Monthly Archives for March 2016.
Overnight last night Alaska Airlines made no-notice changes to their Emirates award charts for business and first class travel, raising prices by as much as 100%.
Alaska has now offered an explanation.
Last Monday Marriott increased their offer substantially to take the lead in the acquisition of Starwood. Marriott’s offer is 0.8 Marriott shares and $21 in cash for each Starwood share. A shareholder vote was scheduled for April 8.
On Monday Chinese insurer Anbang came back with a higher offer. However Anbang is reportedly dropping out of the race to acquire Starwood.
Via Extreme Hotel Deals, the Park Hyatt Aviara (used to be a Four Seasons) in Carlsbad, California has a Park Deluxe Suite available for as little as $229+tax. I reviewed this property several years ago.
This room is a level above the basic Park Suite. However the room type is on sale for less than the base level suite (and indeed for the same price as an entry level room).
On March 20 I wrote that American would be eliminating free 24 hour reservation holds on April 1 and switching to 24 hour refunds instead.
American reached out to tell me that wasn’t accurate, only it turns out that it is accurate. Nonetheless, there’s still going to be a way to put reservations on a 24 hour hold at least for some period of time.
Arguably the most worthless elite status in the world is OpenTable VIP. The second most worthless? Perhaps it’s UberVIP.
If you’ve had over 100 rides in a city where the feature is available, you’ve been ‘upgraded’ to VIP status which means you can select the option for UberX called UberVIP which gives you the best cars only with drivers rated 4.8 or higher. And since you aren’t looking at all available cars, you likely won’t get the closest car, and may have to wait longer.
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
I love Alaska Airlines and the Mileage Plan program, but I love it a lot less this morning. While they don’t have plans to go revenue-based and most of their awards remain reasonable, they have gutted their award chart for travel on their partner Emirates and they have done it without notice.
Emirates has been my favorite Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan redemption. They fly to a number of US cities and have a fantastic first class product especially onboard their Airbus A380 which has showers.
These awards are mostly going to be out of reach now for Mileage Plan members.
Increasingly American Airlines has been imposing a new rule in its fares to make your tickets more expensive.
It used to be that if two one-way fares, say San Diego to Dallas and Dallas to Fort Lauderdale, were cheaper than the fare for San Diego to Fort Lauderdale you’d pay the cheaper ‘sum of the two one ways’ for your ticket. Now for many of the cheapest fares in many markets American has updated their fare rules to prohibit “End of End Ticketing” which means you cannot combine the cheap fares, you have to pay the more expensive fare.
Tiffany describes finding Delta award seats on the airline’s website. She’s making the booking for four passengers, and the miles aren’t all in the account. So she calls the airline, has them set up the award, and then purchases about $1000 in miles in order to buy the award.
And then the price of the award jumped from 110,000 to 375,000 per person one way when the agent went to issue the tickets.
After escalating to web support, a supervisor, and the re-issue desk they couldn’t get the flights to ticket at the price that would be initially quoted each time. They finally tried “seven different itineraries across three days” before getting something to come up at the promised price for the Tokyo – New York itinerary.
Boston Globe columnist Dante Ramos tweeted about a whole new way to be awful at 35,000 feet.
Although I think there’s far worse. I’ve had the pleasure of watching a fellow first class passenger clip their toenails during dinner service.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
