10 secrets airlines don't want you to know Compiled by Chicago Tribune   Travel is great – only problem is, you usually have to fly to get anywhere good. And that can be a drag. Here are 10 tips that can make that trip easier, more comfortable and just all around better, from Cook- American Express Travel in New York.

1. Complain, and ye shall receive. If you don't like something about your flight (food, delays, lumpy seats, rude attendants, lost baggage), be sure to speak up – airlines tend to buy grouchy passengers off with frequent-flier miles.

2. Pay less, get more. It sounds crazy but it's true: First-class seats are available at coach prices, especially for last-minute international travel, if you use a travel agency. Lots of the bigger agents have deals with airlines where you can buy a full-price coach fare and be upgraded to business class. And domestically, agents can book coach tickets under codes (such as Y, Q or Z), which give ticketholders automatic upgrades to first class.

3. Better food? Don't bet on it. All those ads for tasty gourmet meals don't give you the fine print: Most are available only on specific flights. For example, Delta offers Todd English sandwiches but only on flights between New York and Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle and San Francisco. Brace yourself for pretzels. 4. You can still be comfy in coach. Here's a trick: Buy three seats together in coach for two people. It's still significantly cheaper than buying two seats in business class, and you'll have room to relax.

5. Upgrade at the gate. Most airlines offer upgrades to first class for $500 at the ticket counter in the terminal. Sure, that's a lot of dough, but it's a LOT cheaper than if you'd booked first class to begin with.

6. Holidays: Bad time to fly, great time to book. Most airlines launch short sales over the holidays, with discounts up to 20 percent less than usual.

7. Web sites don't always have the best deals. Kayak.com and Expedia are great, but airlines don't necessarily offer all their discounts to the sites directly; instead, they offer net fares and consolidator tickets to large corporate travel agencies to ensure they fill empty seats without devaluing their inventory. So it can pay to talk to a travel agent; they have access to net and consolidator fares that the discount sites do not, especially for international business and first-class seats.

8. Buy a package deal. Even if you don't use them all, sometimes booking a hotel, cruise and airfare together can be cheaper than airfare alone. Watch for specials and take advantage.

9. Buy round-trip, even if you're going one way. Airlines charge a premium…

 Dubai kissing woman ready for jail A British woman convicted of indecency for kissing a friend in a Dubai restaurant has told her lawyer to abandon her appeal so she can serve her month-long prison sentence and "get on with" her life. Read Article   

  We could do with a dose of Barack Obama's honesty While the Obama administration has frankly admitted the scale of America's financial problems, the British people are not being told the truth, says George Osborne.   By George Osborne



It is a tale of two cities. I have left behind a London stuck in a wasted year as a tired and embittered government desperately limps towards its electoral fate; and I have come to a Washington DC buzzing with the energy, ideas and enthusiasm of a new administration.I am here to talk to the senior members of the Obama economic team. When I congratulated one of them on surviving the first 100 days, he replied: "Survived? I think we have done a lot better than that." That self-confidence is infectious; but in all the meetings I have had, from the White House to the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, I have also seen a humility about the scale of the challenges ahead.  
So what lessons can we learn from this new administration? The first is simple: be honest with people.Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, who I saw on Friday, explicitly warned Americans last week that "even after the recovery gets under way, the rate of growth of real economic activity is likely to remain below its longer run potential for a while". The same, I believe, is true for Britain. As in America, I hope that growth will start to return in Britain at the end of the year. After all, we will have been in recession for almost two years by then – the longest and deepest recession since the war. But an end to the prolonged contraction still leaves unemployment high and rising, government debt soaring, the motors of growth broken, and a slow and difficult recovery ahead.That is the truth, yet it is not what the Chancellor of the Exchequer is telling the British people. He says that our economy will bounce straight back from bust to boom-time levels of growth. In doing so he destroyed the credibility of the entire Budget.It makes, to my mind, an unanswerable case for handing over the publication of economic forecasts to an independent Office for Budget Responsibility, something we will do soon after the election of a Conservative government.The second lesson from the Obama administration is that we need a fundamental analysis of what went wrong. People here recognise that the root of the crisis was an unsustainable, debt-fuelled housing and credit boom funded by the savings of emerging economies. The President tells Americans that they need to move from an economy of "borrow and spend" to one of "save and invest".That is exactly what needs to happen in Britain, too, where the boom was even greater and even more unsustainable. Yet Mr Brown persists in his extraordinary claim that the British economy was perfectly sound until it was hit out of the blue…

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