Bits: Air New Zealand LA sale, Nobu Hotel Shoreditch opens today, my Uber milestones

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• Michael says:

  1 Jul1 July 06:41

  OT: I’m flying Club out of LHR terminal 3 in a couple of weeks. My flight is at 6pm. People have said that the Galleries lounge doesn’t have good food selection until after 5. Would I be better off going to the Cathay lounge? I don’t have any status.

  • Chris says:

    1 Jul1 July 08:13

    You will always be better off going to the Cathay lounge! It’s much nicer.

    • Michael says:

      1 Jul1 July 08:35

      Thank you!

      • AspirationalFlyer says:

        1 Jul1 July 09:14

        Hi Michael – last time I was at T3, I was travelling with Finnair and actually did a bit of a lounge bar crawl which included the BA lounge, American Airlines lounge, Cathay lounge and No.1 Traveller lounge. All were ok, but the Cathay lounge was by far the best. If you like Asian food, the Cathay lounge does great dim sum and noddles to order. My recommendation would be to order food when you arrive, grab a glass of champagne or a speciality cocktail from the bar and then enjoy! There is a buffet too, with various western options. The only things that are sometimes better about the BA lounge are a good selection of self pour alcohol and, in my experience, bigger range of magazines and newspapers. The Elemis spa is obviously too if you’re flying long haul. Depending on when you fly the Qantas lounge might also finally be open!

  • CT says:

    1 Jul1 July 08:53

    DEFINITELY go eat in the Cathay lounge. You can always go to the BA lounge afterwards if you’d rather pour your drinks yourself.

• Cdd says:

  1 Jul1 July 06:54

  For those truly interested, you can submit a Subject Access Request to UBER if your account is EU based and get a detailed breakdown of how many of each category of rating you’ve received.

  My stats as of last year were:
  52 x 5 star
  3 x 4 star
  5 x 3 star
  1 x 2 star
  0 x 1 star

  It surprised me as I expected more polarised results on the principle that people generally like or dislike you.

  • Alan says:

    1 Jul1 July 09:06

    It does make you wonder if they’d be better only having a 3 star system – or following Netflix’s lead and do a simple thumbs up/down. The granularity of 5 stars seems rarely used.

• Chan P says:

  1 Jul1 July 07:29

  I ate at Nobu on Thursday. Same great service and food. Will be back at the end of next week

• N says:

  1 Jul1 July 07:34

  A quick one to say a huge well done to the team at Curve for acting quickly and efficiently when I had a stream of rogue transactions appear on my card. I turned the card off after the first one, messaged through the app and I had a new card within 48 hours,with the first oddness transaction reversed.

  • Alan says:

    1 Jul1 July 09:07

    Excellent. I must say since they finally launched the Android version I’ve been pretty pleased with them. Definitely much more helpful than Supercard ever were!

• rotundo says:

  1 Jul1 July 07:35

  I have to confess that I had an “Awww….” moment when I saw this in the email: “Engagements between couples who met on an uberPOOL journey: 5”

• Neil says:

  1 Jul1 July 07:44

  I have had a few what I think were one star ratings, and the only reason I can think of is that they were short journeys. Digging around, I sense that low ratings for short journeys are common – which to my mind undermines the credibility of the whole ratings system. What do people think?

• Greenpen says:

  1 Jul1 July 08:06

  I have never used an Uber cab so don’t really understand what is going on here. However, it seems rather odd that the driver rates the customer and not the other way around!

  • Duncan Stevenson-Price says:

    1 Jul1 July 08:08

    It works both ways. It used to be that users didn’t even see their rating but that changed recently.

    I haven’t had the email Rob mentions so I don’t see the breakdown.

    • the realharry1 says:

      1 Jul1 July 08:14

      but why would you/ should you remotely care what some pissant cabbie thinks about you?

      • Frank says:

        1 Jul1 July 08:32

        Because your rating affects how likely Uber drivers are to accept your ride hail request. A low rating means drivers will be much less inclined to accept your request, particularly during times of high demand.

      • AspirationalFlyer says:

        1 Jul1 July 08:59

        Because if you have a low score and they otherwise have plenty of custom, you may struggle to get an Uber or they will just cancel after initially accepting. There are obviously plenty of other options, but living in East London I often find Uber one of the cheapest and most convenient.

      • Genghis says:

        1 Jul1 July 09:32

        No driver would take my request for a ride around the corner at Birmingham airport the other day. They kept cancelling. Had to walk in the rain!

        • Simon says:

          1 Jul1 July 11:31

          thats why you book a long journey, then amend it when you get in the car…..

        • AVM says:

          1 Jul1 July 12:35

          ^ That’s why drivers rate passengers.

        • Simon says:

          2 Jul2 July 09:30

          The driver cannot see the destination you have entered until they have picked you up and started the journey. I have heard some drivers are calling riders and asking the destination and then cancelling if the journey is only short. If this happens you should report it to UBER.

        • Genghis says:

          2 Jul2 July 09:44

          @Simon So why did around 8 drivers accept my ride and then cancel on me if they did not know where I was going?

    • RIcatti says:

      2 Jul2 July 02:13

      This is all quite rubbish. Serious rubbish.

      I am mostly taking rides alone, NEVER amended a destination to shorten the trip, etc, I lift my luggage to put into trunk myself, and I always, always look out for the car and make myself visible.

      Behaving like a good housetrained dog, basically. My score is not much better than Rob’s.

      I suspect that drivers retaliate for the absence of an automated tip.

• Sussex Bantam says:

  1 Jul1 July 09:08

  I had an offer from ebay/nectar in my email today – spend 3000 Nectar points on ebay and get 1500 back. I’m pretty sure it is targetted but I mention it because I nearly missed it in my inbox so others might too. The email title was ”

  Save with eBay and Nectar – Spend 3,000 points and earn half of them back!!”

  • Alan says:

    1 Jul1 July 09:37

    Yep, have had that before – it’s a decent deal!

  • Rob says:

    1 Jul1 July 10:02

    Worth doing, you’re effectively getting 1p per Nectar point. Easy enough to buy a supermarket gift card with them.

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