Premium Citibank ThankYou Rewards cards — like the Citi Prestige Card and Citi ThankYou Premier — let you transfer their points to airline miles and hotel programs.
They’ve just added a new partner: JetBlue. What’s interesting is that Barclaycard’s new deal to issue JetBlue cards didn’t stop this. And that even no annual fee Citi ThankYou cards can transfer to JetBlue which is a first.
SkyTeam member Alitalia has the strangest frequent flyer program in the world. Instead of expiring miles, the program itself used to expire. With each new program every few years you could credit flights to your account to earn back the miles you had.
Now, without notice, the award chart ‘expired’ on Friday and there’s no new published chart. There are reports of awards costing twice as much as before. Hopefully no one took advantage of the current American Express transfer bonus to Alitalia.
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.
United raised the price of its clubs last summer, raised the price of day passes earlier this year (and started refusing access to holders of day passes at some lounges), and restricted paying club members to accessing lounges only when flying same day.
Now United thinks they should charge even more for their lounges.
Hawaiian Airlines is retrofitting its Airbus A330 aircraft with lie flat business class seats. They’ll have three rows of six seats, so only the middle seats have direct aisle access, but it’s generally a good product for Hawaii flying.
The product launched in June, and they’ve been adding US West Coast flights. New international routes will be getting the seats before the end of the year. We’ll see them on Tokyo, Brisbane, and Auckland (December 5) as well as Sydney (December 13.
Sichuan Airlines announced Los Angeles service from Hangzhou, China last week and it starts on Monday. So they haven’t been selling tickets to fill up planes for long.
They’ve got amazing fares now for this new flight with available connections elsewhere in China.
In response to United’s devaluation of how they price awards, several readers want to know what can be done, what I can do about it.
The way airlines are pricing tickets has changed. You can often buy cheap fares at the last minute now. You used to have to buy 14 or 21 days in advance for the lowest fares, and that’s one way airlines separated business from leisure travelers, but ultra low cost carriers like Spirit, Frontier and Allegiant have changed that model and advance purchase alone is no longer a guaranteed way for airlines to charge business travelers more.
You can still get the best airfare deals in advance though (last minute can be a risk). And those last minute deals are especially unlikely to happen around holidays, because planes will be full.
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.
There are some important lessons to be learned from traffic flows. For instance which way traffic went over the Berlin Wall said almost everything you needed to know about socialism.
We’ve got some early indication of which way points are flowing now that members can freely move points between Marriott Rewards and Starwood Preferred Guest at a ratio of 3 Marriott points to 1 Starwood point.
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 »
