Some things to be aware of: Diners Club is offering a 50% bonus on transfers to British Airways through May 2. (HT: lucky) I usually like to keep my points flexible and don’t get tempted by transfer offers. But with all of the transfer partners that have left the Club Rewards program over the years, I haven’t redeemed Diners Club points in probably four years. They do have some oddball partners that could be useful in the future, but I may still go in for this one — especially since through end of March I can pair it with the 40% bonus for transferring Amex points to British Airways. American Express Centurion (Black Card) members now receive Delta Platinum status rather than just Gold. This is effective as of yesterday and should already show up…
General
Category Archives for General.
Chicago Seminar DO Scheduled for October 29-30
Last October I gave three talks at the Chicago Seminar DO (see here and here), a weekend-long event with talks on mileage running, getting the most of hotel and rental car programs, and my own talks on booking frequent flyer awards, benefits of the Star Alliance and easiest ways to qualify towards elite status, and taking best advantage of mistake deals. I’ll be speaking again at the next one, which has now been scheduled for October 29-30. Last year about 500 people attended, and they completely sold out the host hotel and had two overflow hotels. The event hotel will again be the Holiday Inn Elk Grove Village, bookable here. I’m told this link is the only way to secure a reservation for the nights of the event, that the hotel is completely blcoked for…
Voting Has Launched for the 2011 Frequent Traveler Awards
Voting has begun for the Frequent Traveler Awards, and will be open for the month of March. The Frequent Traveler Awards fill an important niche. Instead of awards bestowed by a group of self-appointed experts, the Frequent Traveler Awards represent the collective judgment of the traveling public. Instead of an award for best airline product or nicest resort hotel, the Frequent Traveler Awards represent the best in loyalty programs. When voting ends on March 31, real travelers will have spoken. Last year nearly one million frequent travelers participated in the voting. And on April 28 at Citi Field in New York we’ll all know which programs are the best. (Last year’s award ceremony was an amazing night.) There are a handful of changes to this year’s balloting. The Frequent Traveler Awards are divided into (3)…
Milepoint.com has launched — and is Giving Away an iPad a Day Just for Registering
Last month I shared details on Milepoint, a friendly, welcoming new frequent flyer community built on the latest technology, when it opened up its private beta. Today it officially launches. The private beta period was great, lots of opportunities to see what the software could do and plenty of people signing up even though the main Milepoint.com page just had a countdown clock to how many days until the site launched — no ability to come in any further. Still, over 4000 members managed to find their way into the site and make more than 175,000 posts. So there’s plenty going on there already! (Though with additional planned features coming online, Randy Petersen says the current site is about 15% of where it’ll eventually be.) To promote the launch, Randy is giving away an iPad…
Marriott Rewards Increasing Points Requirements for Redemptions at 350 Hotels in a Week — They Just Won’t Tell You Which Ones
Last week I wrote a fairly extensive analysisof Starwood Preferred Guest’s award category shifts. Every year the hotel chain moves some hotels up and other hotels down in reward category, changing the number of points required for redemption at each. When more hotels go up in category than down, it’s a devaluation in the program. On the whole Starwood moved as many hotels down as up, in fact a handful more went down than went up. So really just tinkering at the margins with a fairly small percentage of hotels. They gave us a full list of the changes in advance, meaning astute readers of this blog could book hotels in advance if those hotels were going up, or wait until March 1 to book those hotels going down in price. A nice little window…
Fairmont Honors Lifetime Platinum Status Mistake Offer
Loyalty Traveler reviews the saga of the lifetime Fairmont Presidents Club offer that I posted the other day. It does turn out that the lifetime status was included in the Presidential Suite and Penthouse Living Social packages in error. I’d be really curious to know how the error transpired, someone wrote the copy and presumably thought that’s what was intended. They pulled the offer early, it was supposed to run until Tuesday. But though it was unclear for a bit how Fairmont was going to handle things, perhaps they would have cancelled the deal and refunded folks’ money? In the end they decided to honor the promotion. Some folks got their status especially cheap, you could even go in on these things as a group and get a discount for referring people, so the cost…
Trip Report – A Private Jet Experience: Alone in First Class on ANA and Thai, Plus Singapore First, a Suite, a Villa, and Some Incredible Food Porn
Prologue: The decision-making and booking process I’m just back from South Asia, where my wife and I had a nice pretty par for the course first class redemption. But there were some high points, and some lessons in award redemption that I hope to be able to share. Some things I’d do again, some things I’d do differently, so it seemed worth writing up a trip report and hopefully it’ll be worth reading and even helpful to a few folks. I started out looking for first class transpacific award seats on Star Alliance, planning for a trip that was a little bit less than two weeks. The plan was a getaway towards the end of the cold winter season, maybe miss the final snow (we lucked out and did!) and to come back as DC…
Lifetime Fairmont Presidents Club Platinum Status for $2000 (and a free Presidential Suite Night too)
Via Whitedoor on Milepoint, there’s a Living Social daily deal that will give you lifetime Platinum status in the Fairmont Presidents Club program and a one-night stay in the Presidential Suite at the Fairmont San Francisco for $2000. Platinum is the top tier in the program, it gets you suite upgrades and free nights plus bonus miles and early check-in and late check-out. Since it’s being offered on a permanent basis it could even be worthwhile just for the status, at least for those with plenty of years ahead and a likelihood of staying with Fairmont regularly in the future.
Dropbox Free Cloud Storage
Fly Gracefully describes the usefulness of the free tool, dropbox.com. It’s not new, but some folks may not be aware of it, it’s like having a hard drive full of data anywhere you go. The young’ins call Dropbox shows up as a folder on my desktop. I place a file in there. It uploads it to dropbox land. I go to dropbox on my phone or nook and download the file and transfer it where I need it. Dropbox will let you alone have access to files, or let you share files as well which is great for passing along powerpoint presentations that are too large to email. It’s also a handy place to keep travel documents like copies of passports. I’ve long kept scanned copies on my laptop, but this is great because my…
Get 10% Cash Back on Your Travel Spend with the Travelocity American Express Card
As a travel junkie and someone who booked not just travel for myself but for all sorts of friends and colleagues, I like the American Epxress Premier Rewards Gold card which earns triple Membership Rewards points on airfare purchases. And I do like my Membership Rewards points, especially for transfers: To Continental, which will hold Star Alliance awards when you don’t have enough miles in your account. Points transfer instantly, as well. This partnership ends September 30. To Aeroplan, because of their favorable award chart (e.g. 80,000 miles for business class from the US to much of Europe, or 120,000 miles for first class from the US to as far South in Asia as Singapore. Points transfer instantly. To British Airways, because of their 100,000 mile business class awards on Cathay Pacific from the US…
