Over New Year’s Eve, my family and I decided to take a skiing vacation to Hokkaido. I’ve heard amazing things about the powder there, and also about the ski instruction for little kids there, including in English. My 5 year old son has never been skiing, so I wanted to introduce him there. It is…
Lots in the news lately about Marriott trying to acquire Starwood and now a Chinese company coming in to steal them away with a better offer. I have witnessed a lot of industries merge and when one pair does it to get larger all the others feel they need to merge to get equally large…
Sorry for the break in the story. Work and shoveling snow got in the way. Anyway, back to our tale of going D.C. to Maui for a long weekend mileage run on Alaska. I got a deal on the Marriott at Wailea and I’ll explain how the hotel was and how I scored that deal….
As I posted a few months ago, the ILPP is designed to have DTS show you all hotel choices including Government lodging and private hotels. This has always been a downfall of DTS as there was lodging on-post, but it would never display so most resorted to following instructions and booking off-post for lodging even…
Happy New Year to everyone! Hope you all had a great holiday period and some well-deserved time off. Most frequent flyers know New Years as the depressing time when all of their mileage and points counters reset to zero. A few programs, such as Delta and Marriott, allow you to carry over excess EQM and…
So writing about toilets is probably the last thing that I thought I would do when I started this blog. Nonetheless, I can’t pass this opportunity by after writing my review of the hotel yesterday. By my observation, about 80% of the hotel guests are Japanese, so this toilet is probably no big deal to…
The wife and I are on another Mileage Run vacation to Honolulu. I had two free nights from the Hyatt VISA Signature sign-up bonus that were set to expire this month. Combined with a strong desire on my wife’s part to make Alaska MVP Gold75K again, I came up with a few days in Waikiki…
I know there are very few fans of using DTS for your official travel, but as of 1 Sep, it just got worse. It is now mandatory to book your hotel reservations using DTS per this notice. Now I know that I often found that DTS would not list all the hotels (or sometimes none)…
Continuing on from yesterday’s post about changes to DoD lodging and DTS. Here are the new options for commercial lodging: Commercial Lodging DoD Preferred – As of June 15, 2015 , the JTR requires all travelers TDY to an metro area at an Integrated Lodging Program Pilot site to book DoD preferred commercial lodging before…
On 15 June 2015, DoD quietly launched a new program in lodging as a pilot venture. Called the Integrated Lodging Program Pilot (ILPP – got to have an acronym, it’s the military, right?), this program is an attempt to seamlessly combine the traditional military lodging facilities with local commercial facilities when booking through DTS. Theoretically,…
