blue for Business.

If I can remember:

• Chase Freedom for gas.
• Amex Platium for airfare.
• Making sure to use the card with the Amex offer added to it.
• Ink+ at office supply stores.
• The right co-brand hotel card at a hotel.

I’m curious how other people handle this. Do you carry all your cards with you to make sure you never miss a fraction of a point, or do you let it go most of the time? Does my everyday strategy seem overly complicated, or did you lose respect for me since I’m willing to use the wrong card sometimes in order to preserve my sanity (and my marriage)?

Follow me, or don’t. I just created the account tonight because apparently having a twitter account is something bloggers do. The Points Guy was the first account I followed, because his jetsetting luxury lifestyle inspires me to use my #miles to live my #bestlife.

TL;DR – I like to see things in person rather than just looking at pictures. That’s the point of all this… read on at your own risk (of extreme boredom).

As much as I’d like to, I can’t take credit for that title, since it’s the title of a song in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, which is a funny movie that I recommend. But you don’t come here to read my thoughts on mainstream comedy movies, so I’ll get to the point already. A sentiment I hear a lot regarding travel is that famous tourist locations aren’t always worth visiting, since you don’t experience anything more from them than what you can see in a photograph. Sure, it looks cool, but what’s so great about standing in front of it when you can just see what it looks like on Wikipedia? (Maybe this is on my mind because I was writing about Angkor Wat yesterday, I dunno.)

I disagree with this, and I’ll come at it from a couple angles. Let’s start on a hiking rail in Norway near the little town of Stalheim. (The header image for this site is from this trail – the building is the Stalheim hotel.) The trail runs along the side of a mountain, around 2000 feet up from the bottom of the valley – and if you’re afraid of heights (which I am), the narrow sections are sure to keep you on your toes.

So anyway, I’m hiking along this trail, and the scenery is absolutely jaw-dropping, as is often the case in Scandinavia. But the most awe-inspiring thing I keep seeing is the mountain on the other side of the valley – this enormous flat wall of rock that looms over the valley and dominates the scenery around it. I tried maybe fifty times to get a good photo of it, but in every photo, it just looked like rocky terrain. Nothing I could do with my camera captured how it felt to be on that narrow trail, 2000 feet above the floor of the valley, with this massive wall of granite reminding me of my own insignificance. It’s one of the most profound experiences I’ve had when traveling, and I don’t have a photo of it. I did some research on this particular hiking trail before the trip and saw a couple photos, but I didn’t expect to be so affected by it.

Now this example isn’t totally germane, since it’s not a common tourist spot, like the Eiffel Tower or something. But as long as we’re in Paris, we can head over to the Louvre and fight through the crowds to take a gander at the Mona Lisa – probably the best example of what I’m talking about. Everyone knows what the Mona Lisa looks like, and it isn’t even physically impressive due to its diminutive size. However, when I finally got around to seeing it, I was surprised how much it affected me. It wasn’t even the artwork per se, as much as the fact that I was standing in front of the original version of the most famous painting in the history of western art. The fact that it has been reproduced so many times is part what makes it so powerful.

Walter Benjamin has an essay called “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and like everything that came out of the Frankfurt School, it’s a tightly wound ball of intellectual wires. However, one of the things Benjamin writes about is the aura embedded in the original work of art that is lost when the art is reproduced. As a result, the reproduction becomes divorced from the technical aspect of its creation and thus takes on the social context of the zeitgeist in which it was reproduced. This is an oversimplification (since you don’t come here to read my take on German philosophy), but when you take a work of art as endlessly reproduced as the Mona Lisa, you suddenly have a reproduction that has existed in such a vast array of sociopolitical contexts that it means nothing at all. Benjamin’s conclusion was ultimately that art in the age of mechanical reproduction is necessarily political, but the Mona Lisa falls on the opposite side of the bell curve, which is to say that it has so much contextualization that it exists outside context altogether. It’s the white noise of art; discussions of its formal aspects tie back to the original, to Da Vinci’s technique, etc… but the Mona Lisa on the side of a coffee mug or on a mousepad that your dad still uses because he doesn’t realize that mice don’t use a trackball anymore is art presented as a vacuum of ideas.

Wow, we’re getting pretty far afield here. Let’s get back on track: when I stood in front of the Mona Lisa, the aura of the original painting rushed in to fill that vacuum, and it was a profound experience for me. I guess I could have just said that and saved you a bunch of time. Oh well.

I tend to feel the same way about things that aren’t works of art, like the aforementioned Eiffel Tower. I spent a year studying in Paris in college, and it was odd the way the famous sights like Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower blended into my everyday surroundings. But when you’re walking home late at night after the Metro stops running, and you find a grocery store that’s open late, and you get a bottle of table wine to drink on the way home because you’re 20 and you do stupid shit like that, and you’re walking across a bridge over the Seine, and the Eiffel Tower starts sparkling… it stays with you. And just like the Mona Lisa, the image of the Eiffel Tower is so recognizable that it starts to feel like you may as well skip it on your trip to Paris, because you’ve already seen it so many times in photos. But really seeing it, witnessing its honestly ugly protrusion above the flat sea of Parisian rooftops, is different than looking at a postcard of it.

Getting back to Angkor Wat, I’m sure I could get a pretty good sense of it by looking at a bunch of photo tours, but I also know that none of that will compare to being there in person, immersed in its surroundings. It’s also why I don’t mind looking at photos of where I’m going in advance, because I know that I’ll experience it differently when I’m actually there. Shit, I even felt differently about the gray fabric covering the bulkhead of SAS’s business class cabin, because I had looked at so many trip reports and built the trip up in my head so much that actually being in front of it in my lie-flat seat felt like some sort of accomplishment.

TL;DR: you may not be able to find a direct flight to wherever you’re trying to go in China, but if you’re flexible with your gateway and connecting cities, West Coast transpacific availability is wide open right now.

Because my travel interests skew toward European destinations, most of the coverage of airlines and availability on this blog has been focused on transatlantic awards. (Also, living on the West Coast means that transatlantic business class awards usually offer really good value, especially if you break it down to miles required vs flight time.) However, I was thinking in general about reasons I might need to be in Asia, such as scratching Angkor Wat off of my bucket list or visiting vendors in Shenzhen for work.

With that in mind, I did some lookin’ on Delta and United – which I suppose is limiting, given that I didn’t even consider OneWorld, but there you go. Plus, I know you can only stomach so many screenshots of availability calendars.

Now, I realize Asia is a very vast place, but if you’re flexible, there’s pretty great West Coast – China availability right now (and you can connect onto Siem Reap if you want to make me jealous with your selfies in front of Angkor Wat). Depending on which miles you have, your gateway cities/connections will be different, but you definitely have options. Let’s start with Delta, who has business class level-1 availability between LAX and Guangzhou or Shanghai every goddamn day. From there, adding connections to Siem Reap or Hong Kong (the two destinations I’m most likely to have, because don’t forget this is all about me) doesn’t affect the price or availability.

Okay, SkyTeam is covered. Between China Eastern and China Southern, you should have no trouble crossing the Pacific in a flat bed. What about Star Alliance? If you don’t mind connecting through Seoul, you’re all set on Asiana. Here’s SFO-ICN for April and May. Bountiful!

What if SFO and LAX aren’t convenient for you? Maybe you live in the lush Pacific Northwest and would like to fly to Shanghai… Well, don’t worry – China Eastern has your back. Here’s the calendar for VAN-PVG, non-stop only.

Maybe it’s common knowledge that there’s a shitload of availability from the West Coast to Asia, but I seriously feel like people are going to accuse me of Photoshopping those screen shots. EVERY DAY? Dang. I even started looking at specific Delta flights, like SEA-HKG, although availability isn’t as reliable as it is on partners. However, if you look out into June/July, there are usually a couple days a week where SEA-HKG is available too. (I’d argue that VAN and SEA count as the same area, given that it probably takes less time to drive between them than SFO and Oakland in traffic.)

 

 

I’m not some fussy elitist who thinks he’s above budget travel (I’ve happily flown Norwegian a number of times), but I’m becoming less and less interested in the almost daily hyperventilation over WOW Air’s latest screaming deal. $15 flights to Iceland! $5 flights to Iceland! Free flights to Iceland but you have to bring your own ice! We get it, WOW Air is really cheap because their business model relies on dinging you with ancillary fees, and they cram enough people in their planes that the odds are in their favor.

Here’s why I stopped paying attention: as anyone who flies primarily on points and miles will tell you, travel isn’t free. Flying on award tickets may be close to free if you forget about all the annual fees and opportunity costs, but travel in general isn’t free. Most of those WOW Air fares require you to stay a week at a time, so it then becomes necessary to cost out a week-long trip, and even on a budget, that still will eat up some money… Especially if you’re flying to Scandinavia, where everything is expensive. Just boarding my dog for a week would cost almost $300, and if we stayed at a dirt cheap AirBNB, let’s say that would cost $40 per night for six nights. We’d take BART to the airport to save money, but that’s still around $50 round-trip for the both of us. Add in $50 per day each to eat, and we’re over $1000 already, regardless of how cheap WOW Air is to fly.

The bottom line is that we’d end up spending around $1500 at a minimum for a week long trip to Iceland, flying, sleeping, and eating as cheaply as possible. In the winter, when there are 3 hours of daylight every day. Fun? I don’t really get the masochistic approach to travel, where you impress people by telling them all the exotic locations you’ve been to and all the tribulations you put yourself through to get there. “I just got back from Thailand, and it was amazing, except that I had to sleep in the train station for three nights, take seven connecting flights back over a three-day period, and ride in the cargo hold of an old Soviet plane for one of the flights.” Congrats?

I like the new trend of ULCC long haul flights, since there are some people who wouldn’t otherwise have the means to see the world, and this gives them the opportunity. I mean, for fuck’s sake it’s cheaper to fly from San Francisco to Iceland than it is to fly from San Francisco to Denver. That’s pretty crazy. However, most of the people who get excited about these deals do have the means to travel, they just get blinded by how good of a deal you can get (my sample set for this observation is two of my coworkers who constantly ruminate over whether they should go to Iceland for no reason other than that flights are so cheap).

Instead of spending $1500 and trying to minimize every expense during a trip, I’d rather save that money and take a longer, more comfortable trip using points and miles where it makes sense. Maybe that’s reflective of where I am in my life – AKA not young and poor enough that that’s the only way I can travel. Still, the daily parade of insane deals (which should get even louder now that Norwegian received approval to fly under its Irish subsidiary) is the same to me as when the LA-Z-Boy store near my house has 90% off sales. Sure it’s a great deal, but how many LA-Z-Boys do you need?

One interest I haven’t written about much on this blog is airline identity and branding design… I guess you could say that I actually care what the marketing departments at the airlines are trying to communicate to me. There are a bunch of books on this subject, and I’ve been building a collection of them for a while.

Working on my Flying Blue post yesterday brought me into contact with KLM’s logo, and looking at the image of the award calendar that I put up just underscores how brilliant of a logo it actually is. In fact, any logo in service for over 50 years with only minimal updates proves its worth simply through its longevity. However, I think KLM’s logo is uniquely brilliant in how it blends corporate modernism with the brand’s history as the world’s oldest continually operating airline.

Look at the transition between 1958 and 1961 – this is the reset that positioned KLM for the jet age, and it has barely been changed since then. Earlier iterations of the logo tried to preserve some aspect of the original logo’s designation of KLM as a “royal” airline, although by the late 50s, the crown was mostly outdated and tired looking. By reducing it to three main components, each represented by extremely simple geometric shapes, KLM now had an instantly recognizable logo that evoked sophistication and efficiency while still tying the brand back to its Dutch royal heritage.

The designer responsible for this update was FHK Henrion, a British designer originally from Germany. (Henrion also designed the logo for BEA before they merged with BOAC, but I actually prefer BEA’s previous logo.) Unit Editions in the UK recently published an excellent retrospective on Henrion’s career, from his early days as a poster illustrator to the prime of his career, when he designed corporate identity programs for companies like KLM, Tate & Lyle, and the London Electricity Board. The KLM chapter is essential for any fan of airline identity and design, as it includes a generous selection from the official house style manuals that Henrion’s group produced and then revised.

Part of the reasoning for the very wide font and geometric crown was Henrion’s theory that planes are viewed in motion and that logos need to be recognizable even when they’re blurry. He subjected various logos to blur tests to see how legible they would be under various conditions and tweaked the KLM logo accordingly.

Overall, the KLM logo is probably my favorite one currently in use, and not just because I’m generally a fan of Dutch things. I applaud KLM for resisting the temptation to reduce their logo to some dumb swooshy thing (like Air France or American), and I hope they keep it in use for a long time to come. Finally, here’s a photo I took out the window from my first KLM flight earlier this year: