When you write a blog, you ‘put yourself out there’. I tend to be more analytical and less personal than some bloggers, but my travel decisions are certainly open to criticism. But a lot of readers. Every single day. It can take a tough skin sometimes to hear all of the comments and second guessing. It’s nice to get positive comments, though, and I thought I’d share one of my favorites, I think, to date. Michael S. writes, Thanks for the informative site. I can see why “Mommy Points” calls you fancy pants. You are a very elegant man with elegant tastes in food, wine and travel which is fine by me. I don’t know that I’m actually elegant, but I certainly do have preferences that I share here on a daily basis!
Monthly Archives
Monthly Archives for January 2013.
Expedia Rewards Warns Us of Unspecified Changes Coming Throughout 2013
I’ve been an ‘Expedia Elite Plus’ member since that program was launched, and an Expedia VIP member long before that. I actually like booking through Expedia, I often use Expedia Rewards as part of my quintuple dipping strategy when booking airfare. The website interface is pretty good. Online travel agencies can be advantageous versus airline websites not just for the rewards, but for ease of booking specific flights and connections, for combining airlines on a single ticket, not to mention that several US airline sites don’t allow use of a foreign-issued credit card, that you don’t have to show the credit card at check-in since it’s an agency ticket, and you can even choose which country your ticket is issued in (I can book through Expedia’s German, Spanish, Canadian or New Zealand websites for instance).…
50% Bonus on American Express Membership Rewards Transfers to Starwood
American Express Membership Rewards is offering a 50% bonus on transfers to Starwood Preferred Guest through March 31. Normally it takes 3 Membership Rewards points to yield one Starpoint. Under this offer it takes 2 Membership Rewards points to yield one Starpoints. So better than usual, and in my view better than other straight-up hotel transfer options that American Express offers. But still not good or in most cases worth doing except to top off to towards a specific award with SPG. (Then, your relevant comparison is the cost to buy Starpoints.) American Express Membership Rewards are almost always best (1) transferring to airline miles (2) during a bonus promotion (3) for low-level premium cabin award redemptions. The hotel transfer options just aren’t as good. Alternatively, this does represent an opportunity with some devaluation to…
Will Buying Miles from the Mint Save Us All? Obama’s Debt Ceiling Plan B Came From Frequent Flyers
One of the frequent controversies in the frequent flyer world is, should the mileage-earning opportunity be shared? On the one hand, the community benefits by sharing with each other. Before internet forums and blogs a mistake fare might be discovered by one person, they would share with a few friends, but that would be it. In the modern age a mistake fare is discovered, it goes viral, and many more people either have their tickets cancelled or luck our and wind up with a once in a lifetime to travel the world at ridiculously low prices. (And what’s once in a lifetime for many turns out to be ‘just another Wednesday’ for many of us.) The fear is that ‘too much exposure’ will lead to a deal being pulled more quickly than if it had…
Waiting (Im)patiently for the Return of Icelandair’s Alaska Airlines Redemptions
ChangeDetection.com is a really useful website, I use it to track changes to pages like US Airways Grand Slam (I kept hoping they’d bring it back, and would get an early heads up if they changed the page which hosted it). I’ve also been using it to track if and when Alaska Airlines awards come back to Icelandair’s Saga Club program. Back in August lots of folks were hitting Icelandair pretty hard with their partner redemptions on Alaska Airlines. You could straight up buy miles and redeem them on Alaska for first class to Hawaii for about $350. Icelandair was aware of the deal. Their award chart was very very good, 30,000 miles roundtrip in first class, and it was cheap to buy miles in part because of weakness in their country’s currency. And if…
Alaska Airlines Adds Emirates Redemptions to its Award Chart
As expected, Alaska Airlines has gotten up their award chart for redemptions on Emirates which will begin January 16. I was sleeping last night when this was first noticed — while Lucky tripped over himself, fell, and quickly got up a blog post while bleeding in order to bring you the news first. So hat tip Lucky. Here are the award charts: As is common for Alaska Airlines awards on partners, they do not publish award charts for travel between every region of the world. For instance there is no award on Cathay Pacific between Europe and Asia. You can fly Emirates between North America and the Middle East, India, Africa, and Asia but not, say, all the way to Australia. Alaska Airlines awards on partners are roundtrip only, no one-ways for half the miles.…
What Starwood’s Lawsuit Against Two of it Own Hotels Reveals About the Starwood Preferred Guest Program
On Tuesday I wrote that Starwood is suing the Parker Meridien and Perker Palm Springs hotels, accusing them of fraud and seeking to abrogate their contracts. Starwood is trying to cancel its agreements with the Parker Meridien hotels in New York and Palm Springs after the properties allegedly faked accounting records and guests in order to claim over $1 million in payments from SPG. LoyaltyLobby tracked down a copy of the lawsuit (.pdf) and it makes for interesting reading. It reveals the details of the fraud. Starwood Preferred Guest was the first program to offer ‘no capacity controls’ on award nights. If a standard room is available at a hotel, a member can use points for the room. The way that they do that is offering deeply discounted payments to hotels for their rooms most…
You Can Fly Singapore Airlines First Class on Points — Here’s How!
Singapore Airlines offers an almost mythic first class product. The service is great. The seats are top notch. The Krisflyer inflight entertainment system is grand. The food is good, the alcohol very high end, and the amenities copious Mostly though the awards are perceived to be very hard to get. That’s because they almost never make long haul premium cabin award space available to their partners like United and US Airways. US Airways added a footnote to their award chart to say these seats are not an option. Back in July Singapore Airlines awards were made available to partners as a result of a systems glitch. This wasn’t awards at a discount. The error was that the awards existed for partners at all. And there was a feeding frenzy. But the truth is that Singapore…
What American’s Pilots are Being Told About Their Post-Merger Future
Terry Maxon published the American Airlines pilots union Q&A on the memorandum of understanding they’ve approved relating to how pilots would be treated in a potential merger with US Airways. Terry’s summary is better: Q. Why haven’t American’s pilots been told what’s in the memo? A. We can’t. We promised. … Q. When will we be informed? A. When the airlines let us. Q. When will it take effect? A. When we merge. Q. When will we merge? A. Don’t know. … Q. Who’ll represent the pilots after a merger? A. Probably us. We’re bigger. You can of course read the real memo.
Aisle Seat Bathroom Etiquette
If you’re in the aisle seat, is it fair game to go to sleep? And if you’re not in the aisle seat — and you have to use the lavatory — do you wake the person sitting next to you in order to get up and go, or do you hold it? Does it depend on how long the flight is? I just got off of a fairly short flight, I was upgraded — best I can tell the only passenger with a complimentary upgrade on the flight — and wound up in a middle seat. And I had to use the facilities. The man sitting next to me in the aisle sleep was dozing off. I had a real conundrum. It was only a 90 minute flight, so it’s not unreasonable for me to…
