Monthly Archives for October 2016.
The Department of Transportation has had a lot of potential rules for how air travel should work on its docket. And it made a big announcement which doesn’t amount to very much. Fortunately.
So what did the Department of Transportation actually do? Effective January 2018 they will:
Booking Europe awards with American miles can be tough. American releases very little space on its own flights, and their primary transatlantic partner is British Airways — and British Airways fuel surcharges can be truly choke-worthy.
Right now though there’s something of a unicorn: amazing award space for the whole family on American’s oneworld partner Finnair. That means great saver pricing and no fuel surcharges.
United held its quarterly call on financial results this morning. And the consistent message throughout the call was that they’re going to do a lot of things differently, they just won’t tell us what yet.
They’re want to talk about things like basic economy fares and about new IT investments. They’re going to talk about how they’re forecasting revenue. But over and over they punted to say they’d talk about those things at next month’s investor day… Here’s what Oscar Munoz’s office looked like after the call:
Alaska Airlines won the frenzied bidding war to acquire Virgin America. They likely overpaid, but saw Virgin America — barely profitable even with low fuel prices — as the only opportunity to pick up gates at congested airports.
The combination makes for the biggest West Coast airline, and buys them a San Francisco hub to diversify away from the intense competition they face from Delta in Seattle.
Japan Airlines has announced a partnership with Priority Pass to let members redeem 40,000 miles for a Priority Pass Prestige membership.
Starwood points transfer 1:1 into Japan Airlines Mileage Bank, with the usual 5000 mile bonus for transfers into 20,000 miles. So 35,000 Starwood points transfer to 40,000 Japan Airlines miles. (And of course 105,000 Marriott points transfer to 35,000 Starwood points.)
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.
Through November 30 United is offering a 25% bonus when you transfer hotel points to MileagePlus. You can earn up to 20,000 bonus miles this way.
Oddly, the 25% bonus applies to transfers from most hotel programs but transfers from Club Carlson are bonused at 40% and transfers from Choice Privileges are bonused at 50%. Bonuses will post “on or before January 30, 2017.”
The British Airways online shopping portal is offering 76 Avios per dollar spent with Match.com.
Since you earn points only on first-time subscriptions, you want the biggest purchase possible — 12 months for $197.88. That’s 15,000 Avios at 1.32 cents apiece.
Premium Citibank ThankYou Rewards cards — like the Citi Prestige Card and Citi ThankYou Premier — let you transfer their points to airline miles and hotel programs.
They’ve just added a new partner: JetBlue. What’s interesting is that Barclaycard’s new deal to issue JetBlue cards didn’t stop this. And that even no annual fee Citi ThankYou cards can transfer to JetBlue which is a first.
SkyTeam member Alitalia has the strangest frequent flyer program in the world. Instead of expiring miles, the program itself used to expire. With each new program every few years you could credit flights to your account to earn back the miles you had.
Now, without notice, the award chart ‘expired’ on Friday and there’s no new published chart. There are reports of awards costing twice as much as before. Hopefully no one took advantage of the current American Express transfer bonus to Alitalia.
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 »
