I’ve mentioned Fare Alert before, a website that sends out emails when amazing travel deals like $51 tickets to Fiji shows up. Now there’s a new entrant into the mistake rate game. Free Traveling posts hotel deals, some of which are outstanding and others of which are just plain odd … like $5 a night for the Travelodge in West Dennis, Massachusetts. Still, this is the place to go for truly great hotel rates, even if a large number of them will be in obscure places or available only for a small set of nights. I just wish they either emailed out their deals or set up an RSS feed so I didn’t have to keep hitting that refresh button!
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Using Your Blackberry for Laptop Internet Access
Via InflightHQ, here are instructions on how to use a Blackberry to get internet access for your laptop. If you don’t have a wireless subscription, don’t have access to free wireless, and don’t want to pay connection charges this is a reasonably decent second-best.
Starwood Bonus for Stays through mid-March
Starwood is offering 3000 bonus points for every three stays between February 15 and March 15. It is not targeted, and it is combinable with other offers. Registration is required. It’s a ‘special Flyertalk offer’ and was announced on Flyertalk yesterday. Strictly speaking the terms and conditions of the offer require you to be a Flyertalk.com member to receive the bonus. You should be one anyway. It’s not clear to me how they would exclude non-members, though. (In theory they could look at the referral URL you used to click on the promo, but even if you click on the link from this blog it will say blogs.flyertalk.com and even that wouldn’t show whether you were a member or not. Odd terms and conditions, but a much appreciated offer!)
Freddies Voting has Begun!
Voting for the Freddie Awards is now open and will last through February 28. I voted for United as program of the year and best elite level. It has a truly industry-leading award chart — fewest miles for the best international premium class awards (think 90,000 miles for business class to Australia) — and its 1K program can’t be beat for international upgrades from reasonable fares without a co-pay. On the other hand, not a single one of my votes went to Northwest, Delta, or Continental. Together they’ve been increasing mileage costs on premium-class awards and (Continental and Northwest especially) offer generally poor award availability. Skyteam really is the leftover alliance, with equally stingy partners Air France and KLM. On the other hand, best redemption has to go to American… (with a nod to all…
Why are fewer hotels participating in Starwood’s Cash & Points?
Starwood posted its Cash & Points award hotel participation for 2006 yesterday. Well, sort of, since hotels in Asia aren’t listed yet. This has been a long time in coming, I understand from Flyertalk that they were trying to get this up much earlier but a glitch in the process delayed it until January 30. They even moved back the date to look for it on the website a couple of times. I don’t really know what the glitch was, but posting a full year of participation by the end of January is actually an improvement on past practice. Starwood used to list these awards only one quarter at a time, and the listing would usually be posted no earlier than a few days into that quarter. Last year they moved to show a full…
Amex Centurion Becomes Just Another Piece of Plastic
The famed American Express Centurion Card (U.S. version) is certainly not worth the $2500 fee any longer. Centurion members used to get Diamond status in the Hyatt Gold Passport program. Last year that benefit was pulled, and American Express added Platinum status in the Priority Club program instead. That’s hardly a like exchange: anyone can get Platinum status by doing as little as transferring some points into their account from Membership Rewards, the status provides very little in the way of benefits, and I can’t imagine that too many Centurion cardholders find themselves staying at Holiday Inns all that frequently in order to take advantage of it. Now comes news that Platinum status in the Starwood Preferred Guest program will no longer be offered. Everyone signed up for the status through January 21 (about a…
Remember that Conversations on Airplanes can be Overheard
Flying doesn’t lend itself to private conversations, even flying in first class, or even in an international first class ‘suite’. That’s a lesson that someone needs to teach Under Secretary of State Robert Joseph. The Washington Note reports that Joseph was not much of a diplomat on a recent Dulles-Oakland flight. Bob Joseph was on his way to meetings at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. He was having a loud conversation with someone he was sitting next to. (Of course, “loud” is a relative term — but let’s satisfy that with “loud enough to be heard by others in first class.”) The key point of conversation is that Joseph reportedly stated “I miss the Soviet Union, because they knew what the rules were, and now we are stuck with these ‘surrender monkeys’ in France and Germany.”…
Travel is Cheap Today
Craig Depken looks at what it cost to travel from New York to New Orleans and back in 1906. From the Jan. 28, 1906 NYT is an advertisement for the Washington and Southern Railway: MARDI GRAS – NEW YORK TO NEW ORLEANS AND RETURN – $37.75. Tickets on sale February 21 to 27, good returning until March 3, 1906. Extension of limit March 16th can be had by depositing ticket and paying 50 cents at New Orleans. I don’t know how long it would have taken to get from the Big Apple to the Big Easy on a train, but I would figure two days or so. The folks over at EH.net estimate the following 2004 values for the $37 round trip: In 2004, $37.75 from 1906 is worth: $789.69 using the Consumer Price Index…
Mileage Pro Reviewed
I’ve been promising a review of Randy Petersen and Tim Winship’s new book, Mileage Pro, for some time. I read it about six weeks ago, and really did enjoy it. It’s absolutely the best introduction to the miles and points game I’ve ever come across. But I didn’t actually learn anything from it.* They’re quite upfront about their target audience, and it’s not the expert with over 10,000 posts on Flyertalk. Even so, I absolutely enjoyed reading it and I even gave a copy to my father-in-law — who poured through it voraciously. (* Strictly speaking that isn’t true — I learned that you can swap miles into Delta via Points.com on p.94, and though the book and I agree that this is rarely advisable I didn’t even think this was possible since Delta’s participation…
Predictions
Reading through the February issue of Inside Flyer and some recent posts on Flyertalk by Randy Petersen I’m struck by a few of his predictions for changes to frequent flyer programs in 2006. Among the no-brainers, American and United are extending their 15,000 mile awards for short-haul travel (flights under 750 miles). Other airlines will certainly match. Continental has announced its own 20,000 mile awards for flights under 1500 miles — more miles, but longer flights, and interesting competitive response. Short-haul flights tend to see better award availability, since most flyers don’t see them as a good value for use of points. Fewer points make sense. But in most cases they’re still not a particularly good value. Randy has seemed very high on these award offerings, but they really don’t excite me one bit. More…
