Yesterday Delta started offering discounted awards on a handful of routes, on certain dates, for elites members. Apparently that was a ‘pre-sale’ and co-brand credit card holders could book as well.
Now the sale is open to everyone. It’s available on many although not all Europe routes.
Republican Congressman John Mica (R-FL) is offering a phony law to cap checked bag fees as a stunt to push his real agenda, which is increasing the cap on facility fees that airports can charge as part of ticket prices.
Realizing that bashing the airlines is good politics, and not wanting to be left out, Senator Ben Nelson (D-FL) has a new report out of the Commerce Committee that bashes airline fees.
Not everything in the report is idiotic, even if most of the underlying premises are. In fact once we get through all the bad ideas, there’s a pretty good one in there.
Dallas Love Field has 20 gates. They are legally forbidden to build more. (Thanks, Congress!)
Southwest has 16 gates. They’ve subleased 2 from United. That’s 18. The other 2 gates are controlled by Virgin America.
Delta flies from the former United gates. There’s a big court battle over whether they’ll be able to continue to squat on those gates or not. And it all started with the federal government requiring American to give up its gates to Virgin America.
Opentable is an online service for making restaurant reservations. It’s the market leader in the space, you can search for a specific restaurant and make a booking or search an area and find restaurants that have availability for when you’d like to eat, near where you want to eat, and for the number of people in your party.
They offer loyalty points, most of the time you earn 100 points for a booking, that’s worth $1 because 2000 points can be redeemed for a $20 gift certificate.
How that works is all about to change.
Delta Points produces examples of Delta offering Europe roundtrips for 42,000 miles in economy and 106,000 miles in business class.
That’s 30% and 15% off the ‘low’ or ‘level 1’ award price (or at least what low or level 1 used to be when Delta published award prices).
I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
Although I won’t make any claims about what the future of space travel will look like (I’ll leave that to @BoredElonMusk) there will absolutely be loyalty programs in the future in substantially the form that we have now.
The fundamentals of any system that encourages repeat business are precisely the core tenets of frequent flyer programs: recognize and reward (elite programs and rebates).
Credit cards will be less important for rewards in the future, because new technology will reduce the margins for processing payments (so banks won’t pay to incentivize transactions). But we’ll definitely be using miles for space travel!
Most of my analysis focuses on the hotel programs which deliver the best high end experiences. But what about someone looking to stretch their points — which hotel chain has the best bang for the buck at low and mid-priced hotels… the kind of places you might spend a week at fewer points than you’d get from a credit card signup?
I recently asked for reader questions and I’m working through answering those.
Here I’ve decided to take 3 in a single post, rather than writing a standalone post for each. What’s the greatest risk to United miles? How do you book the best value award on Bora Bora? Should you credit Etihad flights to American AAdvantage?
Read on for answers!
“Trying to figure out how to get from Cleveland OH to Moorea and Bora Bora using United (or Star Alliance) miles. Can you help? Thanks”
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 »
