Ajay, Author at Live from a Lounge

About Ajay

Ajay Awtaney is the Founder and Editor of Live From A Lounge (LFAL), a pioneering digital platform renowned for publishing news and views about aviation, hotels, passenger experience, loyalty programs, travel trends and frequent travel tips for the Global Indian. He is considered the Indian authority on business travel, luxury travel, frequent flyer miles, loyalty credit cards and travel for Indians around the globe. Ajay is a frequent contributor and commentator on the media as well, including ET Now, BBC, CNBC TV18, NDTV, Conde Nast Traveller and many other outlets.

Lounge Review: Mumbai Terminal 2 Interim Lounge

October 22, 2014 by Ajay Leave A Comment

Planning the Proposal Trip to Paris One of the trip reports I’ve been holding off for a while, for the lack of adequate time to write it up. Like many of the regular readers on this blog would know, I proposed to my girlfriend in Paris this summer, and she said yes. The first thing to do was to of course, get a flight to go to Paris from Mumbai. Like I’ve mentioned before, I was going to use the Mumbai – Paris flight on Jet Airways A330-200. The context set up here was that we are going on a work trip to Europe, which was total gibberish anyways. We arrived at the Mumbai airport Terminal 2, and headed up…

JetPrivilege to charge child redemptions at adult redemption prices, without notice

October 22, 2014 by Ajay Leave A Comment

Over the past few days, JetPrivilege has been working on multiple changes for revamping the program, after their newfound status as an independent loyalty program, and their majority control by Etihad. The first two phases of these changes included tinkering with the earn rate, which got better in some situations, and the burn rate, which got massively devalued for international premium cabins. Then, yesterday JetPrivilege launched the family pooling concept, where you could pool miles from your family members. One of the small fine print changes they did not announce in big bold letters but slipped in along was the change for children redemptions. Earlier, a redemption for a child ticket, for a kid up to 11 years in age,…

JetPrivilege launches family mileage pooling

October 21, 2014 by Ajay 8 Comments

Jet Airways’ JetPrivilege program has been reinventing itself over the past few months. First, there was a rehash of the earn and burn rates for mileage. While earn rates went up to a minimum of 500 JP Miles, burn rates went upwards as well. JetPrivilege has now launched a family pooling feature of miles, called MyFamily+. As a part of a family account, you can now pool the miles of your family members to redeem for tickets on Jet Airways and their partners. However, to be able to join a family account, you should be an immediate family member of the person who is nominated to be the Head of Family. Salient features of the new setup are: Between 1…

Air India still lacks disruption redressal capabilities

October 21, 2014 by Ajay 1 Comment

I’ve recently been trying to use Air India off and on, given their Star Alliance membership, to try and test how they react in various circumstances and whether it is in line with Star Alliance requirements or not. Sometimes it is, sometimes it is not. For instance, back in August, when I went with AI for my flight to Goa from Mumbai Terminal 2, AI offered me only one lounge access card, which made sure me and my fiancée could not go into the lounge together. As AI Golden Tier member and Star Alliance Gold, I was good for 2 passes due to the *A guidelines. Just this past Saturday, I made a trip to Delhi on one of Air…

My experience in completing the Hyatt Gold Passport Diamond Challenge

October 20, 2014 by Ajay 5 Comments

Hyatt’s Gold Passport program is known to be one of the best loyalty recognition programs out there for hotel guests, and is the Kool Aid for miles and points bloggers such as yours truly. However, I’ve not held their Diamond Status for an extended period of time ever, largely because of my irregular stay patterns with respect to hotels. I’m not a lawyer or a consultant or a full-time blogger, so for me, I did not have a circumstance to do 25 stays or 50 nights to get the status. Hyatt also has another generous offer to get you to Diamond status however. They will allow you to enrol in the Hyatt Diamond Challenge, which grants you the Diamond status…

I’m coming home…

October 18, 2014 by Ajay 1 Comment

Oh boy. I hate going quiet on the blog but sometimes life takes you places where you take a plane and go, and there is just so much going on that your laptop is perpetually starving for battery and hence the posting has to wait. So, the past few weeks, while I’ve been trying to post, I’ve been over to Europe, the USA, and then after a quick trip to Kolkata, I found myself again on the road for two weeks in a row… which was essentially supposed to be one trip to start with. I was over to the Netherlands for a week, and while I was supposed to do some more meetings in other parts of Europe while…

1 week to enhancements to American Express Jet Airways co-branded card

October 13, 2014 by Ajay 3 Comments

Jet Airways and American Express have been together for roughly two years now, and American Express has decided it needs to freshen up the product. So, in this spirit, multiple efforts have happened in the past few months. The new changes come into effect from October 20, 2014. Firstly, American Express dropped the 1st year pricing on this card to INR 5000 along with 10000 JP Miles for sign up, with 2nd year pricing continuing to be INR 10,000. You could add another 2,000 JP Miles by taking your card via a referral. They also added 7 lounges earlier this year, although for JP co-branded cards, these were paid lounges and not free. Some good and some bad changes coming…

An insight into my miles and points balances

October 12, 2014 by Ajay 7 Comments

As I reached another 7-figure benchmark on the total number of miles and points I control (my own and my family), I thought it would be a good idea to do some slice and dice on the data for my own self to be able to understand where I stand, and for you to have an insight as well. For the purpose of this exercise, I just downloaded all my balances from AwardWallet, and assigned the same value to all the miles there. So, an Air India mile = An AAdvantage mile = A Hyatt Gold Passport Point = an IHG point. In reality they are different, because for instance you need much lesser Hyatt points to stay at a…

Hotel Review: Hyatt Regency Kolkata

October 10, 2014 by Ajay 2 Comments

A long weekend is an excuse to get out of town, and October 2-6 this year was one of those with a lot of holidays. With a lot of Bengali friends, I’ve heard great things about Kolkata during the Durga Puja season, and it was one of the things on my to do list. So, this year, it was a good time to make it happen. When I started to look for hotels, I eventually narrowed it down to the ITC Sonar or the Hyatt Regency, which are two hotels I’ve been wanting to go to for a while. Luckily for me, I spotted a very good deal at the Hyatt Regency Kolkata during the Monsoon Flash sale they held…

Vistara’s loyalty program to be called ‘Club Vistara’?

October 9, 2014 by Ajay 1 Comment

Vistara, the newest Indian airline, and a new full-service airline to come into India after a long while, is going full swing to get off the ground at the earliest moment possible. They recently got their first plane delivered, an A320 by the registration number VT-TTB, and VT-TTC is also going to be over shortly. One of the interesting parts of an airline for me and this blog is the loyalty program. I’m personally loyal to a few airlines, and I think loyalty programs to lead to repeat traffic for customers. For Vistara, it seems Club Vistara may be the name they choose for their loyalty program. They recently signed up with social media handles with this name on Twitter…

British Airways got it right with the Premium Economy

October 7, 2014 by Ajay 13 Comments

Earlier this year, I sent some of my Europe travel business to British Airways because of the convenient timings I had for travel to Europe (twice daily) rather than once daily. It involved backtracking as well, and the pains of getting a visa, but that added so much flexibility to my travel plans as well, because I could spend another night at home rather than having to necessarily take a midnight flight out of India all the time to go to continental Europe. One of my earlier trips this year, British Airways bumped me up from Economy to Premium Economy, due to the Economy cabin being overbooked. And that was the first time I really started to appreciate the Premium…