Thanks to a co-branded offer with Harley Davidson, Best Western is offering new members a 1000 bonus points with your first stay by June 28. Hat tip to boazs of MileMaven.
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Fly JetBlue Get $50 Off JetBlue
JetBlue is offering $50 off travel between September 5, 2007 and October 31, 2007 after you book a roundtrip by June 1 for travel commencing by June 15. Registration required. Thanks to reader Sloan for the pointer. Pair this with $10 off each way when buying your qualifying roundtrip. (Here’s the link via American Express.)Purchases need to be made with an American Express card by May 31 for travel by June 13, and Friday and Sunday travel are excluded.While the promo rules say the offer is good on transcontinental flights, that doesn’t appear to be true — the special fare comes up from Dulles to Orlando, for instance, and becomes as low as $39+tax one way.
Would You Want to Land Here?
Would you trust air traffic, or the ground controllers for that matter?
Giving Bad Advice on TV
NBC News in Connecticut ran a story on redeeming frequent flyer miles that was notable for how much it got wrong in only 166 words. Airline industry expert Darryl Jenkins said tough economic times are making airlines stingy with free seats. I much like Darryl, but this may be the closest to plausible thing he’s quoted as saying in the article. (It’s plausible that every quote was taken out of context and mangled…) Airlines aren’t being stingy because of ‘tough economic times’. If anything, the reverse is true. Full planes, usually not a sign of tough times, are making the seats harder to come by. Award redemption at the ‘saver’ level (i.e. capacity controlled awards, after all many airlines allow you to redeem double – or more – the miles to get any seat on…
Flying Air Koryo
Paul Karl Lukacs is blogging about his trip to North Korea. I find his Air Koryo flight from Beijing especially interesting, having heard plenty of stories before but never having flown the airline myself. The plane to Pyongyang was an Ilyushin 62-M, built by the Soviet Union in 1979 and kitted like a set from The Spy Who Loved Me. No cool corporate off-white here. The surprisingly comfortable economy seats were covered in puke green cloth upholstery with an indistinct pink pattern. The cabin’s interior shell was cast in a shade of beige which belonged in a Southern California ranch house from the era of earth tones. The plastic window shades were not opaque but a dark translucent brown. Read the whole thing…
16,000 Points for Choice Privileges Visa Signup
Read Dan emails to let me know that the Bank of America Choice Privileges Visa is offering 16,000 bonus points with signup by August 16th and $150 in spending on the card within 75 days of opening the account. Now, I’m not much of a Choice Privileges kinda guy, but this isn’t a bad deal for a no-fee card.
They’ve Killed the Consumer Card, Their Consumer Card is Dead
To butcher Frank Fukuyama, it’s the end of credit card history and I’m the last man (holding onto a Diners Club card). If there was any doubt at all, the Freddie Awards put an end to it. The card won an amazing 9 straight awards for best loyalty credit card. Last year surprised me, but I imagine there’s often a lag in benefit changes and consumer perception, in other words the card was coasting on its past glory and reputation. This year Diners Club didn’t even garner enough votes (1%) to have their support tallied and reported. The Freddie Awards are a bit of a strange animal, a product has to clear the 1% threshold in votes — not nothing in a contest with over 400,000 voters, but not a huge hurdle — and then…
BA Edits Virgin Atlantic’s Chairman out of Existence
Upgrade Travel Blog breaks news of British Airways pettiness: they’ve edited Richard Branson (of Virgin Atlantic) out of the movie Casino Royale.
The Biggest Travel Risk Abroad
Tyler Cowen points to the biggest travel risk of all, and it isn’t terrorism, disease, or plane crashes… it’s traffic accidents, “the largest cause of nonnatural death among U.S. citizens overseas.” Get a car with functioning seat belts and air bags, and make sure the brakes, lights, and windshield wipers work. And know the local driving customs: “A stop sign is meaningless, or speed limits are meaningless in some countries,” Ms. Sobel said. “If you assume it is safe for people to cross certain streets in some areas of Egypt and Kenya, you are making a potentially fatal mistake.” Ms. Sobel and others advise against driving at night. They also note that headlights are often turned off to save batteries — a false economy since the battery would not drain with the engine running properly…
Airtran Free Flight Certificate Actually Doesn’t Promise… Anything?
Consumerist has the story on an Airtran free flight voucher that can’t be redeemed… because it doesn’t actually promise a free flight? Clearly something else is going on here, like the voucher not being activated somehow, and it thus becomes one of those frustrating endeavors with customer service agents who aren’t empowered to solve problems, where the customer gets caught in a bureaucratic sink hole. Still, it makes for an amusing exchange: When Brett called a customer service representative to redeem the voucher, the story changed. He was told there was no free flight on file for him. Brett writes: I told him I had a voucher, and he said, “but does it actually say you get a flight on it.” I read it carefully and it didn’t. It was deceptively nice and apologetic, and…
