Airlines

Category Archives for Airlines.

StarNet: United’s Weapon of Mass Award Destruction

by Gary Leff on December 10, 2007

Dec 10 2007

Back in July, I wrote up a primer on securing Star Alliance awards. In it, I alluded to Starnet, the system that United uses for booking these awards for Mileage Plus members. Its search capabilities are primitive (you often can find better availability searching segment-by-segment that you can telling the agent your origina and destination, simply because it doesn’t search many possible connections). But most vexxing for frequent flyers is that the system filters availability. That is, a partner airline may be offering a seat for award redemption — but United’s system will still tell you it’s unavailable. The agent will usually blame the partner (“they aren’t offering any seats”) when that isn’t true at all. Instead, United doesn’t want to pay for the seat. United is known to ‘filter out’ availability especially of Luftansa…

Continental Inflight Currency Accepted on Northwest

by Gary Leff on December 8, 2007

Dec 08 2007

Continental Airlines inflight currency, the kind that pays for drinks and headsets, is acceptable onboard by Northwest. I never realized that, and apparently many Northwest flight attendants don’t, either. (In addition to selling scrip at checkin kiosks, Continental gives these out to their OnePass Platinum members.) It’s confirmed by Northwest on a Flyertalk thread that the Northwest flight attendant manual is clear on this fact under amenity coupons (section 365.1.4 if feeling particularly confrontational about the subject). A very minor issue, to be sure, but something I never knew for sure. Drink up!

Reader Wants to Know Whether to Use the British Airways Transfer Promos

by Gary Leff on December 3, 2007

Dec 03 2007

Reader Keith asks: One of your latest posts, about the Starwood to BA bonus, made me wonder whether you think it would be worth moving the miles from Starwood to BA even if I have no current plans to use an award. I generally park miles in Starwood, but a 30% bonus seems tempting, so I was thinking about moving over enough for a business class ticket. I’m not sure how I’d use them, but I live in Chicago, so I wouldn’t think redemption options for BA would be that hard. I wouldn’t. BA miles just aren’t a great place to park miles, or a value even with a 30% transfer bonus. These are all great bonuses if you need to top off a BA account, or need an award for which only BA miles…

Alaska Airlines Offers 10% Off to Newark

by Gary Leff on December 2, 2007

Dec 02 2007

Talk about a non-event. Through January 6th, Alaska Airlines is offering 10% off to Newark as part of its gay travel promotions. Of course, you don’t actually have to be gay to get the discount. You just have to use the promo code EC06607. This is similar to Orbitz gay hotel discounts and $100 gay discounts. Not that there’s anything wrong with that… And yet Alaska is taking heat for their marketing, with an activist portraying the airline as imposing a 10% tax on heterosexuals. “They are giving preferences to male passengers who want to wear dresses on the planes, and giving them preference over married couples,” Now, of course, this isn’t true or a reasonable way to describe Alaska’s marketing efforts. But if Alaska wanted to impose a surcharge on bigots I’d personally favor…

New Alaska Airlines Mileage Expiration Policy

by Gary Leff on October 3, 2007

Oct 03 2007

Alaska Airlines has followed the industry trend and announced a new mileage expiration policy. They’re moving from the old standard of three years to two. Now, they’re still more generous than the current reigning policy in the industry of 18 months. And any activity, earning or redeeming, will keep an account active — no worrying about which kinds of miles extend and account and which do not. And finally, there’s an explicit way to extend expired miles — within a year of expiration, a $75 fee will reactivate an account. Last year I kept my brother-in-law’s Alaska account active by signing him up for a free Points.com account. I think he earned 20 miles. The MilesLink newsletter points out that the first date that miles will expire is April Fools’ Day 2008. Heh.

Breaking the Value Proposition: a Nail in the Skymiles Coffin

by Gary Leff on October 3, 2007

Oct 03 2007

Traditionally frequent flyer miles are redeemed for capacity controlled awards. Airlines offer a limited number of seats for redemption that they expect would otherwise go unsold. And some travelers are frustrated they can’t find the seats. But in general there’s always been the option to spend more miles in order to get any open seat. With United, it’s the “Standard” award rather than “Saver.” With Delta, this higher mileage option has been known as “SkyChoice.” But Delta has announced that as of December 1, spending double the miles no longer gets you any seat. Instead, it just gets you access to more award inventory. Now they’re not the only airline to do this. They’re following Northwest’s lead. But they’re still in the minority. Rulebuster, Standard — or whatever you want to call them — awards…

Northwest EUA Detail

by Gary Leff on September 9, 2007

Sep 09 2007

As a result of some prodding on Flyertalk, Northwest has added a more detailed page on how their complimentary domestic upgrade system works.Nothing really new here for the already well-informed, but a good step forward nonetheless.

Smaller Biscoff Cookie Packages on United

by Gary Leff on August 18, 2007

Aug 18 2007

Cranky Flier reports that United is reducing the size of its Biscoff cookies. I admit, I really love those cookies. Always have, since I first got them on a United Express Westair flight many years ago. Some cutbacks just hurt, ya know?

I Kinda Wish I Lived in Texas

by Gary Leff on August 1, 2007

Aug 01 2007

Because Reliant Energy offers American Airlines miles for using their electricity. The ‘up to 7500 miles’ are broken up and awarded after the 2nd, 6th, and 12th invoices. And I don’t know what their pricing etc. is like. But miles are the second reason (no state income tax is the first) for me to consider moving to Texas.

Hopefully United Has Thought of This…

by Gary Leff on July 24, 2007

Jul 24 2007

As United rolls out the new international premium class product, some aircraft will have the new configuration and some will not — and the planes have very different configurations, very different number of premium class seats. United is famous for aircraft swaps, unfortunately this has happened most recently with mainline A320s to TED (no first class) and before that it was downgrading regular 737s to old Shuttle aircraft that used to service the West Coast only. These aircraft swaps are disruptive, with different seating configurations. And ticketed first class passengers, in the TED example, go to an all-coach configuration. Not as big a deal on domestic routes as long-haul international. But dropping 21 business class seats from the 747 has the potentially to be hugely disruptive. Either United will hold back most upgrades until the…