Airport – Your Mileage May Vary

Our Weekly Recap: 8/13/17 – 8/19/17

Hi y’all and WOO HOO, it’s SATURDAY! Here’s a quick recap of our posts from the past week:

Joe wrote about:

What Priority Pass is and how you can get a membership.
Some favorite NYC foods – pizza, bagels and deli!
What Visa Checkout and MasterPass are and why you should sign up.
Whether or not you should prepay for gas when you rent a car.
How you can get into airport lounges when flying JetBlue from New York to Orlando

Sharon wrote about:

How to bring your favorite hometown foods with you on a plane flight, even if they need to stay refrigerated.
A museum dedicated to fast and comfort foods.
The importance of learning the social norms of a foreign country before you visit.
#TBT to April 2005, when she, Joe and their friend Steve traveled around Tokyo like locals, with locals.
The absolute least expensive way to travel off Disney/Universal property (or nearly anywhere else in Central Florida).
JetBlue’s newest sweepstakes that totally looks like a Facebook hoax.

Like this post? We have plenty more just like it and would love if you decided to hang around and clicked the button on the top of this page to follow our blog and get emailed notifications of when we post (it’s usually just once or twice a day). Whether you’ve read our posts before or this is the first time you’re stopping by, we’re really glad you’re here and hope you come back to visit again!

What is Priority Pass & How Can You Get A Membership

The Priority Pass program is a network of airport lounges (and, more recently, restaurants, bars and even day suites) that allow access to members of the program. They can be airline lounges or locations with no airline affiliation.

The priority pass program has been around for about 25 years. We visited a lounge in Japan with our friend Steve, who had a membership, when we visited there in 2005. At the time, lounges didn’t sell day passes as access to these rooms were seen as an exclusive perk for frequent flyers. Today, the airlines see membership to the lounges and access to them as another way to generate extra revenue.

Here is a description of Priority Pass from their website:

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Restaurant Review: Cask & Larder, Orlando Int’l Airport

I previously wrote about the lounges available at Orlando Airport. However the one section that does not have any lounge nearby is gates 100-129, which service Southwest, Alaska and Virgin America. All hope is not lost, though, because this section of the airport is home to Cask & Larder. I’d put this dining establishment up on the list of the best airport restaurants out there, anywhere.

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Our Weekly Recap: 7/30/17 – 8/5/17

Hi y’all and HAPPY SATURDAY to you and yours! Here’s a quick recap of our posts this week:

Joe wrote about:

The Ticketmaster settlement that could score you free or discounted shows.
The changes to the Citi Prestige credit card and if they’re good or bad.
A man who accidentally shot himself at Orlando International Airport.
Seven travel apps that will make your travel smoother and easier.

Sharon wrote about:

The funniest complaint letter to an airline, ever.
How to see the country (or the world!) a few days at a time.
The “Tale As Old As Time” tea for the beauty or the beast in all of us.
Her & Joe’s second day at Tokyo Disneyland in April, 2005, in a #TBT post.
The spooky, possibly haunted Clown Motel (next to a cemetery, no less) that’s for sale.
All the fees Spirit Airlines charges and how you might be able to avoid them.

Flying Domestically? Get Ready For Tighter TSA Screening Procedures

Traveling domestically by plane in the near future? Well, get ready to possibly spend a whole lot more time in the X-ray line because the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is going to be introducing new U.S. airport screening procedures for carry-on bags on domestic flights in order to better focus on possible threats to passenger safety.
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A Whirlwind 50 Hour Trip to Chicago – Day 1

19553905_10154511663915974_1785449452011117391_n I’m writing this on the plane going back home from a short trip to Chicago. This was a shorter trip than Sharon and I would normally take so there had to be a good reason behind it. Just like our trip to New York in January, we traveled to Chicago because Sharon used her Ticketmaster skills to get us tickets to see “Hamilton.” Getting tickets for the show in Chicago was a little easier than for New York, but not much. To make things more complicated, we needed to change the dates of our tickets due to some conflicts that came up and then we had to shorten the rescheduled trip due to other commitments. Thank goodness I booked the original airline tickets with Southwest so I didn’t have to pay to change the flights. Even with it being a short trip and all the changes we had to make, we had a blast and are so glad we went.

Knowing we had such a limited amount of time to see the city, we narrowed down what

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The Lounges of Orlando International Airport (MCO)

Orlando International Airport, otherwise known as MCO in airline speak (Please don’t call it OIA. Well, you could. But you’d be wrong 😉 ), was a destination for over 40 million airline passengers in 2015, which makes it the 14th busiest airport in the U.S. based on total passenger traffic. For many of those passengers, Orlando is their final destination and the need for them to spend hours at the airport waiting for a connecting flight isn’t as great as at a major hub airport like Miami, Atlanta, Chicago or New York-JFK. Subsequently, the airline lounge market has been stagnant, or even declining, over the past decade because leisure travelers weren’t the bread and butter customers for lounges. These lounges were designed with the business travelers in mind, giving them a place to be productive while waiting for their next flight.

Fortunately, times have changed and many more people have lounge access thanks to credit card benefits, so the lounges at Orlando Airport are finally starting to catch up.

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