An interesting side effect of the failure of Congress to re-authorize the FAA, in addition to airlines not charging federal taxes on ticket sales, is that the American Express Membership Rewards program is not charging their fee (which ostensibly recoups taxes) on transfers to U.S. frequent flyer mile programs. Normally Amex charges $0.0006 per point (capped at $60 per 100,000 miles transferred) when moving points to U.S. airline mileage programs. The fee isn’t charged when transferring to hotel programs or to non-U.S. programs like British Airways and Singapore Krisflyer. That means if you’re considering a transfer to a U.S. program like Delta or Continental (before the Amex-Continental relationship ends September 30), this is a good time to do it – save yourself up to $60. To me the transfer fees are annoying, but the lack…
Monthly Archives
Monthly Archives for July 2011.
If Your Underwear Doesn’t Speak, You Can’t Fly Today
In one of those bizarre “there must be more to it than that” sort of stories, a woman is suing JetBlue for making her prove to them that she was wearing underwear. Apparently she was, but the Captain wouldn’t fly with her and she wound up taking another flight four hours later. Ms Knowles said she was wearing a baggy blue T-shirt over a pair of short dark denim shorts she had put on for the flight on July 13, last year when she was forced off the plane at LaGuardia Airport. She was taken to a hangar, where she lifted up her T-shirt to prove she met the dress code. The supervisor seemed surprise at her shorts and she was allowed to return to the flight, but was then told the pilot refused to…
Is There a Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity to Buy Airline Tickets Tax Free?
The U.S. House adjourned for the day without a temporary extension or re-authorization for the FAA. The last full re-authorization was four years ago, and 20 short-term extensions have been passed since then. The latest one runs out at midnight tonight. This is expected to mean the furlough of 4000 employees, but does not affect air traffic control. Which of course leads me to wonder about the usefulness of those 4000 employees anyway. Republicans in the House, led by Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica, are at odds with Senate Democrats — primarly over the Essential Air Service program. I’ve explained in the past just how wasteful this this program is, and that it really can’t be made more effective. Mica doesn’t propose to gut much from the program, just to end subsidies that amount to…
The End of Buying $1 Coins from the Mint to Earn Miles
Via Million Mile Secrets, the US mint deal is officially dead. They’re no longer accepting credit or debit cards for the purchase of $1 coins, and they say it’s precisely because people were buying the coins to earn frequent flyer miles and depositing the coins in the bank to pay off those credit cards. But they’ve known for a long time that this was going on. I first wrote about it in June 2008. In the summer of 2009, the deal exploded as the Mint lifted the per-person cap on purchases. Scott McCartney learned all about it on the first Star Mega DO and wrote a Wall Street Journal column about it. That was nearly two years ago. After attention in the press, the Mint took some heat for letting the practice continue. And they…
100 Free ANA Mileage Club Miles
One Mile at a Time beat me to the punch, I got an email last night from ANA that I didn't read and I saw a thread on Milepoint but I was pretty tired… Ben was more on the ball. So he posted about an All Nippon Mileage Club Survey offering 100 points. It’s 16 quick questions about their website and about social media. The real value in the offer, as Ben points out, is that ANA has a great website to search for Star Alliance awards but that they’ve implemented a restriction requiring you to have some miles in your account before you can use the search tool without extra effort for a workaround. This should get you the 100 miles you need to save you effort down the road. I really liked the…
250 Free Starwood Points
The recent free points offers for ‘liking’ Starwood hotels on Facebook haven’t worked out too well, they get much greater response than expected and they end the offers early. I haven’t blogged any of them, because I’ve been busy and haven’t seen them until maybe 8-12 hours after they’re posted on various other websites… and they’re already dead. It seems that hotels expect to narrowly target, say, guests at the hotel with a sign in the lobby — connect with their existing guests. But they just say ‘like us on Facebook and we’ll give you points’ with no other qualifying criteria, the offers get posted online, and we all go, “Free points??? YEAH!” And then a motel in Heth, Arkansas all of a sudden has 15,000 fans (most of whom would never be willing to…
792 Free US Airways Miles
Via UnRoadWarrior, the US Airways online maill offers 792 miles for signing up for Rebtel, an international dialing service. Importantly, no credit card or other payment information is required for setting up the account, so it’s just free miles (which will also be good enough to reset the expiration date on your account, if you don’t acquire US Airways miles often).
2 Free Nights at Grand Sierra Resort & Casino, Reno
The Grand Sierra Resort & Casino in Reno is offering two free nights, bookable through December 23rd. You have to enter your zip code when searching for reservations, because the offer is restricted to guests from outside their local area. A “Luxury Summit Suite” upgrade is $25 per night. Although I don’t quite understand how the website describes a standard room as ‘amost 500 square feet’ and then the more expensive suite as being ‘420 square feet’. Meanwhile, a Grand Suite is listed at $55 per night additional and clocks in at ‘558 square feet’. It looks as though the offer is aimed at regular diners of Charlie Palmer’s Steak House, though appears bookable by anyone. The property itself looks ‘fine for Reno’ which is to say that I wouldn’t make a special trip because…
Delta Releases Animated Rendering of New JFK Terminal 4
Delta has released a new Youtube video, an animated rendering of their new JFK Terminal 4 project. The main terminal itself looks great, clean lines, high ceilings, plenty of light. Roughly speaking it reminds me of an Asian airport. We’ll see what it looks like in practice, how the materials hold up to use, and how well it’s treated by my fellow New Yorkers (I no longer live there, but I’m still a New Yorker). The concourses themselves though don’t look nearly as nice, much lower ceilings, although anything new in New York is bound to be an improvement. Some of the marketing copy in the video, though, just seems to set expectations a little bit too… high “We’re investing $1.2 billion of renovations and innovations that will turn JFK into a state of the…
Are We About to See an End to Naked Images at the Airport?
Apparently the TSA has been testing software which will display a generic person instead of your naked body when going through a nude-o-scope. (HT: legalalien on Milepoint.) The idea is to display hidden items under clothing but instead of against an image of your naked body, against a generic naked body drawing that will tell the TSA where to look in secondary screening. They’ll be rolling out the software “in the comming months” to millimeter wave machines, but not yet to backscatter machines. My guess is that this will satisfy many privacy advocates, it’s a brilliant PR move, but does little to address the underlying problems of the TSA — its wasteful inability to do things that actually promote security — all the while making us used to submitting to inspections by the state as…
