Starwood Partnership With Virgin America Ending January 6, Transfer Points Now

by Gary Leff

Dec 28 2016

When transfers from Starwood to Virgin America briefly disappeared from the Starwood website a week ago it looked like a change without notice, the elimination of a partnership driven by Alaska’s acquisition of Virgin America. After all, it was separately announced that Citibank would lose the ability to transfer points to Virgin America as well.

Fortunately the ability to transfer points to Virgin America return to SPG.com and always remained available by phone. It shouldn’t surprise anyone, of course, that Starwood’s partnership with Virgin America is ending however.

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Over 650 IHG Hotels Will Change Points Prices January 15. And Two-Thirds Get More Expensive (Mostly in the U.S.)

by Gary Leff

skyscrapers in city
Dec 28 2016

IHG Rewards Club has posted a .pdf of hotels that will be changing rewards redemption category on January 15.

About 650 hotels are changing category. Of those, about 75% are going to cost more points to redeem starting January 15th. Two-thirds of the hotels that are changing category are in the U.S. Over 90% of those are going up in category and price.

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American Flight Runs Out of Airsickness Bags, Diverts to Uruguay on Christmas

by Gary Leff

airline cabin
Dec 28 2016

On Christmas Eve, American’s flight from Dallas to Buenos Aires ran into trouble on final approach. As it prepared to land in Buenos Aires, weather forced it to divert to Montevideo.

Turbulence was so bad as the plane tried to land in Buenos Aires initially that perhaps half the passengers on the plane threw up and the aircraft ran out of airsickness bags. And there was reporedly a lightning strike as well.

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The Real Security Threat to Your Travel Reservations

by Gary Leff

Dec 27 2016

When my wife and I were first dating she had a business trip to San Francisco. I confirmed her upgrade on United even though she hadn’t given me the flight number or record locator.

I knew the route she’d be flying, and when she got back, so it was easy to pull up her flight details and get her reservation changed. I used miles — United only charged 10,000 miles back then and no cash co-pay — rather than a confirmed upgrade certificate because those certificates were paper back then and I wanted to surprise her (not hand her a certificate and explain what I was doing).

She told me later that she had to decide whether she thought it was sweet and awesome — or creepy — that I’d altered her reservation without telling her.

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What the Rewards War Means for Bank Costs — and Its Only Just Heating Up

by Gary Leff

lounge
Dec 26 2016

The Financial Times ran a ‘big read’ piece last week on the battle for customers between credit card issuers, and featured my advice getting started with rewards and credit cards.

The piece began with a hypothesis from the author that blogs like this one have helped educate consumers about the value of points, and really compare offerings, so that consumers are much better at discerning differences — and therefore banks are having to really spend more to compete.

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