News and notes from around the interweb:
- A new website you have to check out. Conde Nast Traveler‘s consumer editor Wendy Perrin has left after nearly 2 decades and now has her own venture. Here she interviews Randy Petersen who has kind words for yours truly.
- The big upcoming changes to the Turkish Miles&Smiles program turn out to be not so bad. Indeed, it’s still one of the better programs in Star Alliance, though I prefer Avianca’s LifeMiles for lack of fuel surcharges.
- United has reduced the price at which they will sell you elite qualifying miles
- How high fuel prices help legacy airlines compete against low cost carriers. Since everyone more or less has to pay the same cost for fuel, as fuel prices rise the cost advantage of the discounters evaporates.
- Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer (an American Express Membership Rewards and Starwood Preferred Guest transfer partner) is offering 50% off of award flights to several destinations on its SilkAir subsidiary (flights which cannot be booked with Star Alliance partner miles, as SilkAir is not a Star member.) Book by May 25 for flights through September 30. (HT: Loyalty Lobby)
- One free Uber Rush Delivery in Manhattan
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Gary,
On point 3, Mike writes about low rates for purchasing award miles; PQMs are still unjustifiably expensive.
–Jered
The other thing on point 2 is that while the cpm may be relatively low, the minimum number of miles that can be purchased seems to have gone way up – on a recent trip to Asia, as I recall the minimum number of PQM’s was either 26K or 40K, so while the cpm was low, the total spend was really high.
Greg
@Gary — What Jered said….
I have some fun award travel coming up next week and noticed that the award/premier accelerator options are pretty amazing (but outlandish).
United presents me with the option of purchasing either 50,000 or 75,000 miles! Award miles are 2.1 cpm, while the PQM add-on is 10 cpm. I guess that’s one (expensive) way to get Platinum fast, but it won’t help you with your 1K revenue requirements!
We’re super excited to be trying Lufthansa’s 747-400 F cabin as a start to our trip; I really appreciate the pointers I’ve gotten on how those open up to partners starting 14 days prior.