A roundup of 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.
Airlines are going to new great lengths to avoid involuntarily denying boarding to passengers — selling more tickets than there are seats and then not having enough volunteers to take a later flight for compensation when more passengers than expected show up. Some airlines are overbooking less. Others are paying out more compensation to get more passengers to volunteer to give up their seats.
We’ve seen stories about Delta giving a passenger $4000 in travel vouchers for agreeing to take a later flight and United giving out $10,000. American’s Day of Departure Desk will also authorize substantially more compensation than before.
Hyatt used to offer lucrative property-specific bonuses of 500 to 2000 points per night. These were colloquially referred to as ‘G bonuses’ because of the bonus codes attached to them. Combined with whatever promotion Hyatt was running (Faster Free Nights) and the fact that Hyatt used to give 2500 bonus points per night at properties whose club lounges were closed on the weekend meant that the old Gold Passport program was super lucrative, indeed.
We haven’t seen much in the way of property-specific bonuses in the past 8 years, but those are back for hotels that are brand new to Hyatt. And there’s a new 50% rebate on Hyatt’s most expensive redemptions.
American Express is running a 30% bonus on transfers to Virgin Atlantic through July 1. You have to log in to see the bonus.
Virgin’s miles are fantastic for ANA and Delta redemptions. However I’d only make the transfer to redeem a specific award, rather than doing to preemptively or viewing the program as a store of value.
While Korean Air’s first class lags in quality behind many other Asian carriers, I’ve especially liked that I could fly to Asia in first class and connect onward in first class as well because much of their intra-Asia route network offered a first class cabin. That’s being scaled back.
Over the summer I reported a rumor that Etihad was in talks to join Star Alliance. That rumor heated up substantially in February.
Etihad is now joining Air Canada’s Aeroplan as an earning member
Over 11 months ago Delta announced that they would fly to India. They did not say when it would happen, or the route they’d fly. And then.. crickets.
Now, finally, Delta has announced that they will fly New York JFK – Mumbai starting December 22, over a year and a half after they announced they would fly to India again. The service will be operated by Boeing 777-200LR aircraft.
Earlier today British Airways declared that they are planning to devalue their partner award chart effective May 30 but declared that they wouldn’t tell us what the new prices would be.
Apparently, however, prices are actually loaded into BA systems.
A roundup of 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.
Some people have made truly gluttonous use of Priority Pass lounge access like bringing 19 guests into a lounge in Quito, Ecuador and bringing 35 guests into a single lounge with just one Priority Pass card in Kigali, Rwanda.
Now that you can use Priority Pass cards to get $28 credits at a variety of airport restaurants around the world you can do a lot of eating for free.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
