Air India has relaunched its frequent flier programme, called Flying Returns. Faster upgrades to higher tiers and near-perpetual validity of points make the new version of Flying Returns much better than its earlier avatar. Use your frequent-flier points wisely and you ll be able to get free air tickets from time to time. Else, the wait can be really long.
spring break would cover the you 50,000 for an economy seat. now it will cost more than twice that, 52,000 miles. i think we re at a tipping points. consumer advocates say earning miles have never been easier thanks to airline credit cards and now redeeming miles are getting tougher. you enter these programs in good faith and you invest in them for years and years and the goalposts were a lot further away than when they started. i hope they listen to the consumer and they really think about some of the decisions that they re making at the top level. travel experts say there are real winners and losers and the winners are those with airline credit cards and mega status already and the losers are those right on the cusp of achieving status of the latest airline. the latest carrier to tweak the frequent flier program. american airlines will make it la harder to get to its gold level,
your identity in the tsa checkpoint is now down to only six second. i think the timing could not be more perfect in many ways because more and more regular travelers are coming back to travel. reporter: the trial will start at delta s busiest hub, at first for those in delta s frequent flier program who also have tsa precheck. passport and visa photos in a federal database are compared with your live photo. the tsa insists that file is immediately destroyed, upping security from cyberthreats and hacks. we ve definitely taken privacy considerations into account the whole way. somebody does not want to participate, they do not have to opt in and participate. they have that choice if they want to have the experience. reporter: american airlines is also trying facial recognition at its dfw terminal lounges but industry experts think using the technology from the moment you arrive at the airport could cut the time you spend waiting in half.
check and even in those countries that are risk for us i think we could find a good known traveler program, a frequent flier program. i think that would help it pass legal muster if we tried to internationalize this global entry so known travelers could still travel. shannon: very convenient. saves a lot of time. there is a background vetting process but in so many of these cases what critics worry about with foreign countries is that we rely on them for a good chunk of that vetting. is there a way we could do that reliably being able to be confident of the information they collect on these individuals that is then provided to us or to an international body or system? there are a lot of things we could do. for example, even with a country that we have a great deal of adversity with, iran, there are people who are iranian americans who mother-in-law, sister-in-law, cousin would like to come. if we have a sponsor we should figure out how to have a known traveler.