Starwood has a new co-brand credit card partnership. They’ve just launched the Emirates NBD Starwood Preferred Guest® World MasterCard® that comes with up to 50,000 points as a signup bonus plus automatic Gold status.
I recently needed to stay in the Denver Tech Center area, and settled on staying at the Sheraton. I actually burned 3 Platinum ‘Suite Night Awards’ at the property and was pleasantly surprised.
There are two principles that were at play: Sheratons in the U.S. are hugely inconsistent, and Starwood’s Suite Night Awards, which confirm an upgrade up to 5 days in advance of a stay, are tough to use.
Now that the customer-facing part of US Airways has been integrated into American Airlines, the big question is what comes next?
American Airlines President Scott Kirby has said that integration needed to happen before they could make other changes.
Austin has had several new hotel developments recently, like Hotel Van Zandt (Kimpton) and the JW Marriott with its The Corner bar and its Burger Bar window. But the one I’ve been most intrigued by is the Westin Downtown.
That’s because it’s right smack in the middle of the music and bar scene, on the edge of Dirty 6th — a great downtown location for music and the bar scene, though I was curious how they’d handle the noise.
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.
British Airways is offering 40% off economy awards originating in London (although it apparently works from other cities in the UK as well) booked by November 2 for travel through March 20 to a variety of destinations.
Since you still pay full taxes, including exorbitant fuel surcharges, this isn’t as great a deal as it might seem. You’ll often pay a substantial portion of what an economy ticket would cost without the availability of a paid ticket and without earning miles. However this can be especially valuable for:
Aer Lingus flight EI485, an Airbus A320 from Lisbon to Dublin, diverted to Cork, Ireland this evening after a 24 year old bit another passenger about an hour into the trip.
The man was restrained. He became “unwell and then fell unconscious.”
Canadian airline WestJet has a new Frozen-themed Boeing 737 featuring Anna, Elsa and Olaf. With the airline headquartered in Calgary, that seems somehow appropriate.
The aircraft’s tail shows Anna and Elsa ‘celebrating sisterhood and the magic of snow.’ The interior of the plane moves from cold to warm, back to front, mimicking the outside of the aircraft.
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.
Best can mean a lot of things. There are pure quality metrics, and we can debate those. But Starwood has done something interesting in coming up with a list of bests as deemed by Starwood Preferred Guest members which is to say that they are the hotels that best satisfy members and meet their needs (which is going to incorporate quality but also convenience of location and price point).
It’s an interesting methodology: What they did is they took the hotels with the highest customer survey ratings (“Guest Experience Index”), the best ratings and reviews on the Starwood website, and the most award nights redeemed. These three categories were evenly weighted, though they removed the properties that had low scores on customer surveys and online reviews, so ultimately removed several frequently redeemed-for hotels.
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 »
