Spirit is promoting personal loans from Prosper: 200 points for checking your rate online (no hard credit pull, apparently) and 1 point per dollar borrowed up to $35,000. Whether you need to break free from work or some scary credit card debt, we understand. That’s why we’ve partnered with Prosper, an online lending marketplace that offers access to low, fixed-rate loans that you can use for your next vacation or nearly anything else you need. Prosper offers affiliate links, they’d happily pay referral fees to any blogger that wanted to advocate you borrow money from them. I do not have links from them, because I think this is a Very. Bad. Idea. And it’s not any better of an idea when you get Spirit’s Free Spirit miles for doing so. Look, I’m a defender of…
Monthly Archives
Monthly Archives for March 2015.
$170 First Class DC – Los Angeles or San Francisco
One-way tickets between DC and the West Coast run $170 at the low end for coach. But Virgin American has $160 fares DC – Dallas Love Field. One they’ll price out with a connection in.. Los Angeles or San Francisco. To get this price (rather than a bit over $200) use promo code BALLER20. Then just get off in San Francisco or Los Angeles. This is a ‘throwaway’ in that you aren’t using the segment from the West Coast to Dallas Love Field. Although if you want to fly to Dallas you can get those $160 non-stops, or could do extra flying DC – San Francisco / Los Angeles – Dallas just to try out Virgin America’s domestic first class product. Remember this is technically against airline rules. In the case of a flight cancellation…
America is Testing Exit Controls at the Border
In most countries you go through immigration not just when you arrive, but when you leave too. In the US there are no ‘exit controls.’ When you go to the airport you get off a connecting flight and right onto your international flight, no more security and no immigration. Domestic and international flights leave from the same terminal. The US is a real exception this way. Canada and the UK are also exceptions. At least, the US was an exception.
Shaming Tourists, a Weird 787 Route, and Margaret Cho Denied Pre-Boarding
News and notes from around the interweb: TSA PreCheck is an important idea – risk-based security, focusing resources where there’s a greater chance of a threat. It’s why TSA as an acronym for ‘Taking Scissors Away’ is such a problem, because it distracts the agency from looking for actually dangerous items. When the TSA lets a member of a domestic terrorist group into PreCheck, however, the program doesn’t work very well. Not to worry, though, because the TSA says there are multiple layers of security. (HT: S.) A woman who opens for Margaret Cho was denied pre-boarding for the disabled on Virgin America and they’re raising a stink. The quite successful Cho “would take legal action if they had the money to fight a Goliath corporation.” While a regrettable incident somehow I think that if…
She Caused a Disruption *After* Her Onboard Sex Act
Alright, crazy passenger stories happen at least somewhat regularly. A woman flying British Airways from Kingston, Jamaica to London Gatwick “was arrested on suspicion of being drunk on an aircraft” which I did not realize was even a crime. (“I’m glad to have never been arrested, then” half the people reading this think to themselves.) Here’s the piece of the story I don’t get: Apparently the disturbance wasn’t caused by the sex act. It was caused after that. The stripping and whatnot, on the BA flight, was itself merely ‘being cheeky’.
~ $5000 Competitours Europe Challenge Trip Giveaway!
My Award Booking Partner Steve Many of you know that I offer an award booking service. It grew too big to handle on my own, and I was fortunate enough to be able to partner with one of the real veterans and gurus in the frequent flyer game, Steve Belkin (known in online forums as ‘beaubo’). Steve is most famous for exploiting loopholes in frequent flyer programs like Aeroplan and United’s MileagePlus in a truly big way, scaling opportunities to earn millions instead of thousands of miles. And in that pursuit he has hired disable Thai rice farmers to fly in and out of the Golden Triangle area of Thailand, and New Zealand college students to fly to Europe for the summer. His ‘Amazing Race for Regular People’ One of the really fun projects he’s…
Will the Thai Airways Mileage Program Be a Savior for United Passengers?
yosithezet responds to my post suggesting that the Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer program is a good place to credit miles for United flights (because it earns full miles flown and you can top off accounts with points transferred from Citi, Chase, Amex, and Starwood) by asking, “What about Thai? And that’s such a good question! Thai Airways Royal Orchid Plus offers full mileage earning on all paid United fares. Here’s the earning chart: And for avoidance of doubt:
KLM’s Business Class Houses, With Liquor
KLM gives long haul business class customers a takeaway gift of collectible houses with liquor inside. Each flight, a Dutch house. Each year, a different style. I didn’t realize that there’s a KLM Houses App so you can look up the details of each house. (HT: baccarat_guy) I’m not sure I buy their slogan ‘Holland. The Original Cool’ (although it gets cold there for sure) but the house gifts are cool. Just not quite as cool as model airplanes.
American Updating Their Award Charts — Don’t Panic!
An American spokesperson emails, I just wanted to give you a heads up that around 11 a.m. CT this morning, we’re refreshing the look and feel of our award charts to make them easier to read and navigate. There are NO changes to the content or pricing, etc. I don’t think the new award charts are easier, I actually think they’re more cumbersome, since you now get a different separate chart for each region of the world instead of a single grid. Here’s the new partner award chart for travel between the US 48 states and the rest of the world. (Click to enlarge) Why are they doing this? We are in the process of updating all of our aa.com pages to match our new look and feel, so award charts were next on the…
Is This What Our Hobby Has Come To?
Yesterday the Hyatt Gold Passport system was showing award redemption prices in error for some hotels. Take the Park Hyatt Chicago, which normally runs 25,000 points per night as a category 6 hotel. It was showing up at 35,000 points: Now, 35,000 points isn’t even a thing in Gold Passport. The top price for a standard room is category 7, which is 30,000 points per night. The same thing was showing up for the New York hotels, by the way. When I clicked through to the property, the number of points required for the hotel didn’t even appear.
