Air Canada announced changes to elite benefits for 2015. Put another way, Air Canada has shown us what you do when you think that your customers are the problem. I’m not an Air Canada elite member. Air Canada, the airline, runs their elite program while Aeroplan — a separate public company — is the mileage program. I have more than my share of Aeroplan points, and I figure those have already been devalued enough with award chart changes and the imposition of fuel surcharges that those are hopefully safe. But I’m glad today that I’m not an elite member with the airline. Here’s what they’ve done: Half of miles or segments for qualification will have to actually be on Air Canada. So much for partners and alliances. It’s become more common to require some flight…
Monthly Archives
Monthly Archives for October 2014.
Stolen Frequent Flyer Miles for Sale on the DarkNet
S. passes along an article about CipherCracks, an individual online selling stolen miles dirt cheap. Dark net marketplaces like Agora and Evolution (where CipherCracks plies his trade) are known mostly for selling drugs, guns and counterfeit money. You can also find bomb materials, porn and hacked credit cards. But CipherCracks is proof that there are also more mundane things for sale on these illicit sites, which attract sellers who want to remain anonymous. The piece says he deals in “SouthWest, Delta, American, and United” although here’s his ad on reddit for Hilton HHonors points where he notes that American miles are ‘temporarily unavailable’ (perhaps their fraud detection got too good). Apparently this guy sells points from hacked Gamestop accounts, too. And porn. Here’s How it Works What’s being sold are airline accounts that have been…
Charging Different Prices to Different People: Why It’s Good for You
The Wall Street Journal ran a piece suggesting you can’t trust online shopping for airfare and for other goods, because sites may charge you more or less based on who you are. A new study of top e-commerce websites found these practices—called discriminatory pricing or price steering—are much more widespread than was previously understood. Here’s what the Journal reports regarding hotel price discrimination at some of the big online travel booking sites: Among the study’s findings: Travel-booking sites Cheaptickets and Orbitz charged some users searching hotel rates an average $12 more per night if they weren’t logged into the sites, and Travelocity charged users of Apple Inc. ’s iOS mobile operating system $15 less for hotels than other users. …And Expedia and Hotels.com steer users at random to pricier products, the study said. These sites…
Why Not Combine Easy Lufthansa First Class Awards With First Class Awards on Asiana and Thai?
Last night I shared a rare find, that Lufthansa first class award space for 2 passengers at a time is available far in advance even when booking using miles from one of their partner airline programs like United, Singapore, Aeroplan, or ANA. Between mid-January and the end of March more flights between Denver and Frankfurt have this space than do not. That’s a great opportunity, but maybe you like I don’t have a need to book a Europe trip presently. Consider extending this trip and just routing to Asia via the Atlantic. That means you can combine Lufthansa first class award space with first class on Asian airlines, try out first class on some combination of Thai Airways, Asiana, and Air China — not just Lufthansa.
Don’t Be Fooled, The Cheapest Possible Day to Buy Airline Tickets Really Is…
If you’re looking for the cheapest day to buy tickets, you want to read How and When to Find the Cheapest Airfares. What you don’t want to do is believe the ARC study that says Sundays are the cheapest day to buy airfare. I was actually expecting that the Airlines Reporting Corporation, which has tons of real data to parse through, would actually offer a useful data-driven answer to “what’s the cheapest day to buy airline tickets” as though that were really a thing. The problem is that their data set is actual ticket purchases and not airfares. So they’re capturing the average price of tickets purchased on a given day of the week, not the cheapest day to buy tickets. The reason why there is a difference is because different kinds of tickets are…
Lufthansa First Class Award Space Wide Open!
Lufthansa first class awards used to be a gimme. But as the economy improved, the airline cut back the number of first class seats on many planes, and even the number of routes offering first class, award space dried up. In fact, Lufthansa generally only opens first class awards within 15 days of travel. And even that isn’t as guaranteed as it once was. Occasionally, though, either through a glitch or because they’ve given up on first class for a particular route, they open award space — wide. Here’s The Route Where Lufthansa First Class Award Space is Wide Open
Just When Cheap Mileage Purchase Gravy Train Seemed to End, One Last Reprieve
Last month I broke that news that perennial mileage sales deep discounter US Airways would change their ways… [A]t a latest case come November the bonus and pricing structure for US Airways miles will look more like the old American approach. That the last 100% purchase bonus for US Airways miles would be the last time US Airways miles were on sale at 1.88 cents apiece. And that come November US Airways would be selling miles in a way that aligns with how American AAdvantage does it, as part of their merger and in advance of combining the two frequent flyer programs. It turns out this prediction and news was correct. As One Mile at a Time notes, a new US Airways buy miles promotion is up. And it’s exactly the sort of tiered bonus,…
Thank Goodness the CDC Head Stayed at a Holiday Inn Express Last Night…
At the time this commercial was sort of funny. 13 years later it’s kind of dark. (HT: Alan H.) You can join the 40,000+ 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!
Ignore Delta’s Award Availability Calendar, There’s Great Business Class Space to Europe, Here’s How to Find It
Alitalia’s business class award availability between the US and Italy is really good. And their business class product is much improved, too. But if you believe Delta.com, the award calendar is going to make you think there’s nothing available. Here’s a search at Delta.com for two business class seats, New York – Rome, in June. It’s all blue which means high level awards only. The entire month, which means 162,500 miles each way or 325,000 miles roundtrip per person. But it isn’t true.
If You’re On the Terrorism Watchlist, You’re Not Allowed to Sit in an Exit Row
Toqueville passes along a piece about the blogger who is on a terrorism watchlist because of a conviction related to his animal activism in the 1990s. He chronicles his experiences. And one of the things I learned was that if you’re on a watchlist, you’re not allowed to have an exit row seat assignment. This one rather befuddles me. Someone who gets super duper screening and is deemed not a safety risk, so they can fly, is still too much of a safety risk to sit near the emergency exit. The blogger speculates why Terrorists hate humans so much we would physically block exit points in the event of a crash and/or fire. They make you do that weird verbal confirmation thing after the fight attendant recites that exit row speech, and we’re known for…
