Earlier in the month I surveyed the various hotel programs and their ability to get you into suites and upgraded rooms using points, not just status. The two best programs for this are Starwood Preferred Guest and Hyatt Gold Passport. In fact, Hyatt is insanely generous. If you’ll book the ‘Hyatt Daily Rate’ then you can confirm a suite, at time of booking, for up to four nights, for just 6000 points. I asked a bit later, why ever stay in a regular room at Hyatt? Here’s how much more generous Hyatt is with suite upgrades (with points, available even to general non-elite members) than the second best program for suites, Starwood: [W]hile a hotel like the Westin Tokyo will cost an extra 20,000 Starpoints per night for a suite, confirmed only five nights in…
Retailers Can Charge Consumers More to Pay With Credit Cards Starting Tomorrow — And Why It’s Much Ado About Little
There have been tons of stories the past couple of days, across television and all sorts of media, about credit card processing fees starting tomorrow. Except, the scary headlines don’t match the reality. We’ll see very few changes tomorrow. This all stems from a settlement reached between retailers and Visa and Mastercard this past summer which will allow retailers to add a surcharge to Visa and Mastercard transactions. But most won’t because in many cases the surcharges are worth it to the retailer: companies get money right away, deposited straight into their account when processing credit cards, and without the risk that a check bounces; consumers paying by credit card tend to spend more money per transaction; credit card transactions also reduce the likelihood of employee theft significantly compared to cash transactions. And the charges…
150 Free Miles Per Hotel Review You Write
Malta Points ‘points’ out that HolidayCheck will give you 150 free Air Baltic BalticMiles for each hotel review you write. It appears that the reviews you write do get screened, so they need to be real and materially of a similar quality or better than those of other reviews on the site. No scripted gibberish for generating free miles. 😛 Over the summer I had a throwaway line about Air Baltic BalticMiles (saying they’re worth more than SkyPesos), and the head of the program chimed in to suggest that BalticMiles are worth way more than that.. I think it is time we get you over to Riga, Latvia to change your perception of the airBaltic BalticMiles value One-way awards in the Air Baltic program start at 4200 miles, and the airline partners with SAS so…
Bits ‘n Pieces for January 25, 2013
News and notes from around the interweb: Delta has now commented on my blog about the targeting data they collect on customers and its display through their website when members were logged into their frequent flyer accounts. Like many companies, Delta uses demographic and other data to help provide a personalized experience for our customers, improve how we communicate with them and design offers customized to their interests. While the data displayed was only available to the specific user, we sincerely regret that this code displayed and the confusion it may have caused for our customers. We worked to resolve the issue promptly upon discovering it. When American released their new aircraft livery and logo last week, I said we’d be learning about new uniforms a week later. And indeed, American has tapped KAUFMANFRANCO to…
Amazing Delta Business Class Fares to Istanbul and Moscow
Rob points me to the ‘Good Deal Premium Cabin Fares’ thread on Flyertalk, where we find that Delta is running a pretty amazing business class sale on some transatlantic routes. Probably the easiest place to find seats to purchase is Kayak.com, where you’ll be transported to the Delta website. Using ITA Software I searched for Delta flights in business class between New York JFK and Istanbul, and set the trip length from 6-9 days, looking at flights in May and came up with the following calendar: That was before I looked up fare rules, even, and found that there are several cheap business class fares ranging from $978 – $1293 plus taxes which have varying rules such as 14 and 21 day advance purchase requirements, some have 7 or 10 day minimum stay rules. Here’s…
Look Up The Creepy Data Mining Profile that Delta Keeps On You
Loyalty Lobby highlights that Delta — like many major companies — engages with a data firm to assist them in analyzing their customers, assigning value to those customers, and targeting them for offers. But unlike some companies, Delta isn’t very good with IT (witness: their broken award calendar, broken online award pricing engine). And so they have their consumer profile data online for you to see. Since this is getting a bit of buzz at the moment, they’re likely to prioritize pulling down this information, so if you’re curious what Delta’s analytics folks know about you, you may want to have a look sooner rather than later. Log into your Skymiles account. Navigate to https://www.delta.com/databroker/bcdata.action in the same browser You’ll get a bunch of data in a long string, copy and paste it into a…
What Would the Frequent Flyer Program Look Like if American and US Airways Merge?
I’ve been getting tons of questions about what happens to frequent flyer miles in a merger between American and US Airways, and what to expect from the various elite and upgrade programs that the two airlines offer if they combine. And the answer of course is that for the most part we don’t know. But there are plenty of things we can make fairly educated guesses about. To be clear, my predictions are just that — guesses about the future — rather than leaks of plans that have been made by any of the parties to a potential merger. I imagine that there haven’t even been any decisions made as yet, since until and unless a merger actually happens the two airlines remain competitors and I doubt that they are working through the nuances of…
American Adding 53 Large Regional Jets With First Class and Main Cabin Extra
American Airlines is going outside of their American Eagle subsidiary to increase regional jet flying. They have a new 12-year agreement with Republic Airlines for 53 76-seat Embraer-175 planes. (The new pilots union contract lets them grow the regional fleet in this manner.) Republic currently flies 15 Embraer-140 planes for American out of Chicago as Chautauqua Airlines. The new larger regional jets will be coming into service 2-3 per month starting in the middle of the year and fully deployed by the first quarter of 2015. American currently deploys its Embraers with coach seating only, and Bombardier CRJ-700s which could otherwise fit 70 coach seats as 54 coach and 9 in first class. These larger ERJ175s will have 12 first class seats and 64 coach seats and will be painted with the new American Eagle…
A Better Way to Spend a Million Starpoints
About a month ago Starwood released some statistics on their program from 2012, perhaps what got the most attention was that a member was stupid enough to spend 870,000 Starpoints for 2 business class tickets to Italy. Why is this stupid? Because even if they don’t want to worry about availability, they could have spent double miles to buy out of capacity controls through Alitalia’s frequent flyer program — 400,000 Alitalia miles would have gotten them 2 Los Angeles – Rome business class roundtrip tickets out of much broader inventory than saver awards. So 320,000 Starpoints transferred to Alitalia would have been enough, and again that’s without even looking for saver awards that they could have ‘saved’ 550,000 Starpoints. For folks with more Starpoints than sense, looking to burn through their balance (perhaps bitter over…
The Ultimate Do You Know Who I Am Checkin Accessory
Reader gbw passes along this LA Times story on what looks to be the ultimate addition to the ‘Do You Know Who I Am’ toolkit: ReviewerCard. They’ll sell you a card that certifies you write online reviews, and you can use that card to signal to service providers — hotels, restaurants, what have you — that you’re likely to write a review about them so they’d better treat you well. Granted, that’s not how Newman, 35, would put it. He sees ReviewerCard as a way to enhance the relationship between amateur reviewers and the hotels or restaurants they visit. “I’m going to review them anyway,” Newman said, “so why not let them know in advance? It’s not hurting anyone.” …”It’s not a threat,” Newman insisted. “It’s a way to get the service you deserve.” …Thus…
