Yesterday’s ~ $320 discount for any bookings made on Alitalia’s Japanese website is dead. Plenty of folks booked US – Europe for under $300 per person, and intra-Europe tickets for free. The free intra-Europe tickets in particular we don’t know whether they will be honored yet.
There’s still a 25% discount on all Alitalia flights bookable via the US website.
I thought that there might be a better deal available for sub-$500 tickets, MileValue posted this morning a $129 per ticket discount from the promo.alitalia.com/russia website — a discount of 4000 Rubles.
My Russian isn’t very good (it’s been a long time since I was a Cold War spy). Fortunately, Google Chrome translates for me.
But when I managed to pull up the promo itself, I found new language that wasn’t there a few hours ago when MilesValue wrote:
“Valid for departures from Russia only”
Alitalia seems to be setting limits on the promotions they offer in order to reflect their intentions.
Previous Alitalia discounts used to work on Delta flights, too, folks were taking 15% off on Delta which hadn’t been what they wanted to offer.
Now they’re limiting some country-specific discounts to flights departing from that country.
Fortunately the 25% off discount was intentional, continues to be offered, and is even the better deal on any $500+ tickets. Which is most of the tickets that readers of this blog will be booking anyway.
I have a hunch the 25% discount that most of the readers of this blog will be booking anyway is the one that will, in the final analysis, actually get them on an airplane.
Hey, i know that doesnt have to do with this post but i have a question. I know that it is always a good thing to have your oldest credit card open, does this work by the card that the credit is on or the length that you have the credit with the bank? For example i would like to switch my credit from one citi card to another, would this ruin the length of credit?
I’m UK-based and booked three weekend trips to Italy, received confirmation on all three. Just received one (I assume with two more still to come) email :
“Dear Customer,
Thank you for choosing alitalia.com.
We regret to inform you that your ticket purchase has not been processed.
Any amount debited on your account, will be credited back.
Your Alitalia Customer Center Team”
All free intra-europe trips have been cancelled
I have a completely honest question for you gleff:
You keep pushing these completely unsustainable loopholes/deals on your blog that generate ENORMOUS interest/clicks/bookings. But the problem is that these loopholes are completely unsustainable when thousands of your blog readers try to take advantage, and then tens of thousands of readers on other copycat (hat-tipping) blogs, who go and write copycat blog posts (which is all many bloggers seem to do these days, but that’s a different topic) also try to take advantage. So obviously the deal dies as the particular travel provider pulls the deal and cxls the deal retroactively by adding T&Cs or cxl’ing the bookings, etc.
I used to think you were a very smart person gleff. But based on this week’s pumping of unsustainable deals, I am beginning to question whether or not you are in fact real smart. Either:
a) You don’t care about your reader’s time since you keep sending them on all these wildgoose chases for unsustainable deals that will not get honored in the end.
b) You truly think these deals are sustainable, in which case you are completely wrong (and not nearly as smart as I previously gave you credit for?) as evidenced by no less than 3 killed deals this past ~week.
c) You are extremely smart and just want to gain more readership and clicks, and post these things KNOWING you and your hat-tipping friends will kill all these deals prematurely……….but it doesn’t matter to you since you will be getting more clicks and will be laughing all the way to the bank as you deposit your $100k+ a year, even as we your readers come up empty handed time and time again.
I don’t think you are an idiot, so I’m leaning towards “C”. I just truly hope it doesn’t come back to bite you in the a$$ when you keep sending your readers on wild goose chases for deals that SO OBVIOUSLY will not (more like CAN NOT, due to high cost) be honored in the end…………………..and at the same time kill the deal for the more limited amount of people that actually would have been able to take advantage of the deal had you not killed it. The company Lurkers used to actually have to do some work to shutdown loopholes/deals that are too generous. They likely had to search FT, find the deals, etc. Now they simply subscribe to your blog and get instant notice when their overly generous offer means unlimited people can buy unlimited miles for 0.8cpm, all bankrolled by the travel provider who will be taking it in the pants. I’m sure all company Lurkers thank you tremendously for making their jobs so easy and handing them all their info on a silver platter.
I can probably name dozens of deals you bloggers have killed prematurely over the years (VS Gold, FTD, SpaFinders, Fairmont Lifetime Plat, 4 mile HKG tix, etc, etc, etc). Maybe you really should think hard before you post next time, and decide if the deal can actually stand up when tens of thousands of blog readers jump in on every deal of yours within hours. You are ruining travel deals just like FatWallet has ruined other deals.
Maybe I will coin a new term, “The Gleff Effect”, since whenever you post about a deal it dies.
And BTW, don’t take this personally, all those other lousy bloggers like MMS/TPG/etc are just as to blame as you are. And to a lesser extent so are all the hat-tipping bloggers, but I can’t blame them as much as you since they don’t have 3 brain cells in their heads to come up with anything original, so they simply steal your ideas/deals and “hat-tip” you and throw on their own affiliate links in hopes of getting a piece of your pie.
@gregorygrady wow there is a lot there, let me offer a few thoughts.
As far as I am aware at this point, US-Europe tickets have not been cancelled. When I wrote about the deal I noted that some folks were trying for free intra-Europe tickets, I did not have any idea if those would be honored, but that my guess was that the US-Europe tickets would be. At this point, what I wrote seems to be what’s happening. How have I wasted reader time? And do you think I killed this deal? Flyertalk had TONS more activity on it than I did. It was on other blogs before mine, I read about it on The Flight Deal. But overall, probably Flyertalk killed it. And what of it? So far it is behaving exactly how one would have expected.
You blame me for prematurely killing deals, but cte as an example the 4 mile Hong Kong deal. United wasn’t going to honor that one, but I couldn’t possibly have prematurely killed it because as far as I am aware I wrote about it first among any English language websites. Most people learned about it from me, or from sites linking to me, e.g. the Flyertalk thread on the deal linked to this blog.
It has always been the case that some deals work and others do not. And it’s a great ride, either way. I’ve long said that I’m comfortable with travel providers not honoring as long as they do so in a timely manner, and that I want to participate in these deals because when an airline or hotel or whatever chooses to let me fly in a premium cabin around the world for next to nothing it’s worth it, it’s like buying a lottery ticket.
I’ve written about these deals for YEARS. I wrote about the United Auckland business class fare, for instance. Nothing new here.
Flyertalk is more closely monitored by the airlines than my blog is. I once had dnner with a United Vice President who told me all of their senior executives lurked on Flyertalk constantly, daily, but they weren’t allowed to post. This was back when Robin Urbanski was there crafting the messaging for the airline. It gets more traffic, more posts, more comments and replies. It’s so strange to point the finger here at this blog.
Much has changed in the miles and points game, the programs and the reservation systems have much better technology to prevent mistakes and to limit the affect of mistakes. Things get pulled naturally.
My goal is to make as many people aware of opportunities as possible while those opportunities exist. I started this blog to catalog my own thoughts and learning and to share what I know, and ten years later that’s still what I do.
There are some things that aren’t helpful to write about, often because they are quite ‘inside baseball’ or because readers might not be well-served by the advice especially when it’s tricky to pull off. Or because there are things that are sort of sustainable at a low volume, while I’m happy to explain the concept of dropping fuel surcharges from international tickets I don’t go step by step with city pars. Not because the airlines don’t know those city pairs in most cases, but because the volume is low enough that they don’t prioritize the fix.
Despite your conspiracy theory about my traffic, Alitalia discounts or AviancaTaca shopping portals or even Wyndham deals don’t move the needle on traffic for this site. Because they are foreign or obscure or not programs that most readers focus on. But those who do can get real value.
There’s so much factually wrong in your comment, the only mention of ‘SpaFinder’ I can find on this blog is here: http://viewfromthewing.com/2009/04/26/northwest-online-shopping-bonus/
What deal did I kill exactly? The United 4 mile Hong Kong deal originated here. Fairmont Lifetime Platinum was a very limited time offer, blogs did not kill it.
Sometimes it seems like I’m your Keyser Soze…
Perhaps I was premature infant King that only the free tickets were being cancelled and this will certainly be interesting to watch as it plays out. Some work out and others do not. Which is why in my original post I suggested that people wait a few days to see what happens. It does not seem reasonable however to suggest that the tickets are not being on earth because of this blog. If or if you are making that suggestion then I wonder what evidence that is based upon.
I don’t have any issue with the ethics of publishing information you become aware of. That’s the point of the blog, after all. I do agree there has been an awful lot of attention lately to speculative “deals” that go “poof” and too much of that can be bad for credibility.
Gary,
“богатый” is not correct adjective here because it means rich (money wise)
“изобильнo” is a better because it means abundant or plentiful. 😉
Spa finder died shortly after your re-blog about the 1500 + 30/$. A reader of that tagged onto a comment about spa finder and it died shortly thereafter. Quite sad 🙁
That was a nice cow to milk…. ~1.5M miles for me alone and i know of a few others who also did a couple thousand of them a month too.
Sorry, I meant FTD/SpaFinder, not “FTD, Spafinder,…”. Those deals are one and the same, that you quickly ruined about by reblogging it.
LOL, of course blogs killed the Fairmont Lifetime Plat deal. Yes, it was limited time offer. But that limited time offer was 5 days. Unfortunately it was pulled the second day after you and the hat-tipping crew blogged away about how to get Lifetime FPC Plat status and a Free Fairmont night annually for only $2k. I have no doubt far more people would have gotten in on that deal had you not ruined it for everybody but the lucky 113.
4 mile HKG, AviancaTaca, Alitalia, Wyndham: These deals are very obviously not going to be honored when they go viral. So why do you waste your readers time running them around on a wild goose chase when you know the deal cannot hold up to the throngs of people you will push into the deal? My main point is that you are doing nobody a service (and in fact are doing your readers a DISSERVICE) by wasting people’s time chasing unsustainable deals. So please think a little harder before you post some of these great deals/timewasters in the future.
BTW, like I said in my initial post, don’t take it personally that I give you a hard time. The main reason I give you a hard time is cuz you at least have some brain cells in your head and can come up with (some) original content on your own compared to many of the other bloggers who can only hat-tip other bloggers, or who can only mine FT for content and then post that to their blogs. So I would expect you to hopefully have the brains not to waste your readers time by sending them on wild goose chases on deals that aren’t sustainable for tens of thousands of people. I wouldn’t expect the other bloggers to have the brain power to figure that one out, hence I don’t waste my breath commenting on their blogs……………plus several of those other lousy bloggers moderate their comments and won’t let you post anything that doesn’t side with their views. Now that you mention it though Keyser, maybe it’s time I start a new anti-blogger rant thread on FT. 🙂
I would like to thank you for the timely posting of ongoing deals.
I sincerely hope you ignore the above rants. It’s part of a small but vocal subset of the Flyertalk community, which adamantly fights against the open sharing of information and deals. To them, a deal must be a closely held secret, know only among a select few selfish posters who speak a secret lingo, and are a part of a select fraternity.
Because they cannot control the flow of information outside of Flyertalk, they blame the bloggers for the premature demise of every deal. Their concerted movement to censor free and open speech among the community of travel bloggers should be viewed in this light.
They speak for only a very small percentage of the Flyertalk readership.
Peace.
I still believe that Wyndham will go back and honor. And it was never obvious they wouldn’t since the terms and conditions were clear and a change from the previous version of the promotion.
I blog what interests me, I always have, and if folks find that useful or interesting to them they can read it. The United 4 mile deal, you blamed me before for ‘killing it’ but then when it was pointed out to you that even the flyertalk thread cited my blog for finding it that couldn’t have been true so now it was just a waste of time. 🙂 I found it interesting, hey isn’t that cool.
And it’s not always clear up front what will be honored and what will not be, plenty of deals that I did not expect to be honored ultimately were. Very ltitle time wasted, no money wasted, and some readers actually flew. But my view on this has always been as I’ve written in the past — it’s like buying a lottery ticket. When an airline is going to fly people to Paris for $28 I want to be one of those people.
As for SpaFinder, I do not recall writing about this, if you are so convinced that I did I would love to see a link. Because I don’t even remember the deal.