Upgrade Travel blog profiles PointMaven, the sister website of MileMaven.PointMaven is a search tool for hotel bonus offers, just like MileMaven helps find airline bonus offers. If you’re not tied to a specific program for loyalty (e.g. elite status – upgrades) reasons, you may want to choose your travel provider based on the points you can earn. Of course, price doesn’t come into the equation with this tool, just miles and points. But it’s a great way to find bonuses you’d have never known existed. And for that matter, if you’re clearly stuck in a specific property or flying a specific airline, it’s a good idea to check this site anyway for possible bonuses to register for and rack up more points for the travel you’re going to take anyway.
About Gary Leff
Polo Discount
Through April 16, friends and family promo code RL2007SP offers 30% off (and free shipping on orders over $175) at Polo.com. Used is successfully yesterday on some new shirts.
30 Days of Free T-Mobile WiFi
Apr
06
2007
Sign up for a no commitment T-Mobile WiFi account and get 30 days of free service. Offer expires January 31, 2008.
Video Tribute to Alitalia’s DRTCA9 Mistake Fare
Flyertalk member KVS produced a short video tribute to the Alitalia $39+tax business class fare error from Toronto to Cyprus. It was a year ago today that the fare was on offer, and the tickets were valid a year from date of issue, so we now say thanks and rest in peace to perhaps the greatest of all mistake fares.I’ll share details of my own Toronto-Milan-Cyprus-Milan-Rome-Milan-Toronto trip shortly.
Up to 25,000 Bonus Miles for Partner Activity
Apr
05
2007
Delta is offering up to 25,000 bonus miles for activity with their partners. Registration is required. The offer is 5000 miles for each 5 unique partners with activity during the qualifying period of April 1 – May 31 (too tight a timeline for my tastes). Airline partners don’t count. Each partner counts only once, so only one Hilton stay would count as a partner (but a Hilton stay and a Marriott stay would be two partners). Transferring points into Delta should count, and each source should be a different partner, so I may transfer points in from Starwood, American Express Membership Rewards, and Radisson Goldpoints.Read the terms and conditions on the promo, but it should be pretty easy to rack up 5000 bonus miles — much harder to hit a full 25,000.
First Class Norfolk, Virginia to/from San Francisco for $368 round trip
It’s available in either direction and it’s refundable. Search for first class tickets at delta.com or expedia. There’s no minimum or maximum stay, these are actually one-way fares ($368 is just the all-in roundtrip price, although may vary slightly depending on the connections you make). It’s a refundable YUP fare, fare basis YUPBV. Discussed on Flyertalk here.
500 Delta Miles for Auto Insurance Quote Can Be Done Every 6 Months
Mar
20
2007
Free Frequent Flyer Miles points out that you can get 500 miles for an auto insurance quote from Ameriprise, and that it works every six months. So even if you’ve done it before it might be time to do it again.
That Super Deal at the Intercontinental Los Angeles…
Mar
17
2007
Turns out that the 5000 point award nights aren’t even a mistake. I speculated that someone miscoded the hotel as participating in PointBreaks, since the number of points matched that offer but the hotel wasn’t in the list of participating properties (and would have been the most expensive hotel in the list, by far). But it is a planned special offer:Exclusive for Priority Club® members, stay at the new InterContinental Los Angeles Century City, March 15, 2007 through September 4, 2007, to receive triple points, triple miles or triple credit with any 2 night consecutive stay during this introductory period. Plus, Priority Club members can take advantage of our very special Reward Night PointBreaks offer of only 5,000 points a night for stays from March 15 to May 15, 2007.
Another Hotel Program Devaluation Without Warning…
Mar
15
2007
Sometime this morning Priority Club changed their redemption chart. For example, some Holiday Inns jump from 15,000 points to 25,000 points. And some Intercontinentals go from 30,000 points to 40,000 points. The Boston, DC, Vienna, and Tahiti properties are notable among them. There’s no chart of changes by property, so I’ll just be piecing together which ones have changed. Naturally, there’s a Flyertalk discussion and folks are none too pleased. Bumping the prices of some hotels by a third is bad enough. I understand it (there were some great values there, and great values don’t last). But it’s disappointing. However, making the changes without any notice whatsoever is criminal.
Deeply Discounted Award Rooms at the Intercontinental Los Angeles
Mar
15
2007
The Intercontinental Los Angeles Century City (formerly Park Hyatt) has award rooms available for just 5000 Priority Club points, and availability appears to stretch through May 16. Dates after that are pricing out at the usual 30,000 points per night. Though Priority Club does sometimes discount award redemptions (eg 24,000 points instead of 30,000 points for an Intercontinental), this award price is unprecedented… likely an error, though I’m having a hard time figuring out what the keystroke mistake would have been. Perhaps someone mistakenly coded it as a PointBreaks property. Frequently Priority Club awards are available for any room at a given hotel, including suites, and presumably this is an error on the hotel’s part. Discussion of the phenomenon can be found at Flyertalk’s suite redemption alert thread. These suite redemptions are generally honored —…
