Travelers' Intercom

I earned my first airline-mileage-award ticket in 1990 and have been fairly successful in obtaining many award tickets since then for the dates and routings I’ve needed.

A friend who is a member of an airline’s frequent-flyer-mileage program recently had a problem booking an award ticket 10 months out from when she wanted to travel. She had already done the first step, checking the airline’s website, but with no luck. I gave her the following advice, and I hope it will be helpful to others as well:

1. Find a list of the airline’s partners. The list can...

After discovering that my ATM cards would not work at automatic teller machines in Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 2013, I got a chip-and-PIN debit card from Andrews Federal Credit Union, or AFCU (www.andrewsfcu.org). It had been mentioned in ITN (March ’14, pg. 40) that these would work in Europe.* I also got a preloaded chip-and-PIN debit card from AFCU in 2016.

I visited Milan in 2015, 2016 and 2017. Though I had no problems using my debit cards in ATMs, I tried both debit cards at Trenord ticket machines and at the city transport system ticket machines on each visit and they...

While searching for discounted business-class fares from Los Angeles to Zagreb, Croatia, I came across Your Business Flights (Las Vegas, NV; 800/359-3050, yourbusinessflights.com).

After I filled out the contact form through the website, a woman named Giselle contacted me by email, and since I was trying to negotiate something better than what she could offer me, I received a phone call from German.

This was on May 25, 2017, and, for flights two months later, Giselle and German were able to book exactly what I wanted at a lower cost than what I found offered by other flight...