Here’s a chart from the Calculated Risk blog that shows the 2000-2007 average hotel occupancy rates by week in blue. Then the yellow dashed line shows what those occupancy rates were in 2012. Back to normal levels! The red line shows things so far in 2013, even better than 2012. So hotels are running full, a sharp contrast from the black line which illustrates the bottom falling out of hotel occupancy in 2009 during the Great Recession. Nationwide occupancy is up year-over-year by 1.4% to 66.6% and average daily room rates up 4.5% to $112.05. Put simply, hotel chains believe they don’t have to offer big rebates (nearly as valuable points) in order to put heads in beds.
Monthly Archives
Monthly Archives for March 2013.
Bits ‘n Pieces for March 20, 2013
News and notes from around the interweb: What It’s Like To Fly On North Korea’s 1-Star Airline (HT: @TheBrettGall) I’ve written in the past that Turkish Airlines will offer status matches to most airline elites. This is ultra-useful for free access to United and US Airways lounges when flying solely within the U.S. There’s been some suspicion that Turkish stopped doing so at the end of 2012. However, Loyalty Lobby reports that they’re continuing to do so — you just have to use the online contact form to request the match and upload a copy of your online statement from the airline you wish for them to match. It seems to take two months for them to process it (but the status is valid for about two years and requalification requirements are relatively generous). Hack…
Membership Rewards Ending ‘Points Advance’ Benefit on June 30
I received an email from American Express Membership Rewards yesterday titled, An Important Update About The Membership Rewards Program. Eek. An important update. When I opened the email the graphic said, “A Quick Update” and the email simply read, We are writing to let you know that the most recent version of our Terms and Conditions is available online. You can also learn more about the Membership Rewards program, including how to get and use points, at membershiprewards.com/abouttheprogram. I figured they’d changed something in the program terms, the subject line was alarming, but scrolling through I’ve found only one thing that’s obviously different than what I had understood before: that the “points advance” feature of American Express Membership Rewards cards is “Available until June 30, 2013.” American Express lets you borrow points beyond those you’ve…
Alaska Airlines Finally Offers One-Way Partner Awards (and Mix and Match Roundtrip)
Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan is an incredibly useful program. They partner across much of both Skyteam (eg Air France, KLM, Delta, Korean) and also oneworld (eg American, Qantas, British Airways, Cathay Pacific). And they have partners that aren’t alliance members (like Emirates). For the infrequent flyer I often recommend Alaska as a way of earning miles from flights, they may not fly either American or Delta enough to have enough miles for an award ticket but crediting miles flown on either airline to Alaska allows those miles to build up much more quickly. The biggest drawbacks to Alaska have been the inability to use miles for one-way awards on partner airlines (those were limited to flights on Alaska Airlines only) and the inability to mix and match partners on a one-way award. This last is…
American Introduces a New Tool to Help Customers Find Award Seats
Probably the biggest challenge faced by airline mileage programs is the frustrations of their members trying to redeem points. The cynic says that’s by design, airlines don’t want members to redeem because redemptions cost money! But that charge isn’t really true — members who redeem their miles become even more engaged in programs, ramping up their earnings even faster in the future. In contrast, redemption frustrations turn off customers and mean those customers won’t be accumulating miles as quickly in the future; accumulations that provide revenue to the frequent flyer program. So they’re all trying different ways of improving the redemption experience. Some are even considering upending their entire underlying value proposition to treat miles as a cash currency that’s just used to pay the price of any ticket. That would reduce frustration but also…
Are You Part of the 1%? Then You Can Have Big Miles!
Back in December 2011 I wrote about earning big miles for funding brokerage accounts. At the time you could earn up to 50,000 miles from your choice of either American, United, or Delta with a deposit of $100,000. But the trick was that you could cycle the same money in and out of the account and all that mattered was that the sum of the deposits needed to total $100,000. I did just that. I put money in, took it out, put it back, took it out, and so on in order to earn 50,000 American miles. Unfortunately ‘cycling’ no longer seems to be possible to earn signup bonuses from Fidelity brokerage accounts. If you want the full 50,000 mile bonus, you actually have to deposit $100,000 into the account (cash and/or securities). On the…
If At First You Aren’t Approved: Getting Credit Card Reconsiderations… Online
Dan’s Deals gives some good advice on credit card ‘reconsideration’. With most card issuers you don’t need to be approved right away or automatically in order to get a card. You can be denied initially and still wind up with an approval. The best bank for reconsideration in my experience is Chase. If you have existing credit lines with Chase you can usually horse trade — either cancelling an existing card to get approved for a new one, or offering to shift some credit from an existing card onto the new one. The basic principle here is to demonstrate that you aren’t increasing the bank’s exposure to loss by their approving you for a new card. In the case of cancelling an existing card or shifting credit from an existing card, that usually comforts Chase…
What’s Downloaded For Your Inflight Movie Queue?
Most shows I watch on my laptop — I do DVR a few things but mostly I watch television and movies on airplanes. I also never rely on an airline’s inflight entertainment to keep me occupied. I’ll download who seasons of shows and watch good chunks of them on long haul flights (and then resist the temptation to continue watching when I’m back home — these are for flying only!). When I spoke at an aviation conference on a panel with Scott Kirby of US Airways, I heard his boss remark later in the day that all airlines curse the person who invented inflight entertainment. They’re a huge cost center and they provide no opportunity to make any money. The context here was US Airways’ decision to install internet across its fleet — they knew…
Lufthansa’s Shrinking First Class Cabins and What it Means for Award Space
Lufthansa currently offers a first class cabin on 94 out of 100 planes in its long haul fleet. They will be shrinking that down to 75% of their fleet. Already Lufthansa has been reducing the average number of first class seats in the cabin. Their 747s used to offer 16 first class seats and the retrofitted ones now only offer only 8 (albeit in the same amount of space on the upper deck, with a seat and separate bed for each passenger). Fewer planes with first class, fewer seats in first class. And they’ve been making efforts to sell those seats rather than letting them fly empty, offering discounted and two-for-one first class fares. All of which makes it more difficult to get those seats on points. And it has been tougher. Even on routes…
Bits ‘n Pieces for March 18, 2013
News and notes from around the interweb: $300 of a Westin Heavenly Bed. Comparing like-to-like the W Hotels bed is a bit cheaper, discounts are larger and much more frequent. And shipping on the Westin bed isn’t free. But some prefer it.. Loyalty Lobby summarizes free signup offers for Regus Gold membership which gets you free access to cubicles at their office locations worldwide. Australian merchants widely add fees to credit card charges, and consumers there pay more for their cards, receive less in return, and haven’t seen lower cash prices as a result. Now new rules allow credit card companies to limit the fees charged by Australian merchants, and Visa plans to cap the fees at 1%. Fascinating that Australia is learning from experience, while the U.S. has been willfully blind to their example.…
