Monthly Archives

News and Notes from Around the Interweb: The Alaska Airlines lounge at LAX now offers food for sale. Frontier Airlines is offering a 14% discount with promo code FLY2014 on tickets purchased by January 5 for travel between Jan. 6 and March 12. TravelZoo has a suite at the Anantara Bangkok Sathorn for $109 Australian Dollars per night including daily breakfast for two, free wifi, and a free cocktail per guest. JetBlue offered its own version of the WestJet Christmas, trolling Craigslist for people looking for rides home and offering them free flights instead. (HT: Don H.) You can join the 30,000+ people who see these deals and analysis every day — sign up to receive posts by email (just one e-mail per day) or subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s free. You can also…

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IHG Rewards, the loyalty program formerly known as Priority Club which includes Intercontinental (for points-earning and redemption), Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, and other brands has updated its terms and conditions to include internet access not just for elites but for all members throughout most of the world, and to offer that access for free whether the member is even staying at the hotel or not. This benefit doesn’t apply in Europe, where only IHG Rewards elite members will receive complimentary internet. Internet Access for Members: Beginning January 2014, standard internet access will be available to all IHG® Rewards Club members at no additional cost at all IHG hotels located in the Americas, Greater China, Asia, Middle East and Africa with or without a hotel reservation and/or qualifying stay. Furthermore, IHG® Rewards Club Elite members will…

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News and Notes from Around the Interweb: Forbes looks at the best airlines for business travel in 2014. My take: A good business airline gets you where you want to go with multiple fight options a day, and lets you be productive while getting there,” Gary Leff, head of the popular View from The Wing blog tells me. “That means the major network (legacy) airlines are the better business airlines. The two best are American Airlines and Delta Airlines for letting you stay connected with inflight wireless internet while offering frequent schedules across their broad networks. Of course I choose American between those two due to their far superior mileage program. Photos of Lufthansa’s new lounge at Newark Colorado’s marijuana legalization allows entities controlling property to ban pot on their property. Denver’s airport is utilizing…

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Christopher Elliott is outraged by mileage award cancel and redeposit fees. [Peter DeForest] saved up enough frequent flier miles on Virgin America, an airline with a stellar reputation for taking care of its customers, to fly himself and a companion from San Francisco to Las Vegas. But shortly before the trip, his companion fell ill. He asked Virgin if he could cancel the trip and get his miles back. Sure, a representative told him. If he paid the airline a $100 per reservation “redeposit fee.” Seriously? “It’s ridiculous,” he says. “It’s nearly the value of the points themselves.” I agree with him. I actually agree with Elliott who agrees with DeForest, at least that redeposit fees can be counterproductive — a bad idea — though hopefully for more nuanced reasons than Elliott suggests. Award tickets…

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Singapore Airlines Award Availability Is Awesome — If You Are a Singapore Krisflyer Member Singapore Airlines makes much better award space available to its own KrisFlyer members than they do to their partners. Sure, some partners (like Avianca’s LifeMiles) seem to have access to more space than others do (like United, US Airways). But the award availability Singapore offers its own members is really quite amazing. Singapore Airlines Krisflyer is a partner of American Express Membership Rewards, and also of Starwood Preferred Guest. That means plenty of people in the US have points that can be transferred, if Singapore Airlines premium cabin awards are the goal. I’ve written in the past about how Singapore opens up two first class (saver) award seats pretty much every day on their San Francisco – Seoul – Singapore flight…

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Earlier in the month I featured my Million Reader Giveaway where I promised 15 prizes in exchange for your travel tips. I’ve been remiss in awarding those prizes, because over 1300 entries is a lot especially when some of the prizes are being awarded based on subjective evaluation (that’s 1300 travel tips that I have to think about!). But since I want to be able to give you all elite status and points, plus I have these gift cards sitting on my coffee table that I’m going to have to start resisting the temptation to turn them into money orders and deposit them back into my bank account, I went ahead and put together some winners. And I decided to give away more than the 15 prizes promised. Since I’m a co-founder of the Milepoint…

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It struck me, looking at the requirements to sign up for an Air China co-branded credit card, just how important miles, points, and travel are to the advancement of civilization. It’s hard to imagine a more important question in public policy, and in the history of human society, than economic growth. It makes most other questions possible. We can talk about eradicating poverty only once we have resources with which to address such problems. Indeed, we can’t even conceive of ‘poverty’ until at least some have risen out of it. Without economic growth what we think of as poverty is just ‘the human condition’. And what we now think of as poverty would once have been incredible riches — indoor plumbing, satellite TV (many of the slums in Mumbai even have satellite tv), there’s even…

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Travel Is Free summarized United’s ‘award routing rules’. Award tickets have basically two components — the number of miles that they cost (and that can be based on the region you are flying from and to — most US programs price awards based on regions — or the number of miles you fly, some international programs offer ‘distance-based’ award charts) and the ‘routing rules’ or the way you’re able to fly. Distance-based awards don’t usually have very many routing rules, for the most part you can fly however you want between your cities. After all, the more miles you fly, the more out of the way you travel, you’ll simply pay more miles for the award. You may not be able to transit the same city more than twice, you may only be allowed a…

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Tom Allen makes a really great suggestion for New Year’s Eve. Cathay Pacific makes its final 747 passenger flight from London on December 31. And you can be on it! It’s a fully catered party in the sky, with all the champagne you can drink! And as of this writing there are (5) first class award seats available, and (4) business class awards. It’s a great business product of course, but redeeming for business would mean giving up glass after glass of Krug to ring in the New Year. This flight should cost 90,000 British Airways Avios in First or 70,000 American miles. With American miles you pay taxes including the UK’s air passenger duty (aka ‘luxury tax’ or ‘premium cabin departure tax’) but not the fuel surcharges. With BA Avios you pay taxes and…

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