News and notes from around the interweb: Amtrak Supreme Court Case: We learn interesting things from the Supreme Court’s 9-0 decision in the Amtrak case. Despite being ostensibly a ‘for profit corporation’ it is in fact a government entity. Except in an emergency Amtrak has precedence over freight for use of tracks. Indeed, if a host railroad is at fault for Amtrak’s failure to meet performance standards (as determined by the Surface Transportation Board) then damages can be assessed against the private railroad. That would seem to suggest Amtrak apologists’ complaints about the railroad not getting track priority are pretty well bunk… Buy United Miles Cheaper Than Their 50% Bonus Sale: Mommy Points explains how to buy miles from United at 1.9 cents apiece, a better price than current targeted 50% bonus offers. You walk…
The Craziest Things You Can Do With Your Miles — And Why You Don’t Want to Do Them
IdeaWorks, best known for its fatally flawed annual award availability ‘study’, has a new report (.pdf) on non-travel rewards offered by loyalty programs. (HT: Today in the Sky) The study is sponsored by (and contains a full page ad for) Switchfly, a company that sells merchandise, experiential, and other non-travel rewards platforms to these programs. Unsurprisingly, the report offers non-travel rewards an unabashed thumbs up from its very title: Sure there’s some cool stuff, but the issue to always consider is — at what price?
The Airlines’ Secret Document Making the Case Against Gulf Airlines Has Been Released… and It’s Still Unpersuasive
Now that the airlines’ previously ‘secret documents’ condemning Gulf carrier subsidies have been made public (.pdf), Cranky Flier argues the US carriers have a good case, at least in part. He suggests the case against Emirates is weak, but quite strong against the subsidies received by Qatar and Etihad. He agrees with my position that the US and Gulf airlines really don’t compete directly today. But he believes the potential for future competition, largely on transatlantic routes between the US and Europe, make ‘unfair competition’ worthy of scrutiny
Delta’s Next Transformative Step is Here, Introduces Revenue-Based Upgrades
Since the elimination of award charts from Delta’s website, I’ve been saying that: We won’t know when the airline devalues, since we don’t have an official benchmark to compare pricing to It’s a step towards a revenue-based program, where awards are priced dynamically based on the cost of a ticket at any given time. I’ve suggested that Delta may not adopt a flat rate for their miles, either, charging more or less to different types of customers or at different times. And I’ve wondered… what about upgrades? Delta said we didn’t need charts since their website pricing had gotten so much better. But that spoke to awards and not at all to upgrades. Now we know. Delta has introduced revenue-based upgrades where miles are used to ‘pay the difference’ between your fare and a higher…
Let’s Have Fewer Time Zones and Not Change the Clocks Twice a Year
I just had a call with a Forbes writer in Beirut. She asked for time to talk before we changed our clocks in the U.S. I did get the agreed-upon time right in my calendar, but it took a few minutes to figure it out for sure. It didn’t help that I was in one time zone when I made the appointment and a different time zone entirely when I took the call. Since moving to Austin I’ve continued to live on Eastern time (when I’m home). My work is still on the East Coast. And most frequent flyer news in the US happens on Eastern time, too, though United, American, and Hyatt are headquartered in cities that are on Central time. Sunday’s time change complicates things, as US time changes always do, because of…
Delta Just Announcd Several Changes to the SkyMiles Program for Redemption and Elite Status
Delta has announced several changes that appear at first blush on net positive, although they appear worded to sound better than they are and despite making proactive announcements Delta still fails to explain changes in award availability to restrict most domestic markets to 21 advance purchase for saver awards and changes in terms and conditions that suggest a shift towards revenue-based redemptions coming. Here are the changes:
Americans Carve Their Initials Into the Collosseum, Another Airline Follow’s Spirit’s Path, and More Stories You Have to Read to Believe..
News and notes from around the interweb: What an Uber Driver Needs to Do to Maintain Good Ratings The tourists arrested for taking naked photos inside Cambodian temples have apparently inspired two California women who scratched their initials into the Colosseum in Rome. 5 Travel Rewards Cards You Don’t Want to Have (my piece for USA Today‘s travel site). A Qantas retrospective as the Aussie carrier delivers a 747 to final retirement Hawaiian Airlines is retrofitting 717s to pack in more seats. They don’t recline. And they’ve borrowed a line from Spirit’s marketing playbook, Airline spokeswoman Alison Croyle says even though the new seats do not recline, they are set at a “pre-reclined angle.” Here’s a map of all the planes that have disappeared since 1948 Air New Zealand’s 75th Anniversary Exhibition
What Revenue-Based Elite Status is For, and Why United is Doing it Wrong
Airlines Try to Balance the Number of Elite Flyers With Airline Capacity Back in November I explained how frequent flyer programs manage their elite levels. “Too many elites” is a problem when a program can’t deliver benefits. On the other hand, when elite ranks shrink (usually during bad economic times although also when an airline is going through problems like bankruptcy or a strike) airlines want to goose those numbers — such as with double elite qualifying promotions. In recent times airlines have seen, overall, the problem of too many elites rather than too few. That’s because the economy has been good enough to support increasing air travel, while airlines have maintained capacity discipline — more people flying a whole lot more without a corresponding increase in available seats. This could change with an economic…
Kaligo Makes It Easier to Earn a 10,000 Mile Hotel Booking Bonus — for New And Existing Customers Alike
Last month I wrote about new hotel booking site Kaligo. They’re similar to Rocketmiles and PointsHound in that they kick you back airline miles when you book hotels through their system. At the time they offered readers 1000 extra bonus miles with first booking. Plenty of readers took them up on the bonus. (For avoidance of doubt, they gave me a special booking link to provide this thousand mile bonus — I did not receive anything if you used it.) That offer has ended. However, one of the frustrations that a few people expressed in the comments is that maxing out the standard new customer bonus of ‘up to 10,000 miles’ required making a hotel reservation worth $1000. Kaligo changed things up and for March and April they’re offering the full 10,000 bonus miles when…
What’s Grosser Than Gross? Airline Club Lounge Edition.
No, not the mouse in the United Club at Washington Dulles. Instead, this.
