Links: Chase Sapphire Preferred Visa Starwood Preferred Guest American Express American Express Premier Rewards Gold Card Over at Conde’ Nast’s Daily Traveler I wrote a basic piece on rewards credit cards. It’s the first post of a three part series. This one focuses on the best cards to put your spending on. The other two focus on the best signup bonuses and cards with the best benefits for carrying the card (as opposed to actually using it). The basic principles I offered were: The first piece of advice is to pick a reward goal. If you want to fly to South America, your best bet is American miles. If you want to fly to Europe or Asia then United or US Airways miles are best, followed closely by American miles. For Australia and French Polynesia,…
Monthly Archives
Monthly Archives for May 2012.
A gAAlley Full of Cookies
Warm Cookies and Milk.
Radisson’s Buy One Cheap Night, Get a Free NIght Anywhere in the World Starts Wednesday
Back at the end of 2011, Club Carlson was running an outstanding promotion with 50,000 bonus points for a single Radisson stay, that basically meant making one cheap stay (I did mine at Washington’s National airport during true low season to get a cheap rate) would yield enough points to stay at any of their top tier properties in the world for a night. Most Radissons in the U.S. aren’t especially nice or aspirational, though the Radisson Blu chain is changing that, and there are also tons of better (and more expensive!) properties abroad. So a great promotion. While available registrations for it were capped, and I expected it to go quickly, it didn’t. They presumably impose a cap to generate excitement (It’s limited! Act now!) as well as to place a cap on their…
1000 Bonus Priority Club Points Per Night
Priority Club is offering 1,000 bonus points for every qualifying night stayed between June 1 and September 3, up to 20,000 bonus points. Registration required, though the link hasn’t yet gone live. (Via the indispensable Priority Club Insider.)
Delta Adds Virgin Australia Flights to Online Award Booking
The toughest frequent flyer award there that there is out there is North America to Australia/New Zealand non-stop. There’s not a lot of flying to Auckland these days, Qantas has pulled their Los Angeles – Auckland flight and Air New Zealand tends to release business class award seats about two months out during peak season (if at all). Meanwhile, getting Qantas seats to Australia can be a real challenge. They’re conservative about releasing award seats (though business class to Brisbane is among the most available). And seats released when the schedule loads are accessible by British Airways, Cathay Pacific, and Qantas’ own members, plus Alaska Airlines members, weeks before American AAdvantage members can access thsoe seats — because Qantas opens their schedule nearly a year out while American only books flights 331 days out. United…
Frequent Flyer Blogs With Simple Lessons on How Your Family Can Travel for Free
Last summer I wrote about how to convince people that frequent flyer programs are worthwhile. They’re my passion of course, and I get stares and jealous comments from colleagues, people say they want to know ‘how to do what I do’ and yet most of the time they don’t follow through. It just seems so far outside their experience and comfort zone, they don’t make the leap. And yet some people do, I did, many readers of this blog did, what made that difference? That’s the very nut that Dave Code wants to crack in this Huffington Post piece. He begins with the big value proposition of credit cards, making it sound simple to take your family overseas for free: Parents, you may not realize you have a chance to dramatically increase your family’s quality…
American Will Be Going 10 Across in Coach on their 777s
Yesterday I attended American’s event announcing new premium cabin enhancements. The biggest deal was their plan to reconfigure the business class cabins on all of their international widebody aircraft with the same seat they’ll be getting with their new Boeing 777-300 aircraft, the same industry-leading seat that Cathay Pacific has been putting in their planes. That’s huge news, it’s a better seat in my opinion than anything that any other carrier (other than US Airways, which offers a similar seat in all its A330 aircraft) offers across the Atlantic. But it’s going to take a long while to get the reconfigurations done, we won’t see the first one in service for about two years. Buried in the discussion, along with rehashing all of the other improvements coming down the pike — pajamas in first class,…
American Announces Their New Business Class Seat Fleet-wide and Other Premium Cabin News
I flew out to Dallas for an American Airlines media event focused on new premium cabin enhancements. Folks were directed through the main security checkpoint in D, by the Grand Hyatt. Boarding passes were apparently a bit confusing at first for the TSA, since they read as being “from Dallas” and “to Dallas.” But American managed to straighten that out before I turned up. An American widebody was parked at Gate 23 and our boarding passes got us on. When I walked on the plane I immediately recognized one of the flight attendants from the oneworld Mega DO charter, and as it happened we had three of them onboard for the event. Some American Airlines regulars may recognize her as well, from the safety video. Rob Friedman, American’s Vice President of Marketing and a former…
A Quick Trip to Dallas and a DFW Airport Overnight
American Airlines invited me to their media event on premium cabin enhancements, and I jumped on it figuring any extra travel to Dallas means travel on American when I’m earning quadruple miles (from a post-oneworld Mega DO promotion). I looked up airfares, saw that without much advance purchase and for the flights I needed given work schedules, that I’d be staring down the barrel of a $1700 ticket. I wound up booked in T class instead, that’s a coach award. No miles earned, not upgradable. And last minute, so the available seats weren’t great either. Not a fantastic way to start a premium cabin improvements discussion, eh? But I watched seat map availability (thanks, Expert Flyer) and an exit row opened up. And then an exit row aisle. I was all good. Great crew, I…
Star Mega DO 4 Launch Party Announced — Spots Are Limited!
A Mega DO is the ultimate frequent flyer adventure — fly around on a chartered aircraft and party with the heads of your favorite airlines, hotels, and loyalty programs while taking advantage of once in a lifetime behind the scenes opportunities whether it’s a private party in Lufthansa’s First Class Terminal in Frankfurt, visiting not open to the public parts of Boeing, or evacuating an aircraft on the slide and into the water. The last event, the inaugural oneworld Mega DO, was covered in USA Today and also in an Associated Press piece that was picked up in about 70 papers around the country. Here’s the Wall Street Journal piece on September’s Star Mega DO 3 and the Journal’s coverage of the first Star Mega DO in September 2009 which was also written up in…
