In the middle of last month updated flight search on their website. That upended the way they display flights for sale. But it also changed award search, too.
No, they didn’t add any new partners for online booking. But they did screw up the award calendar. Limiting your search to American Airlines flights doesn’t actually limit your search to American Airlines flights anymore.
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Last month there were 2 offers of 500 Virgin America miles each for signing up for emails.
Now there’s another one: 500 Elevate points if you sign up for the Virgin Produced newsletter by October 26. That’s easy points worth $11, that should become Alaska Airlines miles if you don’t redeem them first.
Delta announced this evening that Richard Anderson, who stepped down as CEO in May but remained the airline’s Chairman, “has elected to retire as executive chairman effective this date.”
They did not offer any reason.
Wyndham had a crazy day, opening with a really amazing offer that members could redeem all of their Starwood points for charitable donations, and receive 4 Wyndham Rewards points per Starwood point for doing it — plus a status match through 2017.
They pulled the promotion before it even officially started. My biggest concern — other than that they kind of looked like the gang who couldn’t shoot straight — was that people might have already started redeeming their Starwood points for charitable donations and would wind up with nothing from Wyndham to show for it.
Delta is offering discounts on domestic economy awards to and from New York if you book by tomorrow October 12 for travel betwen December 1 and December 20.
Awards start at just 5000 miles. But paid fares are even better…
Back in August United announced new change fees for awards and new limits award stopovers. They eliminated round the world awards as well. This was a devaluation, but — at least based on the announcement — seemed to be in areas where United was more generous than the competition.
It turns out the changes were more draconian than what United announced.
Wyndham offered status matches and to match Starwood account balances with quadruple the points if you donated your full account balance to charity.
About 40 minutes prior to the start of the promotion they announced they wouldn’t be honoring the offer after all.
Delta now offers complimentary domestic upgrades to Silvers on award tickets, a benefit they already provided to higher-tier elites.
This move doesn’t cost Delta anything substantive. Domestic first class seats rarely go out empty. This might help a Delta Silver using their miles domestically on a Saturday regional jet flight in a market where the airline is overscheduled like Seattle.
Arguably the greatest frequent flyer offer ever came in 2002 when the KLM Flying Dutchman program offered not just to match elite status in another frequent flyer program, but also account balances (flights on KLM or partners were required for this). People earned millions of miles from a few flights.
Over the summer JetBlue matched Virgin America point balances with up to 75,000 bonus miles.
But I don’t recall an account balance promotion that was both unlimited (like KLM’s) and that required draining the points in your existing account.
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 »
