Registration is now open for Starwood’s first quarter promotion that had apparently leaked early. Between January 5 and April 15 you can earn: Double points on stays of 2 or more nights 1000 bonus points for every 5 five nights stayed during the promotion period, up to 4000 bonus points. Registration is open through March 31. While this isn’t a huge offer that will cause me to move any stays, it’s better than no offer and remember: you should register for promotions when you first see them or else you’ll wind up forgetting to do so and forego points. Even if you don’t expect to have qualifying stays, sometimes they creep up on you and the bonus won’t be top of mind at that time. You can join the 40,000+ people who see these deals…
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Category Archives for General.
Reader Wants to Understand… US Airways Credit Card, American Status Buy Up, and What it Means for Upgrades
Reader John moratto asks, I have two US Airways Barclay elite world MasterCard. How could I get a credit cards that will give me companion coupons and Prefered elite miles just for purchases? Also if I buy up to platinum status will I receive 500 mile upgrades for platinum(50,000 miles) or only for the miles that I flew. Up through 2014, the US Airways Premier World MasterCard from Barclays bank offered 10,000 elite qualifying miles for spending $25,000 in a year on the card. That benefit is no longer available on the card. US Airways and American are merging frequent flyer programs The Barclays-issued US Airways card is becoming an American card The base-level American card issued by Citibank does not offer elite qualifying miles for spending. Citibank issues their ‘Executive’ card with a $450…
What Should an Airline Do When Its IT System Goes Down?
If you answered, “don’t send all of your passengers by bus to another airport over 160 miles away, only to have them turned away and sent back” then you’d be correct. Apparently, though, that wasn’t the answer given for a Pakistan International Airlines flight from Lahore to Riyadh. Administration of Allama Iqbal International Airport Lahore sent all its passengers to Islamabad by bus in the wake of a glitch that occurred in the IT system of the airport on Saturday. Boarding passes to the passengers of flight PK-755 headed to Riyadh from Lahore could not be issued due to a disruption in the IT system after which the relevant officials sent all the passengers to Islamabad by road. Passengers were told their flight was going to take off from Islamabad instead. So they went there,…
American Express Losing a Transfer Partner. And I Don’t Care.
Travel With Grant reports that American Express Membership Rewards will lose Frontier Airlines as a transfer partner on March 5. And all I can say is.. who cares? Even before Frontier became a true low cost carrier (there’s even a fee to use your miles within 6 months of travel, and they don’t publish their schedule much farther out than that), acquired by the folks behind Spirit and remade in the Spirit mode, the only thing I ever did with Frontier’s miles is transfer them to Starbucks gift cards and use their account signup bonuses to transfer to miles in other airline progams. Unquestionably there have been values in the Frontier award chart. But the best opportunity Early Returns members ever had was to become Wisconsin residents because that allowed them to transfer miles to…
Eating and Entertainment Like a Singapore Local
Must-read Earlier Installments: Singapore, Cathay, and Qantas First Class.. Some of the Best Meals of My Life, and a Tour of Hyatts in Bangkok, Singapore, and Sydney Inside the New Oneworld Lounge at LAX’s Tom Bradley International Terminal Cathay Pacific First Class, Los Angeles – Hong Kong Cathay Pacific “The Wing” First Class Lounge, Hong Kong Cathay Pacific Business Class, Hong Kong – Bangkok Grand Hyatt Bangkok: Suite, Club Lounge, and Facilities Thai Molecular Gastronomy at Sra Bua in Bangkok Getting Custom Tailored Suits Made in Bangkok at Empire Tailors Nahm at the Metropolitan: the Best Thai Food in Thailand? Thailand’s Iron Chef Cooks Ancient Recipes in a Deserted Top Notch Restaurant Eating The Best Local Thai Dishes in the Bangrak Neighborhood of Bangkok Louis Tavern CIP Lounge and Cathay Pacific Business Class, Bangkok-Singapore Grand…
Man Builds Flight Simulator For His 2 Year Old, and How to Become a Skyboss
News and notes from around the interweb: Virtuoso’s flutes destroyed by US customs What Ferran Adria is doing now. He closed El Bulli because of the ‘pressure’ of repeating himself. My framing, not his, is that it was the JohN Stuart Mill problem: when you’ve accomplished everything there is by a young age, what point is there in going on? (Fortunately neither Mill nor Adria killed themselves, though Mill at least contemplated it.) Marketing matters: The name of VietJet’s premium fare bundle alone makes me want to ‘buy up’ on my next Southeast Asian low cost carrier flight. They won’t have women in bikinis dancing down the aisles of every flight. But I can get priority airport services, including lounge access, as a skyboss. A Captain recalls piloting the last flight into Nicosia’s airport in…
The Numbers Prove Which Airline Runs the Best Operation, and It Isn’t the One You Think…
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics is a treasure trove of data, and their on-time performance statistics are one area of fascination for an aviation junkie. It’s conventional wisdom that Delta runs a good airline operation. And that’s true: Delta performs well as an on-time airline since 2011, 3 to 7 points better than industry average. Hawaiian Airlines shows up as a perennial leader, a function of being based in Hawaii which doesn’t have the same weather and air traffic issues that other airlines face in their home cities. An article of faith amongst several ex-Continental loyalists is that Continental was the better run airline and United a disaster when the two carriers merged. This isn’t borne out by the on-time performance data. In most years United and Continental had similar on-time performance. United was actually…
You Can Ask United to Give You Top Tier Revenue-Based Global Services Status!
At American and Delta, the top services aren’t part of the mileage program, a separate elite tier. At United, in contrast, their revenue-based status Global Services is actually a true top tier — Global Services members get their upgrades ahead of 100,000 mile flyers, and even trump the usual upgrade priority so that full fare elite passengers fall behind Global Services members (whereas a full fare Silver on a given trip will trump a mid-priced fare 1K in the upgrade queue). They don’t publish a criteria for earning Global Services status. It’s not based on mileage flown, but revenue for the most part. They give it not just based on your own revenue but also to significant travel influencers who drive the revenue of others (such as through major corporate contracts for which they’re the…
Avoiding the Worst Airport Germs, Prank Calling American Airlines, and a New Years Eve Uber Driver Tells All
News and notes from around the interweb: An UberX driver chronicles her New Years Eve. No one puked in her car, but she was propositioned with pizza.. Flat whites come to Starbucks January 6! I always order these at the Andaz 5th Avenue, and at a few other places in New York. It’s a coffee choice I picked up in Australia in the late 80s — microfoam poured over double espresso. Coffee is important. The Forward Cabin posts this three year old prank call that I hadn’t ever heard: recordings of Arnold Schwarzenegger prank calling the American Airlines automated voice system and then a reservations agent. Russia’s economic crisis leads to an airline bailout Confessions of a former TSA agent Contra this advice from George Bush Dana Carvey, you’re going to want to use paper…
How Do Normal People Ever Manage to Navigate Airline Bureaucracies? United Strands a New Mexico Monk Edition
Sometimes it amazes me that the public at large can successfully travel from one city to another without getting stymied by airline bureaucracies and ineptitude. Modern flight is truly miraculous. Modern airline technology, customer service, and business processes often are not. I run into frustrating situations with airlines all the time, and I do this all the time and – presumably – I even sort of know what I’m doing. Most people don’t. Delta agents don’t know who their partners are. American doesn’t publish its award redemption rules. United tickets on partners re-issue and cancel. United ticketing issues are especially problematic. For instance, How to Make Sure You Really Have a Ticket When You Redeem Your Miles When You Purchase a United Award Ticket That Doesn’t Mean You Actually Have a Ticket United Award Tickets…
