The Weekly News Roundup is a collection of headlines from around the internet that caught the attention of the Tagging Miles team. Content on these blogs do not necessarily reflect the positions of Tagging Miles, and should not be considered endorsements. Have a great story we should read? Contact us now and let us know!

Travel

• The Smithsonian shares the history of air travel in Hawaii – pretty interesting, when you think about it.
• From the Australian Business Traveller – The ME3’s stance on Alcohol during the upcoming Muslim holy month of Ramadan. It started on 18 June. Cliff notes: Emirates is ok, others not so much. Glad I’m flying Emirates!
• If you thought the R2-D2 liveried ANA plane was cool, then maybe you’ll try to get seats on the latest ANA fleet addition, via the Australian Business Traveller, ANA’s fleet now includes the Millennium Falcon, in their inflight magazine. I wonder if they ever open up award seats….
• Business Traveller writes how you can minimize your risk when traveling. Its not as crazy as the course I hope to eventually take.
• Seth seems to hit the mark again as he offers an analysis of why it makes sense for United to vacate JFK. From a business perspective, consolidating people, aircraft, operations, means United theoretically becomes more efficient as a business.
• The Points Guy (or rather, one of his growing number of contributors), visited the Unclaimed Baggage Center. It’s an interesting read… and an even better reminder not to check your bag.

Paris Air Show #PAS15

• Paris Air Show is this week – and there is a lot going on. One thing I didn’t expect to see, however is the Indonesian Minister of Transportation attending and having what sounded like a very frank discussion on Indonesian Aviation Safety. Seth Miller, writing for Airways News has the report.
• Aviation Week has a nice video of the flying demonstrations.
• The Runway Girl Network shares an interesting development in the 777-8X and -9X. Boeing will utilize folding wing functionality, to fold 3.5 meters of each wing, to meet general airport taxiway and gate apron widths. Its definitely an interesting read.
• And if you liked last week’s Dreamliner video, check out this one from John Walton

Miles and Points

• Milenerd tells us what we should smile more — Gol Smiles, the frequent flyer program for Brazil’s Gol airlines. While the main deal may be over, I think the real point is that this could be a program to watch. It sounds like many of Milenerd’s readers felt similarly, because he had a Gol Email Avalanche the following day.
• Gary shares insight into loyalty program fraud working groups, and how they feel about its members.
• Lucky shares some advance notice that American will be increasing award costs for select peak travel dates. Right now its only 4 days, but, could it become more?

Manufacturing Spending

• Matt has an interesting discussion of “clean” vs. “dirty” spend… He even mentions the value of cash only for some spend… It took me nearly a week to actually be able to write that… the horror!
• Chasing the Point shares some MBA level insight into analyzing a giftcard exchange, before you send any meaningful amounts of giftcards.
• Oren’s Money Saver shares that AMEX Prepaids (these are the old blue ones, that we used to use to load Vanilla Reloads bought from Office Depot, at least, that’s what I did..) will soon have a $4.95 monthly fee, starting in October. I had to dust mine off to cancel it (because, it was being used that much!). Has anyone else found a good enough use for the card to pay $4.95 a month? All that said, I’m still surprised that this wasn’t covered anywhere else.
• Frequent Miler shares his AMEX Gift Card Strategy, now that he’s had a year of free shipping. I used to do this myself, but, locally, more and more stores clamped down on it. It might be time to revisit it before my own free shipping year ends. Of course, you could also add this into a stacking strategy to accumulate store gift cards.
• Shawn shares a way to auto liquidate Staples Visa Rebate cards… I can share his frustration, I’ve got a stack at home too..

Credit Cards

• Free-quent Flyer offers an alternative view to Chase cards. Of course, I already jumped on the Slate (but not to the tune of $30k) to pay off some college loans, my bigger concern would be using a new CC app, in the new Chase Environment for a negative interest loan. But we all have different priorities.