New United Elite Website, How to Cheat on Your Expense Reports, and LifeMiles Forgot to Raise Some Prices

News and notes from around the interweb:

Sneaky ways to cheat on your business expense reimbursements
Is 7500 American AAdvantage miles for test driving a Cadillac worth your time? Battle lines are drawn.
Secretary of State John Kerry’s plane went mechanical. I think this has happened before — recently. What I don’t understand is why they choose to fly him transatlantic in a 757 (hopefully they’ll get him a longer range aircraft for his trips in the Winter, or else he’ll refuel at one of United’s focus cities in Goose Bay or Gander). Someone ought to inquire whether he was booked onto the Austrian Airlines codeshare with United for his flight back to DC, to see if he was compliant with the Fly America Act..
United has a new Premier status tracker on its website.

The new tracker is a personalized microsite, which clearly shows your Premier qualifying activity including waivers and exemptions, and how you are tracking against all Premier status requirements.

You can access the new site right now by going to mystatus.united.com and logging-in with your existing MileagePlus credentials. We will also soon add direct links from the My Account page on united.com (with no need to log in twice).
The price of purchasing Avianca’s LifeMiles went up 10% last month. Sort of. Buying them outright got more expensive, but LifeMiles will let you buy up to 60% of the points you need for an award at the time of booking (‘cash and points’ awards). And they haven’t adjusted that price, you can still buy points at 1.5 cents apiece that way. Of course, their award chart got more expensive this week so that’s an across the board price increase, too, in a way. (HT: One Mile at a Time)
A woman threw up on an American flight between Dallas and Chicago and was instructed to remain in the lavatory for the duration of the flight. American claims the flight attendants weren’t afraid of Ebola, and were just doing their best to take care of the passenger. ::cough::

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