News and notes from around the interweb:
- American Express Membership Rewards is offering a 20% bonus on points transfers to Aeromexico through March 6. (HT: Points, Miles, & Martinis).
- Travel Summary highlights some of the best values in the Aeromexico award chart. I find dealing with their call centers frustrating enough that no matter the values, the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.
- I’ve got to applaud Ben Edelman and Jason Steele for this. And Delta admitted they were wrong, too!
- American Express is giving a 25% discount on redemptions for Hyatt gift cards. Even at 25% off it is a bad deal. Here’s how to play your Membership Rewards points instead.
- Southwest Airlines Demands Loyalty From Its Customers in its new ‘Loyalty Goes Both Ways’ Campaign.. according to the Onion (HT: Wandering Aramean)
- View from the cockpit: Landing in a rain storm (HT: World Airline News)
- You can join the 50,000+ 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!
I don’t care how “awesome” AM’s schedule looks. I won’t ever give them a bit of business until they mail me the free ticket they robed from me almost 15 years ago. Years ago I was a young fella new to the miles game and ended up flying a “DL” flight that was codeshared with AM. On the flight I got free booze and a much better level of service than I had received flying with DL, so in an attempt to flee SkyPesos, I got a Club Premier account. I was doing a fairly good bit of transcon flying on DL on full-fare tickets with work and I credited all of my DL activity on Club Premier account. I got within a handful of miles all earned from flying towards my goal and was had begun to make my travel plans when all of a sudden, about half of my Club Premier miles (seems like back then they did call them miles, but I digress…) disappeared from my account. I called Club Premier and asked what happened. They informed me that the miles had expired since I hadn’t flown an AM operated flight. Flying any other SkyTeam member was irrelevant. Of course I wasn’t flying as much with work then and I was both naïve and relatively broke. My free ticket to Cancun vanished, thanks to AM. Once burnt, twice learnt!