IHG Rewards (formerly Priority Club) ran a promotion called “The Big Win” which started in September. They’re bringing back The Big Win promotion for the first quarter of 2014. The website for the offer will go live over the weekend. InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) is kicking off 2014 in a big way by offering loyal IHG® Rewards Club members more opportunities to earn free travel through the next installment of its hotel rewards promotion, “The Big Win.” This is a first of its kind promotion, which provides each loyal guest with an individually tailored set of offers. “We have found that introducing tailored offers through “The Big Win” has been beneficial for both our guests and our hotels,” said Jim Sprigg, director, Database Marketing & CRM Solutions, IHG. “So, this January, we are launching a…
Monthly Archives
Monthly Archives for December 2013.
Will Your American Airlines Mainline Flights Be Replaced By a Regional Jet? American Places an Order for 90 More Large Ones..
Back in January American ordered 53 large regional jets with first class and main cabin extra additional legroom seating. Largely these planes have been intended to operate in and out of Chicago O’Hare, replacing bigger aircraft. American has lagged United at Chicago, and the move was seen as a way to shrink capacity there without reducing their network. The regional jet-ification of American continues, however. That’s something that’s been expected with the US Airways merger. US Airways operates a large fleet of regional jets, flying them longer distances and on a greater variety of routes than American does. Specific routes have not yet been announced. Today American announced an order for 90 large (76 seat) regional jets and they took an option for 130 more. Thirty of the jets will go to US Airways Express…
British Airways Improves “Household Accounts”: Redeem Pooled Miles for Anyone You Wish
British Airways offers “household accounts” that allow you to pool miles from multiple frequent flyer accounts to redeem a single award. You can pool points with six people who live at the same address. That increases the usefulness of signing up family members who are just taking a single trip, since their miles aren’t stranded — you can burn them. And it increases the usefulness of credit card signup bonuses, even, each family member can sign up for the card and you can take the miles from their account towards your own accounts (pretty selfish of you, right?). The downside to creating a household account has been that you could only redeem for members of the household. You’ve given up the ability to redeem award tickets for people that aren’t linked in the household account…
Here’s What Transportation Used to Cost
I came across something I posted in 2007 and I’ve been pondering it for a bit. I recently flew Etihad’s first class suites, connecting from terminal 3 in Abu Dhabi to terminal 1 where the business class lounge is packed solid and poorly provisioned. I then wound up at a bus gate out to my business class onward flight to India. My round trip ticket cost me some American Airlines miles of course but less than $100 in taxes and fees. Here’s what travel used to cost. In England it was calculated that one horse was needed for every mile of a journey on a well-maintained turnpike road. So, for the 185 miles from Manchester to London, 185 horses had to be kept stabled and fed to deal with the seventeen changes required by the…
Abuse Your Travel Reimbursements, Find Your Receipts, and Get Banned from Wal-Mart (Bits ‘n Pieces for December 11)
News and Notes from Around the Interweb: The craziest business expenses of 2013. Make your finance department happy: How to Retrieve Travel Receipts That You’ve Lost Banned from Walmart for Life for Price-Matching Too Much. At least the ban wasn’t for overusing their MoneyCenter. More American Airlines Merger News Than You Can Shake a Stick at Lufthansa’s First Class Terminal is now on Twitter. It claims to be an official presence, but their tweets sure say “Quack” a lot. 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 follow me on Twitter for the latest deals. Don’t miss out!
Barclaycard Has a Points-Earning Shopping Portal: Arrival World MasterCard Got Even Better!
Link: Barclaycard Arrival PlusTM World Elite MasterCard® The Barclaycard Arrival PlusTM World Elite MasterCard® gives you 40,000 points after $3000 in purchases within 90 days. That’s worth $400 towards travel. And the card gives you 10% of your points spent on travel back, so another $40 or effectively a $440 signup bonus. “Travel” is airlines, hotels, cruises, train, and car rentals. So this covers the extra expense for a car on your trip. Or use the points for an airline ticket you’d buy anyway, saving yourself the cash for spending money on your trip. (Or use the points to buy someone else’s ticket, and have them give you the cash.) This is effectively a 2.2% cash back card, since the card earns 2 “miles” per dollar with each point worth a penny towards travel plus…
Do Hotel “Mattress Runs” Make Any Sense?
Yesterday I declared that the era of mileage running is over. Except in some very limited cases, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to buy tickets and fly just to earn miles. One case is “mistake fares” that are so low the benefits may outweigh the costs (although even there, the value of your time needs to be factored in, although when it’s an incremental ‘vacation’ rather than purely a trip for the miles that calculation changes). Another is a single trip at the margin to earn something substantial like top tier elite status — I would argue against mileage running from scratch to get to 100,000 mile flyer status, but if ypu’re going to end the year at 96,000 miles then an incremental trip probably makes sense, provided you expect to fly as…
Congressional Budget Deal Will Double Airline Security Tax: Fair to Travelers?
The budget deal announced yesterday by Patty Murray and Paul Ryan, Democratic Senator and Republican Congressman, would (among other things!) double the airline security fee. Under the agreement, which still has to make it through Congress, passengers would pay $5 per segment instead of $2.50 for aviation security. This raises revenue, and by framing it as a user fee lets Paul Ryan claim that he’s agreeing to a budget deal without tax increases. But is that right? Money is fungible, and it’s more money for the federal government than before. Perhaps air travelers should pay the costs )the current fee covers only about 40% of the TSA budget), although and of course aviation is already one of the most heavily taxed industries but then it’s also one of the industries with the heaviest government involvement…
Alaska Airlines Visa 50,000 Mile Signup Offer
The Alaska Airlines Visa is currently available with a signup bonus of up to 50,000 miles. 25,000 Bonus Miles upon approval 25,000 Bonus Miles after $1,000 in purchases within the first 90 days of the account open date The offer says that it is ‘by invitation only’ although there are reports of approvals by folks who did not receive a targeted e-mail. The email that did go out apparently was specifically aimed at Washington state residents. It’s hard to imagine awarding a different bonus to anyone who applies under this link and is approved for the card product (as that would seem to raise potential issues with federal card marketing regulators), nonetheless I will be interested in reports from anyone who didn’t receive the email and who resides outside of Washington state. As far as…
Delta Dramatically Improves its Elite Program With Confirmed International Upgrades
Delta is making changes to their 2014 elite upgrade program, and overall the changes are positive. Confirmable Domestic and International Upgrades as a “Choice” Delta offers its Platinum and Diamond elite members ‘choice’ benefits — one upon reaching Platinum, and folks who reach Diamond get two more. New upgrade certificates are being added to the ‘choice’ offerings beginning March 1. That means that these certificates come at a cost or tradeoff. Platinums and Diamonds will have to choose these instead of choosing something else like miles, club passes, or gifting status. But overall these upgrade certificates are actually good and what most will choose. Regional Upgrades: a Platinum Choice Upon qualifying for Platinum, a new choice is 4 ‘regional upgrades’ which are confirmable upgrade certificates valid on any route where complimentary upgrades are offered. These…
