United To Require Minimum Stays Starting In October [Pack A Bag]

Sorry travelers, as expected, United Airlines will require minimum stays on all flights starting in October. Gone are the halcyon days of jetting away for a business meeting after breakfast with time to spare before returning for dinner. Most United fares will now require a three-night or weekend stay, but it "will depend on the destinations involved, the price of the ticket and the length of the flight." And, yes, you will still be charged $15 to check the first bag.

"[Business travelers will] push back big time," said Mike Boyd, a Colorado-based aviation consultant. "It's one thing to simply raise fares. It's quite another to do it by imposing restrictions that appear to make it harder to conveniently fly."

Major carriers scrapped most minimum-stay rules - put in place largely to discourage big-budget corporate travelers from snatching up the cheapest seats - at the start of the decade, although United and other airlines recently started bringing the overnight rules back piecemeal.

Friday's changes are far more sweeping because they also apply to highly competitive routes where United goes head-to-head against lower-cost rivals such as Southwest Airlines and JetBlue Airways.

"What we did this week was almost across the board," [United spokeswoman Robin Urbanski] said. "At the end of the day, it's all about improving our profit as we combat these record high fuel prices."

We previously suggested that travelers evade overnight requirements by buying back-to-back one-way fares, which can be cheaper than a single round-trip ticket with a hotel stay.

In related news, United also raised the price of one-way fares.

5 No BS Ways To Get A Credit Score For Free [Equifax]

Here are 5 ways to get your credit score for free. Note, all of them are the credit scores developed by the credit bureaus themselves, Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax, and are not your FICO score, which is only sold by the Fair Issac Corporation (you can get your FICO score through myfico.com). Only the FICO score is used by lenders to determine your credit worthiness. However, you can at least use these credit bureau scores to get a general sense of how good your credit is.

• CreditKarma.com : Gives you your TransUnion score. Advertising-supported.
• E-Loan : Experian score. Scroll down to "One-Time Credit Snapshots" and "Free Credit Score (Credit Score Only)"
• Prosper : Experian score. Information on how to do it here .
• LendingClub : Gives you a letter grade score, which you can use this chart to translate to a numerical score.
• Washington Mutual Credit Cards : Get your Transunion score when you log in.

• Another way these are useful is that if you check in periodically and keep track of the results, you can see how your score fluctuates and try to correlate its delta with any credit-related actions you took during that time. But, if you're shopping for a loan or a mortgage, you will definitely want to pony up the cash and get your real FICO score.

  [via MyMoneyBlog ]

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