The new World of Hyatt program was a change to elite qualification and benefits, not really a change to earn and burn. And a year into that program there’s certainly some consternation, and there’s new leadership running loyalty at Hyatt.
In spite of record hotel occupancy Hyatt is tweaking very little for earn and burn, moving only 9 hotels up or down in category (8 up, 1 down).
I do as much of my shopping online as possible to earn shopping portal bonuses, you go online and click a link to a store to earn a rebate for the purchases you’ll make anyway. There are other ways to do this of course, for instance the MileagePlus X app lets you earn United miles for in-store purchases at participating merchants. But online is generally best.
Several times during the year however there will be bonuses that each of the major shopping portal offers. Want to know why they all have similar offers around the same time? Here’s some of the inner workings of mileage-earning shopping portals.
A woman sitting in the bulkhead on Southwest Airlines flight WN2943 from Portland to Sacramento on Saturday was caught smoking. The woman had tampered with the smoke detector on the lavatory.
Pro-Brexit forces in the UK have nearly completely folded in coming up with a transition deal.
The ‘win’ was saying they’d leave the EU, but in practice it won’t happen for many years (and the transition period could always get extended) while in the meantime they’re going to pay the EU, subject themselves to European regulation, and get a trade agreement.
Lufthansa has announced that the Miles & More program will move to revenue-based earning effective with tickets purchased March 12 onward.
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.
The Wall Street Journal is covering Chase’s hire of Matthew Massaua from Barclaycard to run the Sapphire Reserve product. Matt ran partnerships for Barclaycard, and is universally well-regarded.
Marriott will give you 1000 points for answering a simple question on Twitter.
And here’s the answer.
We used to think of miles as worth 2 cents apiece. That was a simplistic calculation, 25,000 miles paid for a $500 domestic ticket more or less. The truth is miles with several airlines used to be worth far more than 2 cents apiece. They’d sell you miles for 3.5 cents, and credit card signup bonuses were commonly 5000 miles (if anything at all).
Airlines have so devalued their miles that most aren’t worth anywhere close to 2 cents anymore, although the specific value of each currency varies. As a result, in order to get the same juice in consumer behavior as because, it’s necessary to…
In January the Department of Transportation published a ‘supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking’ on their existing rulemaking docket from 2014 regarding transparency of ancillary fees.
DOT proposed to that fees for first and second checked bag and carry on bag be disclosed “wherever fare and schedule information is provided to consumers” and this would have to be provided “at the first point in a search process where a fare is listed in connection with a specific flight itinerary, adjacent to the fare.”
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 »
