A new blog with promise, Heels First Travel, describes using a Starwood award night for a day room by the Charlotte airport during a 6 hour layover. I’m a fan of this exact thing, back in August during some terrible storms my flight back home from Florida was cancelled and US Airways was offering me travel only two days later. I finally constructed a three-segment 12 hour travel day that included several hours in Raleigh, rather than killing time at the airport I grabbed a few hours at the Four Points and was far more comfortable. Heels First created the long layover to start an international award ticket. Sometimes you want to get to your international gateway city with plenty of space to cover for delays and cancellations, if you miss that international flight it…
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Reader Question: Fuel Surcharges
Caraline writes: BRITISH Air charged me just this week over 400.00 in fuel charges for an American Air flight from Boston to Paris. My friend who booked the same flight on American did not have a fuel surcharge. We both used our frequent flier miles. Something is wrong. What can be done. I wanted to be on same flight as friend so I booked it. BA said no fuel charges on domestic flights or flights to far east. I used 45000 miles and still had to pay 601.00 in total. My friend only had to pay 87.00 On domestic awards inside the U.S., frequent flyer programs like American’s and United’s will only charge you the $2.50 per segment (not to exceed $10 roundtrip) “September 11th Security Fee.” Until 10 years ago domestic awards really were…
Best Deals Around the Blogs for January 24, 2012
One Mile at a Time tells you how to get a 20% off coupon code for Virgin America. Mommy Points has a roundtip of the best mileage offers for flower purchases, it’s almost Valentine’s Day fellas! And there’s 40 Delta miles per dollar from 1-800-Flowers and 30 United miles per dollar with FTD. At 40 miles per dollar you’re basically buying miles and getting flowers for free (though delivery charges don’t earn miles, so the deal isn’t ever quite as good on a straight mileage purchase as it initially seems, but it’s still a good deal since you do also get flowers…). Yesterday Frugal Travel Guy pointed out that JetSetter is offering some deep discounts on the Peninsula New York. I actually emailed Lucky from the One Mile at a Time blog on Sunday saying…
Priority Club to Improve Points Earning at Intercontinental Hotel Properties in North America
New Girl in the Air reports that starting February 15, Priority Club is changing its points earning structure for Intercontinental Hotel properties in North America — offering 10 points per dollar (like at Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza hotels) rather than the current fixed 2000 points per stay. Folks currently spending less than $200 on a stay at an Intercontinental (which is certainly possible for a night in Cleveland or Tampa for instance!) will earn a bit fewer points. But the pricier Intercontinental properties, and those with longer stays, will certainly earn more points. The change doesn’t apply in Europe or Asia Pacific, just North America. And it doesn’t apply to Affiliate Resorts (Venetian). While this is a positive change — it’s always been strange that Priority Club has been so tight-fisted with points at…
American Miles Becoming Increasing Valuable for Aspirational First Class Award Redemptions, While Star Alliance Programs Become Harder to Use
If you want business class all over the world, it’s hard to beat Star Alliance (although American miles, and oneworld, have Star beat for North America to South America by a wide margin – great availability on both American and on LAN). But if you want first class awards, departing from North America, Star (e.g. United/Continental and US Airways) has really fallen down several notches while American Airlines miles have gotten more useful. Star Alliance used to be my go to, all over the world, but recently it’s been much much more difficult to get first class awards departing the U.S.: Singapore Airlines used to be hard, but possible, usually just for a single seat at a time. Now that they no longer serve any U.S. routes with the old first class on the 747,…
How to Use Hidden City and Throwaway Ticketing to Save Money on Airfare
Airlines often price tickets from one city to another through a hub cheaper than flights that terminate at the hub. That’s because there may be more competition between the two cities that are cheaper. And this presents an opportunity called “hidden city ticketing” — you buy the flight to the cheaper destination, connecting where you really want to go, and just get off the plane at your ‘true’ arrival point. (Throwing away the final segment, throwaway ticketing.) For those who think I’m somehow breaking secret ground here, the post was actually inspired by a recent useful thread on Milepoint and even further I’d note that Nate Silver wrote this up in some detail in the New York Times back in May. Here’s Silver’s explanation: Passengers flying to or from airports that are dominated by a…
Credit Card Usage Strategy for Someone Who Isn’t a High Spender
In response to Tuesday’s post laying out my personal credit card spending strategy for 2012, reader Andrew writes: Gary, can you please write a post laying out a credit card strategy for those of us who don’t spend mega dollars in a year? Even with some reimbursable business spend, I’m probably not going to spend more than 50K this year, and it seems silly to split up that spending across, at minimum, three cards (as you suggest). Getting 15,000 or 20,000 points per card per year isn’t getting my wife and I closer to award travel very quickly. I replied briefly in the comments, but will share my take on this as well. My post was about my own personal situation which I described, and I absolutely recognize that it doesn’t apply to plenty of…
Don’t Forget to Add a Segment to the End of American AAdvantage Award Bookings
American Airlines and partner awards don’t allow ‘free’ stopovers (visiting an extra city along the way) except at the North American gateway city. Many airlines will let you stop over, say, in Tokyo on the way to Hong Kong or Bangkok. American Airlines will charge extra miles for this. (Unless you are using one of their distance-based oneworld awards which require flying two oneworld airlines other than American, which permit no changes to routing after issuance, and which do not allow flying on non-oneworld airlines.) The exception is that you can stopover in whatever North American city you leave the country from, or first return to. If you live in New York, you can fly New York – Tokyo – Singapore on Japan Airlines, come back Singapore – Hong Kong – New York. And you…
Award Booking Tip: Placing Award Reservations on Hold
Though I have an upcoming trip to the Maldives, I don’t have a ton of exciting travel to look forward to beyond that, at least exciting by the standard of flying international first class on a premium airline to an exotic destination, hopefully one I haven’t been to before. So this weekend I decided to start playing around with future trips. First I put an award on hold to the United Arab Emirates — American miles to fly Etihad first class (suites with doors!) to Abu Dhabi, then a business class hop over to Delhi and back, the though was to stay either at the Park Hyatt Abu Dhabi and/or Park Hyatt Dubai while in the U.A.E. I wasn’t sure if that especially appealed, but the ability to hold the award without committing was nice.…
Planning for Star MegaDO 4 Has Begun!
With the first ever oneworld MegaDO just around the corner, which I’ll be blogging and am super thrilled about — an aviation-enthusiast’s dream of inside operations with American in Dallas, Boeing in Seattle, and other oneworld carriers in Los Angeles all connected by a chartered 757 party plane — it’s actually time to start the thinking, planning, and scheming for future trips. Now, for those unfamiliar, a group of frequent flyers first got together and chartered a plane and set up tours and activities with some Star Alliance airlines, enthusiasts and loyal customers that the airlines decided to pay attention to. There were crazy moments like pillow fights gone viral on YouTube and sliding down an evacuation slide in Europe. The media quickly started paying attention, there was a feature article in Conde Nast and…
