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)
And Now for a Little Bit of Friday (Credit Card Churning Geek) Humor
About a year and a half ago I posted about leveraging credit card signup bonuses. If it’s a great deal to get a 100,000 mile signup bonus card, why not get 5? Or 10? Sure, unless you’re Dan’s Deals himself, you may not get approved for four Starwood Preferred Guest American Express cards at the same time using the four browser ‘trick’ (submitting four applications simultaneously). But I passed along the controversial suggestion that it would be possible to corral all of your family and friends into getting the cards. You meet the minimum spend, pay off the cards, and you keep the account numbers and passwords to redeem miles later. Points Envy takes this strategy to a whole other level: why stop at people who are alive? Getting your family members involved in the…
It’s Not the Crime it’s the Coverup: Wyndham Rewards Changes Offer Details, Not Wanting to Offer 16,000 Bonus Point Promo
On Wednesday I wrote about a Wyndham Rewards offer that allowed members to earn 16,000 bonus points per stay at several new Wyndham hotels. That’s especially attractive because there are several inexpensive new hotels, where the bonus points are worth well more than the cost of the rooms (either to redeem for other hotels, or to transfer to airline miles). And since Wyndham Rewards permits points earning even when members don’t show up for the stay (if you pay for the room, you earn points for it), it was convenient for plenty of people to make reservations without actually having to check-in. Wyndham made a similar offer earlier on that was targeted, the rules said you had to receive an email invitation in order to participate although it seemed as though most folks subscribed to…
Are Delta, US Airways, and Alaska Airlines the Most Likely to Switch to a Revenue-Based Program? And What About Our Current Mileage Balances?
Yesterday I wrote about revenue-based programs and how I think it’s likely that Delta will change it’s frequent flyer program to align both earning miles and the cost of redemption with the price of airline tickets — and how I think that revenue-based programs are bad for both travelers and for the frequent flyer programs themselves. Joe Brancatelli also expects to see a revenue-based program next year — on one or more of Delta, US Airways, and Alaska Airlines. I had written about the speculation of US Airways in addition to that of Delta in the past. I hadn’t seen it written about Alaska Airlines previously, although now that I’ve seen that speculation it resonates as at least plausible (more so than if the speculation were about, say, American AAdvantage for sure). I’d have put…
