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’s been lots of discussion first about the Citi Prestige card signup bonus likely changing after today, and also about other changes to the product itself.
For instance, I wrote that starting late next July Prestige cardholders will no longer get access to American Airlines lounges.
This is a difficult time for the Turkish people. Erdoğan is a strong man and a disaster who invoked Hitler to justify new powers he seeks in the aftermath of the coup attempt in his country.
While I’m not inclined to make discretionary trips to Turkey now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the huge opportunities for transiting the airport enroute to the many destinations that you can conveniently reach via Istanbul in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
I used to think that miles would always be worth at least a penny. But even that’s not a guarantee. Like most things in US aviation, Delta is at the forefront — including with devaluations.
It’s useful to think of miles as a currency. They’re a proprietary currency with no currency board or independent central bank. And there’s a huge incentive to devalue, to monetize the debt.
Last week I was telling a past award booking client they’d do better using their American Express points to buy flights to Europe they wanted to gift their friends than transfer those points to Delta and redeem an award.
Citibank has posted to the Citi.com website that the Citi Prestige Card will offer access to American Airlines lounges (when flying the airline) until June 20.
That’s 11 months’ notice that the American Airlines lounge access benefit will end, which is reasonable, although hopefully Citibank will proactively communicate this to cardmembers as well as posting it to their website.
The Citi Prestige Card offers 50,000 points after $3000 spend within 3 months. That’s been the strong offer since Citibank increased it last spring.
And now is the time to get the card if you’ve even been on the fence about it. There reporting that the signup bonus for the Citi Prestige Card will be changing tomorrow. I don’t have any direct information on what the new offer will be, but it seems like you’re going to be much happier signing up now than you would be waiting.
The most consumer-unfriendly change ever to a loyalty program has to be when LatinPass became GlobalPass and required people to re-earn the miles in their account with purchases through their shopping portal. But LatinPass hadn’t been attached to a single airline, it was a coalition program.
The most consumer-unfriendly change ever to an airline frequent flyer program wasn’t made by Delta. It was made by United.
On Friday I wrote about United fares between US hub cities and Southeast Asia for less than $500 roundtrip. These fares are still around, and it gets even better.
I noted that you can fly Newark, Chicago, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Houston. So mostly from United hubs, which is unusual, fares like this are almost always used to attack the hubs of other airlines. (For a little more fares are available from other cities as well.)
It turns out you can book an open jaw itinerary for even less — fly into one city and back from another from $355.
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.
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.
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 »
