British Airways offers “household accounts” that allow you to pool miles from multiple frequent flyer accounts to redeem a single award. You can pool points with six people who live at the same address. That increases the usefulness of signing up family members who are just taking a single trip, since their miles aren’t stranded — you can burn them. And it increases the usefulness of credit card signup bonuses, even, each family member can sign up for the card and you can take the miles from their account towards your own accounts (pretty selfish of you, right?). The downside to creating a household account has been that you could only redeem for members of the household. You’ve given up the ability to redeem award tickets for people that aren’t linked in the household account…
About Gary Leff
Here’s What Transportation Used to Cost
I came across something I posted in 2007 and I’ve been pondering it for a bit. I recently flew Etihad’s first class suites, connecting from terminal 3 in Abu Dhabi to terminal 1 where the business class lounge is packed solid and poorly provisioned. I then wound up at a bus gate out to my business class onward flight to India. My round trip ticket cost me some American Airlines miles of course but less than $100 in taxes and fees. Here’s what travel used to cost. In England it was calculated that one horse was needed for every mile of a journey on a well-maintained turnpike road. So, for the 185 miles from Manchester to London, 185 horses had to be kept stabled and fed to deal with the seventeen changes required by the…
Abuse Your Travel Reimbursements, Find Your Receipts, and Get Banned from Wal-Mart (Bits ‘n Pieces for December 11)
News and Notes from Around the Interweb: The craziest business expenses of 2013. Make your finance department happy: How to Retrieve Travel Receipts That You’ve Lost Banned from Walmart for Life for Price-Matching Too Much. At least the ban wasn’t for overusing their MoneyCenter. More American Airlines Merger News Than You Can Shake a Stick at Lufthansa’s First Class Terminal is now on Twitter. It claims to be an official presence, but their tweets sure say “Quack” a lot. You can join the 30,000+ people who see these deals and analysis every day — sign up to receive posts by email (just one e-mail per day) or subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s free. You can also follow me on Twitter for the latest deals. Don’t miss out!
Barclaycard Has a Points-Earning Shopping Portal: Arrival World MasterCard Got Even Better!
Link: Barclaycard Arrival PlusTM World Elite MasterCard® The Barclaycard Arrival PlusTM World Elite MasterCard® gives you 40,000 points after $3000 in purchases within 90 days. That’s worth $400 towards travel. And the card gives you 10% of your points spent on travel back, so another $40 or effectively a $440 signup bonus. “Travel” is airlines, hotels, cruises, train, and car rentals. So this covers the extra expense for a car on your trip. Or use the points for an airline ticket you’d buy anyway, saving yourself the cash for spending money on your trip. (Or use the points to buy someone else’s ticket, and have them give you the cash.) This is effectively a 2.2% cash back card, since the card earns 2 “miles” per dollar with each point worth a penny towards travel plus…
Do Hotel “Mattress Runs” Make Any Sense?
Yesterday I declared that the era of mileage running is over. Except in some very limited cases, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to buy tickets and fly just to earn miles. One case is “mistake fares” that are so low the benefits may outweigh the costs (although even there, the value of your time needs to be factored in, although when it’s an incremental ‘vacation’ rather than purely a trip for the miles that calculation changes). Another is a single trip at the margin to earn something substantial like top tier elite status — I would argue against mileage running from scratch to get to 100,000 mile flyer status, but if ypu’re going to end the year at 96,000 miles then an incremental trip probably makes sense, provided you expect to fly as…
Congressional Budget Deal Will Double Airline Security Tax: Fair to Travelers?
The budget deal announced yesterday by Patty Murray and Paul Ryan, Democratic Senator and Republican Congressman, would (among other things!) double the airline security fee. Under the agreement, which still has to make it through Congress, passengers would pay $5 per segment instead of $2.50 for aviation security. This raises revenue, and by framing it as a user fee lets Paul Ryan claim that he’s agreeing to a budget deal without tax increases. But is that right? Money is fungible, and it’s more money for the federal government than before. Perhaps air travelers should pay the costs )the current fee covers only about 40% of the TSA budget), although and of course aviation is already one of the most heavily taxed industries but then it’s also one of the industries with the heaviest government involvement…
Alaska Airlines Visa 50,000 Mile Signup Offer
The Alaska Airlines Visa is currently available with a signup bonus of up to 50,000 miles. 25,000 Bonus Miles upon approval 25,000 Bonus Miles after $1,000 in purchases within the first 90 days of the account open date The offer says that it is ‘by invitation only’ although there are reports of approvals by folks who did not receive a targeted e-mail. The email that did go out apparently was specifically aimed at Washington state residents. It’s hard to imagine awarding a different bonus to anyone who applies under this link and is approved for the card product (as that would seem to raise potential issues with federal card marketing regulators), nonetheless I will be interested in reports from anyone who didn’t receive the email and who resides outside of Washington state. As far as…
Delta Dramatically Improves its Elite Program With Confirmed International Upgrades
Delta is making changes to their 2014 elite upgrade program, and overall the changes are positive. Confirmable Domestic and International Upgrades as a “Choice” Delta offers its Platinum and Diamond elite members ‘choice’ benefits — one upon reaching Platinum, and folks who reach Diamond get two more. New upgrade certificates are being added to the ‘choice’ offerings beginning March 1. That means that these certificates come at a cost or tradeoff. Platinums and Diamonds will have to choose these instead of choosing something else like miles, club passes, or gifting status. But overall these upgrade certificates are actually good and what most will choose. Regional Upgrades: a Platinum Choice Upon qualifying for Platinum, a new choice is 4 ‘regional upgrades’ which are confirmable upgrade certificates valid on any route where complimentary upgrades are offered. These…
Alaska Airlines Will Start Awarding Elite Qualifying Miles for Flights on All International Partners Starting January 15
Here’s the scoop: Starting Jan. 15, 2014, Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan members will be able to earn elite qualifying miles on all 12 of the carrier’s international partners, including British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Fiji Airways, Korean Air and Qantas. Mileage Plan members already earn elite qualifying miles on AeroMexico, Air France, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Emirates, KLM and LAN. Alaska has really been stepping up. A year ago I had them on a watch list to devalue their program in a big way, and of course they still could, but the huge competitive pressure that erstwhile partner Delta is putting on them by building up a significant Seattle presence seems to put off the possibility at least and light a fire under their competitive offerings. Not only has Alaska added Emirates as a partner,…
BREAKING: New Threat to Aviation Security Identified
Having declared victory in the War on Water, with no more liquids greater than 3 ounces allowed beyond the security checkpoint, the next front in the battle to keep the skies safe from Terrorism and Other Threats is going to have to be stopping the existential risks posed by two inch plastic toy guns that come with children’s toys. Or something. Thank goodness for the quick work of the TSA! Yesterday at approximately 17:00 hours, a one Mr. Rooster Monkburn was successfully disarmed when a TSA agent confiscated the monkey sock puppet’s two-inch, vaguely gun-shaped piece of plastic—and then threatened to call the police. …“She said ‘this is a gun,’” said May. “I said no, it’s not a gun it’s a prop for my monkey.” …”She took my monkey’s gun.” The TSA has issued a…
