Airline Fanatic

Donal Trump Jr. just put an editorial piece in the New York Times explaining to America just how normal he is, and that even he gets stopped at security for asinine reasons. I can’t really tell if the article is more about Donald the Younger trying to convince Americans he is just your average Joe, or if he really believes the fact that he got a secondary screening at an airport is worthy of an article in the Times. The truth probably lies somewhere between the two explanations, but here is a quick summary anyway:

Obviously, in this day and age, security needs to be tight. But it was an alarm clock. Despite my best efforts in trying to explain the situation, security shut down the lane. I felt like an idiot. And by the way, no one much cared about what I had to say.

The T.S.A. agents called in the state police. It took them only five minutes to figure out that I was indeed carrying an alarm clock. One of the officers spoke to the gate agent on my behalf, while I was being held, sockless and shoeless, in the screening line. The whole alarm clock affair took about 25 minutes.

Sometimes it pays to be a Trump. Frequent flying isn’t one of those times. But at least I got my alarm clock back.

I’ve been in and out of Laguardia enough times to recognize the 727 sitting on the tarmac with a huge TRUMP on the side of it.  I’m sure it costs a hell of a lot of money to park your plane at one of the busiest small airports around, so why not just use it when you actually have the need to fly somewhere?  Granted that model wouldn’t be able to reach any of the international destinations Trump listed in his article, but I’m sure it would be much better than flying economy and answering “Apprentice” questions for hours on end in the back of an airplane.

This seems like pretty basic stuff United is missing here.  According to TravelGlitch.com, anyone who buys a $100 e-certificate off ebay or through some other manner, then has unlimited access to other certificates by only changing the URL they use.

That sounds a bit complicated, but lets break it down and see how it works.  First, you buy a $100 e-certificate off ebay for around $10, and then are told to go to a specific URL to claim your reward.  Well part of that URL is your unique certificate number.  It turns out that the first 9 digits of the certificate always stay the same, and only the last 6 change.  All you have to do is start out at the number of the certificate you purchased and start counting up by one.  In 10 minutes of work TravelGlitch was able to find 5 valid certificate numbers that would have given them $500 in discounts.

From one perspective this is pretty awesome news, for a $10 investment you can get hundreds in discounts.  But think about all the people who actually own these certificates but have not yet used them, only to find that their number has already been used once they do actually try to use it. One would think United would have foreseen these issues and built a website secure enough to make sure certificates actually go to those who own them, rather than those who just play with their URL a bit.  United has to do something about this!

[Via TravelGlitch]