I’m seeing a ton of coverage of Marriott’s new award chart lauding the top points price of the most expensive hotels. For instance, Dan’s Deals: wrote AMAZING! Marriott’s New Award Chart Is A Dream Come True For Aspirational Hotels. This is indeed good news, but it needs to be tempered.
In many cases this won’t actually be a price cut of two-thirds like it appears at first glance.
Marriott has finally released hotel category assignments, letting us know the redemption pricing of hotels starting sometime in August. Hotels only received what category they’d be assigned to two weeks ago.
They’re highlighting that “Nearly 70 percent of all participating hotels can be redeemed for the same or fewer points.” That doesn’t actually sound good to me, though they point out 52% of hotels go down in price while 31% go up which is a little better.
American Airlines has redesigned the look of the AAdvantage website account page which may presage more targeted promotions. There are two new promotions announced to start.
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.
Frequent Miler asks “Is Hilton considering new elite benefits?”
Head for Points reports on attending a Hilton event that bloggers were invited to. And in fact says “We were also given advanced notice of some new Hilton Honors member benefits which may come later this year.”
Bookable via Priceline, Mexico City – Santorini is bookable from $988 roundtrip. Dates are very limited at this price but under $1000 roundtrip to Greece seemed worth a mention.
A man wearing only underwear — that means he was running on a hot tarmac with bare feet — scaled a fence and ran towards a Delta flight on from Miami that had just landed in Atlanta on Tuesday.
He “jumped on the wing and began to pound on the windows.” Naturally there’s video.
Barclays just re-launched the Frontier Airlines World Mastercard and it’s one of the most creative new products I’ve seen in a long time. Frontier is an ultra low cost carrier, but for cardmembers it doesn’t have to be. In fact if Frontier had onboard internet this card is good enough to make me consider the airline.
Delta partner China Eastern, a SkyTeam member, is running an amazing fare from Los Angeles to Beijing. This may be the best non-mistake fare business class deal to Asia in 20 years: just $1137 roundtrip.
There was a real buzz tonight at New York JFK. A JetBlue flight, 1623 to Los Angeles, went silent. Media picked this up, and there was little to no information about what was happening. Speculation abounded, fearing the worst.
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 »
