I’ve written in the past that the frequent flyer program you should use depends on where you want to go. While I have opinions about ‘which program is best’ no single program is best for every destination. There are certainly some off the beaten path programs that are best for some travelers in some situations. But most of the time when people come to me looking for help booking their award tickets, they already have their miles saved up and want to make the most of those miles. Since I often say that the best strategy is to earn miles, use them up quickly rather than saving them for a far-off distant future, and then earn some more I think it’s a great idea to find the best uses of your miles now, travel, and…
Netflix American AAdvantage Signup Bonus Ends November 14
Netflix will no longer be a partner of American AAdvantage effective November 15. November 14 is the last day to earn a 2500 American Airlines mile signup bonus. The offer is available to new subscribers only, and miles take 8-10 weeks to post (during which time you’re paying for monthly service, until you cancel). You can still earn 4000 United miles with a Netflix signup — 2000 for the signup and 2000 for paying with a MileagePlus Visa. Or just a flat 3000 United miles. I do not know whether the end of the Netflix-American relationship signals that they will stop awarding miles in frequent flyer programs to acquire new customers in general, and whether we’ll be seeing a similar end to the United offers soon, or whether the change is contained to their American…
Tracking Missing Miles and Making Sure You Get All the Points That Are Due to You
Back in July Singapore Airlines made tons of first class awards available to their partners. Given Singapore’s history, and even though they’ve been making plenty more first class awards on their Boeing 77W aircraft available to their own members, this was pretty clearly at the time not intentional. And it was short-lived. I booked a whole bunch of tickets, not knowing which ones I would have use for or when I would be able to actually take the trips. Fortunately I had a fairly hefty United mileage balance which allowed me to do that (and a hefty Chase Ultimate Rewards balance I could have made instant transfers from in order to supplement that balance had I needed it). While I made about a million miles worth of bookings, in the end I will only use…
Making the Most of Skypesos: Aeroflot Award Space is богатый (Plentiful)
Despite my many beefs with the Delta Skymiles program, I do my best to identify ways that those miles can be used as productively as possible. Some Skymiles Award Challenges You can’t use Skymiles for one-way awards without paying the roundtrip price (but if you must fly one-way at the ‘high’ level on Delta aircraft, don’t just book a one-way — book a one-way high, and return at the low level for whatever date that is available, it will bring down the price of your one way to the average of high and low, rather than the roundtrip high price). And you can’t use Skymiles for international first class awards. But with their airline partners especially, if you know where to look, you can get good international business class availability to get most anywhere. Great…
$300+ Alitalia Discount is Gone But 25% Off Any Alitalia Ticket Remains
Yesterday’s ~ $320 discount for any bookings made on Alitalia’s Japanese website is dead. Plenty of folks booked US – Europe for under $300 per person, and intra-Europe tickets for free. The free intra-Europe tickets in particular we don’t know whether they will be honored yet. There’s still a 25% discount on all Alitalia flights bookable via the US website. I thought that there might be a better deal available for sub-$500 tickets, MileValue posted this morning a $129 per ticket discount from the promo.alitalia.com/russia website — a discount of 4000 Rubles. My Russian isn’t very good (it’s been a long time since I was a Cold War spy). Fortunately, Google Chrome translates for me. But when I managed to pull up the promo itself, I found new language that wasn’t there a few hours…
$320 Off Alitalia Flights (Free Flights Within Europe, Cheap Flights To Europe!)
Alitalia has a coupon code PROMOJP worth approximately $320 off most flights. You have to: Book by October 26th (but I do not expect it to last that long because it is too good) Travel between November 5 and March 7 (but December 20 – January 6 travel is blacked out) Book on Alitalia’s Japan website, entering the promo code in the E-Coupon field at checkout The promo code is good for 25,000 Japanese Yen. It works anywhere that Alitalia flies, lots of folks are getting excited over the possibility of booking tickets within Europe because many of those only cost about that much. Some tickets are being issued that are free. I have no idea whether those will ultimately be honored or not. Others will find it more useful to fly from the US…
American’s Flights are Back on Schedule, their Pilots Are Negotiating… but Delusional
A month ago, American’s pilots began faking sick to cancel flights, and ginning up last minute maintenance requests and engaging in other tactics to delay flights as well. When they were the only work group not to come to agreement on a new labor agreement with the airline, voting down the offer that their union brought to them (and leading to an ouster of the union’s leadership), the bankruptcy court went forward allowing American to impose new terms. The pilots are back at the bargaining table. American has proactively reduced its schedule. And the cancellations have stopped. Yesterday, for instance, there were only three cancellations across the entire American Airlines route network. On time performance has hovered around 70% — much better but still below average. This past week the pilot’s union even began talking…
Delta Brings Back Air France Business Class Awards and Eliminates Some Fuel Surcharges
Quietly and against all conventional wisdom Delta has been making some positive changes to their frequent flyer program and to their website used to search for award space. Back in May they added searching for Virgin Australia award space to their website. Virgin Australia offers better award availability than anyone else between the US and Australia (without connecting in Asia), and exceptionally so on their Los Angeles – Brisbane flight. It’s a good business class seat, too, often available in prime holiday season as well. Delta also stopped billing fuel surcharges on these awards. Do not rely on Delta’s award calendar to find the space, search it day by day for the dates you are interested in. About a week ago Delta began allowing Korean Air awards to be searched at Delta.com. That’s huge because…
Dr. StrangeJeff: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About SkyPesos Becoming Revenue-Based
Airlines like to move in lockstep with each other. Their frequent flyer programs are for the most part pretty conservative, which is why I’ve been surprised at the seeming willingness of some of them to potentially scrap their business model — which is currently very profitable — in favor of a new, more speculative one in the form of a revenue-based frequent flyer program. Programs keep up with what their competition is doing, American launched their frequent flyer program and days later United introduced theirs. One introduces bonus miles on a route and another follows. Same for double elite qualifying miles at least when programs making such an offer compete head-to-head. They blame each other as well: when one program raises their award chart prices the will often point to the changes made by their…
25% Off Alitalia Flights
They’ve been frequently running 15% off flash sales, those used to even work when booking Delta through the Alitalia website but that little trick went away in the last round. This is the first time I’ve seen the discount at 25% Off though. E-Coupon SPECIAL will take 25% off Alitalia flights booked by October 26th for travel between November 5 and March 27. (December 20 through January 6 are blacked out for this offer.) The promo code page linked above is unlocked here by entering an email address, for those curious. (HT: Dan’s Deals)
