This is nearly three years old, I’m not sure how I missed it the first time around.
Bits ‘n Pieces for October 30, 2012
News and notes from around the interweb: As announced on Milepoint, Starwood has finally introduced an Android app. Mommy Points offers great advice to prepare for a child’s first flight. A Jetstar (Qantas low cost subsidiary) crew was taken hostage in Shanghai (Shanghai’d?) by passengers who figured they were getting stranded after a diversion. This even though the airline was providing hotel rooms. Passengers eventually made it to their final destination of Beijing. Wendy Perrin offers advice to plan ahead for the next big storm, you’re in best shape if you’ve got a good travel agent handling things for you; some people benefit from travel insurance (although I only like insuring against the costliest of bad events); you can hire Cranky Concierge to help; and she follows my advice to use online tools to find…
Fly More Places for Fewer Miles: American’s Little-Known Distance-Based Frequent Flyer Awards
Last week I wrote about the best value awards that each US frequent flyer program has to offer, and I noted American’s distance-based awards, frequent flyer tickets that are priced based on the number of miles flown rather than by where you start and where you’re flying to. That chart has some real values, such as the ability to fly business class between the US and Europe for 90,000 miles roundtrip instead of the usual 100,000, the ability to pop around Europe with several extra flights thrown in for 115,000 miles in business class instead of 100,000 miles roundtrip plus another 20,000 miles for each and every additional intra-European flight, and the ability to fly to Australia in business class via Asia (not normally allowed on a single award ticket) for an extra 25,000 miles…
PointsHound: 100 Free Miles in Your Choice of United, Delta, Hawaiian, or Aeromexico
PointsHound is a website that will give you frequent flyer miles for making hotel bookings. They will give you 100 miles just for signing up (this is my referral link — the 100 miles comes from being referred by an existing member, and the referrer only gets points when a new member actually makes a booking through the site — if you’d like feel free to add your own referral link in the comments). You can choose earning miles with United, Delta, Hawaiian, and Aeromexico. And while many websites like TopCashBack and eBates will offer cash back for the hotel bookings you make through the hotel’s own website, PointsHound rebates you in the form of miles and has you book through their own system. The downside to making bookings through third party websites is that…
Frequent Flyers Sue US Airways and Hawaiian Airlines Over 200 Million Miles Uncredited From Shopping Portal Transactions
Last June, one of the most lucrative mileage promotions ever offered big mileage bonuses for purchasing web hosting and storage from a company called easyCGI through the US Airways and Hawaiian Airlines online shopping portals. Back in mid-June, the US Airways mall had an offer from web hosting company EasyCGI for 4,757 miles per purchase. The offer had no restrictions on product specific purchases, length of service or quantity limits. It specifically said there were no restrictions. Now, this didn’t seem like a mistake — there was a similar offer being made through the Hawaiian Airlines shopping mall for 7,269 miles per purchase with no restrictions. But even though the Hawaiian mall was offering more miles, US Airways was the bigger deal — both because US Airways miles have more uses with more partners, and…
Save the Date for the Next Frequent Traveler University
Announced on Milepoint, the next Frequent Traveler University will be held April 26-28 at the Hilton McLean Tysons Corner. Ticketing for the event, and hotel booking at a special rate, will open shortly. But for now I just wanted to make sure the date was out there so that folks could block it off on their calendars. The next Frequent Traveler University will be held at the Sheraton LAX, November 30 – December 2, and is sold out. 400 folks will be attending to talk about frequent flyer miles earning and burning with Ben Schlappig of the One Mile at a Time blog, Frequent Miler, MileValue, Pizza in Motion, Million Mile Secrets, and Wandering Aramean. And talking talking travel with Cranky Flier and representatives of loyalty programs. And the incomparable Randy Petersen. Details on the…
Wyndham Making Good on Their 16,000 Point Bonus Offer
In the middle of the month Wyndham came out with a promotion of 16,000 bonus points with each of the first three stays at a handful of new properties. The crazy value to the promotion was that many of the hotel properties are really inexpensive, and Wyndham Rewards credits no show stays as a matter of policy (most hotels don’t give you the points unless you actually show up). The promo made it possible, for instance, to earn miles in a variety of frequent flyer programs (by transferring Wyndham points) at less than a penny apiece. Wyndham declared that the promotion was targeted, even though the terms and conditions of the offer were clear that all that was necessary to be eligible to participate was to (i) be an active member (ii) book a stay…
American Relaunching Itself as a Premium Airline… and the Challenges of Frontline Service Delivery
While the trend among US airlines has been to cut costs, American has done as much to make investments in their premium products as any US carrier — and has done so throughout their bankruptcy. Now, many of the investments will take several years to come to fruition. But there’s little question that they are working to position themselves as a top end premium carrier worthy of the corporate contracts (where they already have an advantage) and paid high yield traffic (where there’s less competition among US airlines). It’s even tough to keep up with all of the product improvements that have been announced over the past year or so. They’re putting brand new international seats into their aircraft: a new first class seat (which will ultimately be offered only on their 777-300s) and a…
American’s Problems Won’t Be Magically Solved By Merging With US Airways
Cranky Flier has a piece today where he answers a reader asking him whether he’s biased against American Airlines by basically saying no, he isn’t biased, American just does stupid things and needs a merger to save themselves. Go read the piece and decide whether a more correct, Straussian reading of his post is “Yes, I am biased against American.” He begins with a shout-out to American’s achievements in the 1980s: [T]hroughout the 1980s, American was a shining beacon of awesomeness. It had previously effectively invented the computerized reservation system. It was the first to really make a frequent flier program relevant. It perfected the hub and spoke system. And it successfully developed modern revenue management. He cites several big errors made at the same time — acquisitions and hubs that didn’t work out —…
Malaysia Airlines Joining Oneworld on February 1
I have an upcoming trip to Malaysia booked with American AAdvantage miles and have been holding off booking my domestic connecting flight, hoping that I could just add a segment on Malaysia Airlines at no cost (other than for incremental airport taxes). Sadly that isn’t to be. Malaysia Airlines was supposed to join in the second half of 2012. Now word is that their join date will be February 1, 2013. They will be a good addition. And as their oneworld admission approaches, there’s a good chance that their frequent flyer partnership with Delta could come to an end. I expect to much prefer the options provided by American for Malaysia redemption over those that featured in Delta’s Skymiles program — specifically Delta didn’t permit first class redemption and added fuel surcharges to awards on…
