Presumably, some folks on your holiday gift list are travelers. Equally likely, you want to come up with a gift that they would really like.
The folks at Switchfly (switchfly.com, the loyalty program redemption experts, have an answer for you. According to their research, "most Americans (65 percent) would be excited to receive an air travel gift for the holidays, and the No. 1 holiday gift American air travelers want is an upgrade to first class." That's a plausible finding, but one more easily stated than accomplished. Time was you could buy an "open ticket" to a known favorite destination, and the traveler could pick the dates within a year. Alas, those days are long gone. Instead you pretty much have to get involved with the details of a gift trip.
You can, of course, just buy their tickets in whatever class you wish. But that requires specifying destinations, dates and times -- a process not susceptible to surprise gift giving. You can't buy upgrades as such, but if you want to go for business class, several online agents, including accessfares.com, sell discounted business-class tickets for intercontinental trips.
For many, the best way to give travel is through a frequent-flier program. You can use your frequent-flier miles to give trips in economy, first or business class -- provided you have the miles. Typically, a round-trip ticket within the 48 states requires 25,000 miles in economy and 50,000 miles in first class. Trips to Europe require roughly double that, or more than double in business class. Here, too, you either have to book a specific trip or promise an award when the travelers want to go. And finding award seats to popular destinations is fiendishly difficult. If your travelers are prepared to buy their own economy tickets, you can offer to upgrade them, but that's tricky: Upgrading cheap economy tickets costs almost as many miles as a "free" award trip, and in addition, you have to shell out a stiff co-pay.
As another approach, if the people you want to give to are frequent travelers, consider giving them a membership in the lounge club program on the airline they use the most. Or try Priority Pass, that gets them in lots of clubs -- but more overseas than at home. You'll pay $300 to $500. Or subscribe them to First Class Flyer (firstclassflyer.com, trial issue free) or Expert Flyer (expertflyer.com, $9.99 per month).
Air travel isn't the only gift option; you can buy your travelers a cruise. But, as with air tickets, you have to specify the ship, cabin class and itinerary.
I don't generally follow the herd about listing a bunch of travel gadgets as gifts. But I do, however, have one overall suggestion: If your travelers don't already have ultra-light luggage -- and they probably don't -- a very lightweight suitcase or two would make travel a lot easier. My current go-to luggage is a Lipault 22 incher that's almost 5 pounds lighter than the case it replaced. Last year, my colleagues at SmarterTravel.com featured it as Luggage's "World's Lightest" models filling the bill. Once your travelers have tried really light luggage, they'll never want to lug a behemoth bag around again.
I also violate my "no gadget" rule with one I found really useful on my current trip: a Kinivo Wi-Fi dongle that connects a laptop or notebook computer to the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz bands -- really useful if you have an older computer with only the 2.4 GHz band internally. When I tried to get online with the free Wi-Fi at Stansted Airport in England, my notebook's internal Wi-Fi couldn't find the airport signal at all. But once I plugged it in, the dongle detected more than twice as many signals, including the airport's free Wi-Fi. It also seems to speed up reception even when you can detect a signal. It's $17.99 at Amazon.
Send email to Ed Perkins at
eperkins@mind.net
Travel on 12/21/2014