News and notes from around the interweb:
- Lucky runs down the new Virgin America-Singapore Airlines partnership. The best opportunity so far is for occasional Virgin America flyers to credit cheap tickets to Singapore, since Singapore awards points based on miles flown and Virgin America based on ticket cost.
We don’t yet know what sort of award inventory Virgin America will have access to on Singapore, and the answer to that question could be useful (since Singapore gives their own members substantially more premium cabin availability than they give to Star Alliance partners).
- Executive Travel profiles me on the value of miles and how to make the most out of them.
- Loyalty Lobby highlights Accor’s 40% off Asia Pacific sale for stays from March 27 through June 30.
- USA Today realizes that Delta has the worst award availability of the major North American airlines. And for reasons other than the flawed IdeaWorks study, though they quote that too.
Defenders of Delta showing up in 3,2,1,…
Sadly, Delta will read this article and say, “Boy, we need to get that revenue based model up and running quickly so squash this bad publicity.”
That how clueless this airline is even though they continue to be my airline of choice largely as a route captive. (I will jump to United and put up with ORD transiting (I LOVE MSP) it they make the change.)
Frequent flyers generally don’t like the mainstream media picking up on the topics discussed on flyertalk and milepoint, but Delta’s insanely bad availability is an issue that would benefit from greater publicity. They really need to be shamed into offering more plausible award inventory. It’s obvious that nothing else will work.