I’m a co-founder of frequent flyer community Milepoint.com, but I ponied up the $59 for premium membership. By paying for a year up front, I took advantage of the offer which came with 2000 United miles, Hyatt Platinum or 2000 points for existing Hyatt elites, and National Car Rental Executive status as well as a variety of other benefits like a free Gogo inflight wireless session. I didn’t get in on the first round, but I did the second time it was available (the offer is no longer available with United miles and Hyatt status, but $3.99 monthly premium membership does include ad-free viewing, National Car Rental status, and a host of travel-related discounts.) My 2000 United miles posted sometime over the past 24 hours: I’ve received several questions about when points would post and…
Monthly Archives
Monthly Archives for September 2012.
Figuring Out Whom to Blame for the Evaporation of Air France Award Space
In my last post I speculated on the reasons that Air France business class award space has become, for the most part, unbookable by Delta. My theory was that Delta had already ‘spent too much money’ buying award seats from Air France, compared to their budget or what they were comfortable with, so they had turned off the spigot. I was careful to call this speculation, but it seemed reasonable because they had done something similar in the past. I rejected the idea that it was Air France making a permanent policy change. It makes no sense that Air France would close off business class award space, across-the-board, on an ongoing basis — when there’s clearly seats that they expect to go unsold, and when they’re even in a joint business venture with Delta. And…
Has Delta Completely Stopped Offering Business Class Redemptions on Air France?
Delta has the most punitive international upgrade program of any major US frequent flyer program. United, American, and US Airways let you upgrade any fare with a cash co-pay in addition to miles. Delta requires you to buy nearly full (“M”) fare coach to upgrade to business class, anything less is ineligible. Period. Delta’s M fares are often as expensive or more expensive than discount advance purchase business class fares, when those are available. Delta doesn’t treat its elites any better, top tier elites get international upgrade certificates that can be used on… nearly full fare “M” tickets as well. United doesn’t let its elites upgrade all fares internationally, low-ish “W” fares are permitted though. American allows its 100,000 mile flyers to upgrade any fare. One neat workaround used to be that you could upgrade…
Bangkok Golden Thai Restaurant in Northern Virginia Isn’t a Thai Restaurant
I had lunch at Bangkok Golden Thai Restaurant on Tyler’s advice, and was totally blown away. It’s in the Seven Corners shopping center, next to the Tobacco Barn and a nail salon, and two doors over from a Jenny Craig. This place is maybe half a mile from the Eden Center — where most everything inside is Vietnamese, and very good, that was the originally-planned destination for the day (no place in particular, just the Eden Center and go from there). The photos in this post are just from my phone, since I really wasn’t expecting the lunch that I had and didn’t have my camera with me. The Yelp reviews of Bangkok Golden Thai are strange because in many ways it’s a strange place. There are tons of great reviews saying how wonderful it…
Free Virgin Atlantic Silver Status
Yesterday as I was organizing old posts on the blog, collecting trip reports, compiling previously-written advice, I stumbled upon this post from December 2007 where I said that Virgin Atlantic Silver status was a new benefit of American Express Platinum (and that Black card holders got Gold). At the time it was an outgrowth of Virgin’s new-sih American Express relationship, they had only recently been brought on as a points transfer partner I believe. I was curious if the benefit still existed. The link from that post no longer worked. So I googled “virgin atlantic silver american express platinum” and the second result was this link offering Virgin’s Silver status to American Express Platinum cardholders. It’s a page to sign up for a new account, no verification of Platinum cardholder status appears to take place.…
New Features at View from the Wing
Somehow I wound up in a nostalgic mood yesterday, the kind you feel when you go through old drawers or old boxes and look through each and every item, bringing back memories of childhood or high school. Only for me, it was reading through the old archives of this blog, which I’ve been writing for over 10 years. I was struck by the early posts, how I was trying to figure out what the blog was supposed to be, it was as much postings of weird news as it was travel deals, and the deals and offers I posted were really just the things I wanted to keep track of, this website was just a convenient bookmark or repository for links and my notes on them so I could find them more easily later. Writing…
TechCrunch Coverage of the Award Wallet Kerfuffle
TechCrunch has a good run down of the fallout from Delta’s cease-and-desist order to points tracking websites like Award Wallet. They note that TripIt and MileWise are also affected, and that Delta joins American and Southwest in objecting to these sites accessing account information on behalf of members. Here’s the situation in a nutshell: the airlines think your rewards data is theirs. Users think they own their own data. Imagine that! What’s worse is that airlines are actually pissing off some of their most important customers – frequent flyers – when they do things like this. It’s a group that’s critical to airlines’ bottom line. They report that American claims it’s about security, while Delta says ‘system performance’ but it’s really about control over valuable data and eyeballs. Techcrunch’s recommendation? “But here’s a suggestion to the airlines about building brand loyalty:…
The Travel Politics of View from the Wing
For folks who thought I was being political or one-sided in posting about the Romney campaign’s drawing for tickets on the campaign plane, I’d remind folks that I did cover Obama Points, the loyalty currency the President introduced during the 2008 campaign, more than once. And I predicted Obama’s victory 8 months before the last election (as well as that we were headed into the worst recession since World War II, that we were in a liquidity trap the Fed would be powerless against for some time, and that the coming four years would see big deficits and no tax increases — not bad on the prediction score!). I have political preferences of course, I write about my thoughts on policy occasionally (mostly with regards to travel issues — such as the TSA, air traffic…
How to Make Airport Car Rentals Work Better
Joe Brancatelli has a great idea to really improve the airport rental car experience. I want to drop my rental car at my departure terminal The car-rental firms have nine million reasons why they shunt us to distant airport “rental return” lots. And there’s only one reason to allow us to drive right up to the departure terminal and drop off our vehicles: We’ll pay for the convenience and the time savings. No matter what the rental firms say, implementing such as scheme is no more complicated than valet parking at a restaurant. You have a podium in front of each departure terminal. The renter drives up and drops the keys and the valet generates a receipt from a handheld device. We pay perhaps $10 for the valet service and everyone wins. The service need…
United Will Be Bringing Back Upgrade Inventory Detail to its Website
United will be restoring fare class availability to its website on an opt-in basis, i.e. the return of ‘expert mode’ which is they way that it used to be offered by United.com before Continental got involved. This will be coming “within the next two weeks” and is “a direct result of [customer] feedback, we have worked hard to accelerate a couple solutions that accomplish this goal.” In other words, they didn’t anticipate the firestorm that ensued when the airline took away customer ability to see upgrade and award inventory online. The issue even got coverage from the Wall Street Journal‘s Scott McCartney. Under that sort of pressure, it made sense for them to walk back the position that information in the hands of customers was a bad thing. They’ve done too much these past six…
