It’s the one year anniversary of the gutting of the British Airways frequent flyer program, and Avios is celebrating with a 25% discount on long haul redemptions originating in London, for six days beginning on November 14th. Full details of the sale aren’t online yet but it appears that it will be available through the British Airways, Iberia, and Avios websites and will apply to long haul travel in any class of service through May 2013. US frequent flyers fear not, you get a 30% bonus on transfers of American Express Membership Rewards to British Airways Avios starting next month. (HT: Head for Points)
Keeping Up Live with the Star MegaDO
Mommy Points is blogging the Star MegaDO. Sadly, I’ve blogged it in the past but have a conflict that prevvents me from joining the fun. They’re on the ‘optional transatlantic’ portion of the trip now in Zurich. They fly to San Francisco tomorrow, and then charter a United widebody to Houston (where they’ll have a barbecue at the airport) and then to Chicago where among other things they’ll meet with United’s CEO. She passes along some posts from the MegaDO blog, where you can read about the ultimate frequent flyer adventure as it happens. A LAX send-off from the Star Alliance Lounge A glimpse of what the Lufthansa overnight flight from LAX-FRA was like with 100 Mega Do fanatics on-board Our arrival ceremony in the new A-Plus Pier at Frankfurt, including some remarks by the Star…
Instant Accor Hotels Platinum Status Available… in English
Last week I wrote about I wrote about instant Le Club Accorhotels Platinum status, just for signing up. There’s a Dutch landing page for the offer and the form is in Dutch, I figured no big deal since Google Chrome does instant translation. A week later this one is still working, and Steve in the comments notes that the landing page brings you to a form where you can simple change the language in the URL, and you can sign up for instant platinum status in English. (Thanks for the tip, Steve!) As always, you must open a new account, it cannot be applied to existing accounts. And when you do so you must use an email address that’s not currently on file with them. That can even be a gmail account where you add…
Why Are Seatbelts Required on Airplanes?
In reaction to Michael O’Leary once again talking about standing inflight in order to squeeze more passengers onto a plane, Garett Jones tweets, What argument do defenders of government-mandated airline seatbelt paternalism use? It can’t be that plane crashes aren’t salient to buyers. Of course it’s not even obvious that Michael O’Leary’s RyanAir really wants stand up aircraft. They want to talk about standing up on planes, because it signals that they do everything possible to offer a cheap product, and it gets free coverage of that meme. Just like every so often he talks about charging to use the lavatories. Nonetheless, Jones asks a good question. Why do we have to use seatbelts on planes? I’m not talking about why seatbelts are provided, I think they are really helpful. Anyone who has been through…
30% Bonus Coming on Transfers from Membership Rewards to British Airways
Last week the American Express Membership Rewards website was briefly showing a 30% transfer bonus that wasn’t going to go live for a month. What’s odd is that the Membership Rewards website never shows future bonuses, at least I haven’t seen it, so I assumed it was a glitch. And indeed the information was pulled off the site quickly. If you go to the page for the US American Express Membership Rewards program’s partnership with British Airways, no bonus appears. I was curious, so I got in touch with American Express. At first they were as perplexed as I was, but after a little bit of digging got back to let me know that indeed there would be a 30% transfer bonus coming down the pike. Specifically, the 30% bonus will start on December 3…
Does Delta’s New Website Reveal that a New Revenue-Based Skymiles Program is Coming Soon?
Delta has been rumored to be introducing a new, revenue-based frequent flyer program since March. An internal document on the potential program was leaked, and ever since then the frequent flyer community has been waiting for Skypesos armageddon. The rumors heated up last month. My own prediction has been that Delta announces the program in 2013 and introduces it for 2014 (even though they have a history of making changes with no notice whatsoever, it’s hard to imagine this one is done without a rollout). And by ‘this one’ we don’t yet know what it is. And I’ve decided not to worry about it for my own travels. There are plenty of frequent flyer programs in the world, I like the Flying Blue and Korean Air programs within Skyteam better anyway (largely but not exclusively…
Bank of America Worldpoints Eliminating Their Best Redemption Option on January 31
Bank of America Worldpoints offered one and only one redemption option of reasonable value per point — transfers to Aeroplan. With the right card you could earn 2 Aeroplan points per dollar. Unfortunately it appears that this option will be ending on January 31. You will still, however, be able to hire an Elvis impersonator for about 17,000 points. Or redeem for 2-D glasses, a spermbike, a McWedding, or even ice cream made from breast milk if you must.
Rumors of Bluebird and Vanilla’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated
Several commenters have mentioned here on the blog, several folks have e-mailed me today, and I’ve also checked over at my local Office Depot which had Vanilla Reload cards yesterday, but it does seem like Office Depot is withdrawing those cards from sale. Even stores that still had some, many are removing the cards from their shelves. And there’s much hand-wringing and teeth gnashing over it, of course. There’s no question that this was one of the great, albeit short-lived opportunities: to buy money with a credit card, earn points, and use that money to pay off the credit card. It was the U.S. Mint (buying coins by credit card, depositing the coins, paying off the credit card) without the hassle of physical coins which were heavy and required transporting. Except… even if Office Depot…
How Google Could Become Your New Travel Agent, if Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity Can’t Get The Government to Stop Them
The Federal Trade Commission has been investigating Google for 18 months and is apparently close to a decision. The allegations, while generally about their search practices, whether they’re a monopoly, and whether they ‘unfairly’ use their search engine to benefit their own complementary businesses versus directing traffic to other companies (and implicitly whether there is a ‘right’ to traffic on the part of those businesses, and whether Google should be thought of as a public utility), are in many ways about how Google has entered the travel space and how they are trying to transform the future of online travel. The FTC has focused on claims that Google’s search results have emphasized its own products, such as online shopping or travel services, while giving less prominence to smaller competitors in those fields. I do start…
Minimum Spend is No Longer an Issue for Credit Card Signup Bonuses
The advent of the American Express Bluebird card has been a huge development for frequent flyers in the miles and points game. It’s a product for the ‘unbanked’, American Express has partnered with Walmart and that should provide insight into the target market for the product. It’s a prepaid American Express card (for folks who aren’t getting credit cards) combined with an online bank account — it holds money, accepts direct deposit, and allows you to pay bills by check through its bill pay system. And you can even withdraw funds from an ATM machine. The key feature though is the ability load funds into the account by buying Vanilla reload cards with a credit card. You’re basically buying money with a credit card for a fee of $3.95 per $500 card. And then you…
