US AIrways is offering a 50% mileage bonus on purchases with participating merchants made through the Dividend Miles mall through June 30. Registration required. Up to 10 shopping transactions are eligible for the bonus, and transactions must post by August 30 with a transaction date not later than June 30 in order to be eligible. This is stackable with the shopping bonus for Dividend Miles elite members that runs through February of 2011 (25% for Silvers, 50% for Golds, 75% for Platinums, and 100% for Chairmans Preferred). A Chairmans Preferred member who registers this offer and shops at FTD by June 30 would earn 50 miles per dollar, whereas a non-elite would earn 30 miles per dollar. Since the earn rates on the underlying shopping purchases themselves aren’t stellar this isn’t an opportunity to load…
About Gary Leff
New Website That Helps Find the Best Rental Car Prices
Hotwire is still one of the best ways to get a cheap rental car, you can usually get cars a few bucks cheaper on Priceline even but Hotwire will tell you upfront what the non-cancellable/non-refundable pricing is from a major airport rental facility. But you don’t always (or even often) want a prepaid rental, and sometimes there’s not a ton of savings to be had from going through prepaid channels. I rarely use those myself, I’m too addicted to my elite status benefits. In my own case, one of the major chains gives me really good upgrades, very personalized service, and even market rate on gas when I don’t refill the tank (and I don’t have to prepurchase a full tank in order to get it). With a good bit of nose to the grindstone…
Delta Eliminates Close-in Award Redemption Fees, Publish Data that Admits They Charge More Miles Than Anyone Else for the Same Awards..
I’m late to the party on Delta news, but everyone else is doing my job for me this week. Back in April, Delta eliminated close-in award redemption fees and then on the same day re-instated those fees. Or at least Delta pulled the fees off the website and then put them back. Then yesterday came word that Delta has, in fact, ended those close-in ticketing fees. These are the annoying surcharges for booking award tickets within three weeks of travel, and had been on an escalating scale — up to $150 for redeeming awards within three days of departure. Years ago these were known as ‘expedite’ fees since the airlines had to process tickets quickly, but in a digital world the truth was much clearer — both a revenue opportunity and a disincentive to last…
Debating the Merits of United’s Old Business Class Seats for Longhaul Flying
PlaneReality flew United’s old business class Los Angeles – London and offers a review. Naturally it starts with a broken united.com, that’s a given. Food and service seemed ok, this is business class and not first after all. The major complaints were lack of standard power supply and lack of video on demand on a decent screen. This is the part that struck me, though: These older seats have great recline and plenty of legroom, but go for an aisle seat if you plan on getting up a lot. Like I alluded to, United could keep these seats if they installed audio video on-demand. What’s funny is that PlaneReality’s take is the exact opposite of mine. I don’t really care what kind of power supply United offers, I have an empower adapter and they aren’t…
Osama bin Laden Gets Past Airport Security at Heathrow, Flies British Airways
You may have seen this already, it’s all over everywhere: British Airways put together a spread showing their new mobile boarding pass, displayed on an iPhone. And the traveler was… Osama bin Laden. Here are the details of bin Laden’s travel plan: Apparently bin Laden likes to fly — or at least knows the value of loyalty — because the boarding pass features a frequent flier number. And don’t worry about his leg room. The world’s most-wanted man is apparently flying pretty up in first class, seat 7C. Except.. except.. What the crack security staff at Heathrow apparently missed is that this is clearly a forged boarding pass on bin Laden’s iPhone. That’s definitely not a British Airways frequent flyer number on his boarding pass. In fact, presumably the “NW” at the beginning designates that…
Lots of Sound, Little Fury in New Department of Transportation Proposed Passenger Rights Rules
Coming out today are a new series of proposed ‘passenger rights’ rules. They’re trumpeted, in the news, and don’t amount to much — though on net I’d score them a mild negative. The Department of Transportation will require more upfront disclosure of fees for various services on top of ticket pricing. It’s not at all clear that consumers want this information. Bureaucrats and pundits want consumers to want it. But their behavior suggests that they don’t. And perhaps for good reason — travel booking in a do-it-yourself world is complicated enough that many consumers would face information overload. It’s telling that there have been so few travel portals which bundle this information for easy consumer access. The major online booking site business is fiercely competitive, and yet none of them sees offering this information as…
US Airways 100% Bonus on Purchased and Gifted Miles is Back
US Airways is offering a 100% bonus on purchased or gifted miles through July 31. Leave it to US Airways’ marketing genuises to say that a mileage purchase promo that runs from June 1 through July 31 is “for one month only” — but the bonus indeed runs two months. The maximum bonus is 50,000 miles for buying 50,000 miles, and 100,000 miles gets you business class fro the US to Europe (90,000 gets you business class from the US to North Asia including Hong Kong). This year US Airways raised the price of miles from 2.5 cents apiece to 2.75 cents apiece, and also the mileage cost of several awards. So we’ve gone from $1000 in purchased miles for business class to Europe to $1400 for the same. Still, with the ability to redeem…
Repost: 1500 Miles for New US AIrways Dividend Miles Members
Back on April 21 I noted that US Airways is offering new Dividend Miles members 1500 miles for signing up by July 31 by using promo code NM15. The offer is here. I figured that a post noting the offer by Points, Miles, and Martinis is a good reason to mention it again in case anyone comes across this blog that isn’t already a US Airways frequent flyer member. 1500 free miles makes it worth signing up. While I don’t love the airline, I’ve certainly found the frequent flyer program to be lucrative — lots of great promotions for earning large number of miles at low cost, and amazing redemption possibilities using Star Alliance partner airlines with a reasonable award chart, no blocking of partner award seats (as United unfortunately does), and very few routing…
Getting Help Booking Mileage Awards
In the current month’s Wise Flyer, a regular feature in Inside Flyer (subscription required.), Randy Petersen answers a reader question about services that help you search for frequent flyer award tickets. AwardPlanner by MileageManager .. is part of a paid mileage manager service so you actually get far more for your investment since MileageManager manages your frequent flyer accounts–including help with expiring miles. AwardPlanner, a dedicated award tool, allows you to search for award seats from all the programs in which you have miles–making it a one-stop shop for watching for award seats. If the tool is unable to find your award seats at the time of your request, it will put your request into a queue and re-check daily for you until it finds an award seat and will then notify you via email.…
Three Major Questions for the United-Continental Merger
From the perspective of a frequent flyer, I’ve had (3) main questions about a United-Continental merger. Starnet blocking. United is the only airline in the Star Alliance that will not allow its mileage members to book any award seat taht its partners offer to them. United often doesn’t want to pay for the seats, to they program their computers to respond that award seats other Star Alliance carriers are offering “aren’t available.” Continental has explicitly rejected such a strategy. This month blocking has been at a minimum, though that’s part of the normal cycle (I usually see blocking at its lightest in February/May/August/November). So I’m not ready to take this as a clue that blocking is done for a merged entity. Whether or not blocking exists in the combined entity is – to me –…
