United sells miles paired with the purchase of tickets online at its website. You can buy redeemable miles based on the number of miles flown on the itinerary. On top of that you can also buy elite qualifying miles, too. Some people do this during the year in order to qualify for elite status more quickly. Others may do it right at the end of the year when they realize how many miles short they are going to be for status. In fact, some use this feature just to straight up buy the qualifying miles, without actually flying the itinerary that those miles are sold with. That’s because when you buy the miles, they post right away and are not refundable. But remember that any United itinerary purchased on the airline’s website can be refunded…
General
Category Archives for General.
5% Cash Back, 35,000 Points, and Cheap One-Way Awards (Bits ‘n Pieces for January 2, 2014)
News and notes from around the interweb: “A photograph taken by another passenger showed a man restrained in a seat with his legs bound and also appeared to have his arms tied.” (HT: Claire M.) PFdigest says that it may still be possible to get the old American Express Blue Cash card offering unlimited 5% rebates on gas, groceries, and drugstores after your first $6,500 in annual spend. 35,000 miles for the Hawaiian Airlines MasterCard is back, the card now issued by Barclays. This interests me not at all, their partner awards are generally expensive and you can’t combine partners on a single award, and transfers to Hilton are no longer as interesting post-devaluation. It could be useful for getting to Hawaii from a city Hawaiian flies to, of course. This past summer’s Aeroplan devaluation,…
Prepare for a New Year of Travel, Don’t Let the Government Destroy Your Flute, and You’d Better Give United Big Money Or You’re Over-entitled
News and Notes from Around the Interweb: US Customs destroyed 11 of flute virtuoso Boujemaa Razgui‘s instruments upon his return home to the U.S. because they were deemed “agricultural products.” This seems far worse than anything United did to Dave Carroll and much, much worse than Delta banning Lynn Harrell from the Skymiles program for attempting to earn miles for his instrument. Stephanie Rosenbloom offers good tips to be ready for a new year of travel: keep your passport up to date, don’t carry knives through TSA security, have the right mobile apps to respond to irregular operations during travel, prepare for lounge access, and have the best mileage-earning credit cards. She recommends my credit card advice page. Mommy Points sums up United’s new minimum revenue requirement for elite status. I covered this extensively when…
14% Off Airfare, $109 Suite, But Buy Your Own Lounge Food (Bits ‘n Pieces for December 31, 2013)
News and Notes from Around the Interweb: The Alaska Airlines lounge at LAX now offers food for sale. Frontier Airlines is offering a 14% discount with promo code FLY2014 on tickets purchased by January 5 for travel between Jan. 6 and March 12. TravelZoo has a suite at the Anantara Bangkok Sathorn for $109 Australian Dollars per night including daily breakfast for two, free wifi, and a free cocktail per guest. JetBlue offered its own version of the WestJet Christmas, trolling Craigslist for people looking for rides home and offering them free flights instead. (HT: Don H.) You can join the 30,000+ 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…
IHG Rewards Introducing Free Internet for All Members — Whether Staying as a Hotel Guest or Not
IHG Rewards, the loyalty program formerly known as Priority Club which includes Intercontinental (for points-earning and redemption), Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, and other brands has updated its terms and conditions to include internet access not just for elites but for all members throughout most of the world, and to offer that access for free whether the member is even staying at the hotel or not. This benefit doesn’t apply in Europe, where only IHG Rewards elite members will receive complimentary internet. Internet Access for Members: Beginning January 2014, standard internet access will be available to all IHG® Rewards Club members at no additional cost at all IHG hotels located in the Americas, Greater China, Asia, Middle East and Africa with or without a hotel reservation and/or qualifying stay. Furthermore, IHG® Rewards Club Elite members will…
What’s the Best Business Airline? Has Pot Been Legalized at the Denver Airport? And What Would Abolishing the TSA Look Like? (Bits ‘n Pieces for December 30, 2013)
News and Notes from Around the Interweb: Forbes looks at the best airlines for business travel in 2014. My take: A good business airline gets you where you want to go with multiple fight options a day, and lets you be productive while getting there,” Gary Leff, head of the popular View from The Wing blog tells me. “That means the major network (legacy) airlines are the better business airlines. The two best are American Airlines and Delta Airlines for letting you stay connected with inflight wireless internet while offering frequent schedules across their broad networks. Of course I choose American between those two due to their far superior mileage program. Photos of Lufthansa’s new lounge at Newark Colorado’s marijuana legalization allows entities controlling property to ban pot on their property. Denver’s airport is utilizing…
Award Ticket Redeposit Charges: Unfair Junk Fees?
Christopher Elliott is outraged by mileage award cancel and redeposit fees. [Peter DeForest] saved up enough frequent flier miles on Virgin America, an airline with a stellar reputation for taking care of its customers, to fly himself and a companion from San Francisco to Las Vegas. But shortly before the trip, his companion fell ill. He asked Virgin if he could cancel the trip and get his miles back. Sure, a representative told him. If he paid the airline a $100 per reservation “redeposit fee.” Seriously? “It’s ridiculous,” he says. “It’s nearly the value of the points themselves.” I agree with him. I actually agree with Elliott who agrees with DeForest, at least that redeposit fees can be counterproductive — a bad idea — though hopefully for more nuanced reasons than Elliott suggests. Award tickets…
Here’s How to Book 2 Singapore Suites Award Seats Together on the Same Flight
Singapore Airlines Award Availability Is Awesome — If You Are a Singapore Krisflyer Member Singapore Airlines makes much better award space available to its own KrisFlyer members than they do to their partners. Sure, some partners (like Avianca’s LifeMiles) seem to have access to more space than others do (like United, US Airways). But the award availability Singapore offers its own members is really quite amazing. Singapore Airlines Krisflyer is a partner of American Express Membership Rewards, and also of Starwood Preferred Guest. That means plenty of people in the US have points that can be transferred, if Singapore Airlines premium cabin awards are the goal. I’ve written in the past about how Singapore opens up two first class (saver) award seats pretty much every day on their San Francisco – Seoul – Singapore flight…
19 Million Reader Giveaway Prizes Have Now Been Awarded!
Earlier in the month I featured my Million Reader Giveaway where I promised 15 prizes in exchange for your travel tips. I’ve been remiss in awarding those prizes, because over 1300 entries is a lot especially when some of the prizes are being awarded based on subjective evaluation (that’s 1300 travel tips that I have to think about!). But since I want to be able to give you all elite status and points, plus I have these gift cards sitting on my coffee table that I’m going to have to start resisting the temptation to turn them into money orders and deposit them back into my bank account, I went ahead and put together some winners. And I decided to give away more than the 15 prizes promised. Since I’m a co-founder of the Milepoint…
How Car Rentals and Credit Cards Advance Human Civilization
It struck me, looking at the requirements to sign up for an Air China co-branded credit card, just how important miles, points, and travel are to the advancement of civilization. It’s hard to imagine a more important question in public policy, and in the history of human society, than economic growth. It makes most other questions possible. We can talk about eradicating poverty only once we have resources with which to address such problems. Indeed, we can’t even conceive of ‘poverty’ until at least some have risen out of it. Without economic growth what we think of as poverty is just ‘the human condition’. And what we now think of as poverty would once have been incredible riches — indoor plumbing, satellite TV (many of the slums in Mumbai even have satellite tv), there’s even…
