General

Oct 06 2015

Luxury Travel Diary, a high-end travel blog with great reviews based in the UK, has a bunch of travel auctions — some about to close, others extend into October — and there look to be some real bargains.

They wanted to highlight some of these, and offered to help organize a giveaway of a 3 night hotel stay in a suite at a top property in New York for readers of this blog. I suppose that folks who already know about these auctions don’t like this added attention, because frankly there aren’t enough bidders relative to the value of the offerings and some of these items go too cheap.

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Oct 06 2015

Business stories like the one new United CEO Oscar Munoz is telling are almost always apocryphal, although they sometimes contain a kernel a truth. They can encapsulate an idea in a way that goes viral because it’s in the form of a narrative. And it seems to represent how Munoz is thinking about changing the culture at United.

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Oct 06 2015

United is offering a 30% bonus earning miles with their partners that you haven’t earned with during the past 12 months. They want to get you earning more broadly in the MileagePlus program than you are today.

The opportunity to earn with this promotion runs through November 20, and requires registration (you’ll only earn the bonus on transactions after you’ve registered). There is no reason not to register, just in case you wind up earning with a partner during the promotion period.

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Oct 06 2015

ANA is making changes to its award chart effective October 15. Historically ANA has given reasonable notice of award chart changes, so this surprises me to see.

This is especially relevant because ANA is a Star Alliance partner, and American Express Membership Rewards and Starwood points transfer to ANA’s miles.

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Oct 05 2015

Several sources are telling me that Marriott Rewards will be rolling out four new features to their program: cash and points, points advance, points sharing, and reward nights count towards elite status.

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Oct 05 2015

Barclays has been providing free credit scores to cardmembers for a couple of years.

The credit score I showed you over the weekend in my post about credit scores as a predictor of relationships was from my Barclaycard American AAdvantage Aviator Red account.

American Express has now joined the party of free credit score providers.

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Oct 05 2015

Last week I wrote that neither United.com nor the ANA website have been completely reliable for searching Star Alliance awards.

As a result, I’ve found Air Canada’s Aeroplan website to be the most useful tool when searching for award space on Star Alliance partner airlines. But two readers point out some interesting discrepancies.

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Oct 05 2015

Orbitz currently has the strongest rewards program of the Online Travel Agency websites, and is part of a great strategy for ‘quadruple dipping’ on your travel purchases. They are running a 2x rebate on airfare purchases through October 25.

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Oct 05 2015

The most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.

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Oct 05 2015

Denver is a very strange airport for security. PreCheck lines can be super long. The lead singer for Puddle of Mud was arrested there for riding the baggage carousel into the secure area. And it’s where TSA agents manipulated the nude-o-scopes so they could fondle attractive passengers.

It also seems that the airport was evacuated because the TSA found bath salts in a checked bag.

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