The Hilton New Orleans/St. Charles Avenue is available for $5/night prepaid, non-cancellable from July 12 through July 17 or dates inside that period. (It may be available other dates as well, but I haven’t found other periods where the rate is offered, and no other dates have been mentioned in this Flyertalk thread as yet.) All room types including suites appear available at this price. If you book at Hotels.com you can earn a $75 prepaid Mastercard for the booking under this current promo for 4 night or longer stays. As always, you might consider waiting to book airfare to see whether the deal is honored (although sometimes booking airfare can help if you’re negotiating with the hotel to get them to honor the rate). My preference is not to book until they’ve had time…
Delta to Honor Miles Promised By Clear
The demise of Clear security lanes at airports has been much discussed, which is precisely why I’ve remained quiet about it. Of course, it really shouldn’t surprise anyone. The original promise was that Clear would mean basically skipping security (‘trusted traveler’) but the TSA didn’t go forward with that, and it just meant skipping lines (‘reigstered traveler’). But Clear was only in about 20 airports, most of which had elite security lines as well. The market for paying to skip lines was frequent business travelers who essentially got the same thing free from the airlines. In spite of several free trial offers for Clear I never had a desire to go through their process and sign up, it offered virtually no incremental benefit to me. The one piece of the story that does strike me…
Intercontinental Prepaid Summer Offers
TravelZoo has a good compilation of their Intercontinental hotels offers, book by June 29 and rates are prepaid, non-refundable. The full list is on the Intercontinental hotels site. It’s a good time to be a Royal Ambassador member! TravelZoo’s favorites are: U.S. and Canada Tampa: InterContinental Tampa $69 valid Thursday-Sunday, July 1 – Sept. 8 New Orleans: InterContinental New Orleans $79 valid July 1, 10-11, 16-19, 26-31; Aug. 1, 8-31; Sept. 1-7 Toronto: InterContinental Toronto Centre $87(CA$99) valid July 1-31; Sept. 1-3 Atlanta: InterContinental Buckhead Atlanta $99 valid July 1-2, 6-7, 12-14, 17-31; Aug. 1-31; Sept. 1-3, 6-8 New York: InterContinental The Barclay New York $159 valid July 1-31; Aug. 1-23 Caribbean & Mexico Puerto Vallarta: Presidente InterContinental Puerto Vallarta Resort $90 valid July 1-14; Aug. 16 – Sept. 8 (Oceanfront Room) Cancun: Presidente InterContinental Cancun…
500 Virgin Atlantic Bonus Miles for Online Shopping
Virgin Atlantic is promoting its online shopping portal with 500 bonus miles for your first purchase over US$50 or £25. (Hat tip to FFBonuses on Twitter.)
On How to Parse Review Websites and Pick Hotels
On Twitter, USA Today columnist Laura Bly passes along this tweet: laurablyMore choices: control, or confusion? RT@MindlessMuse: Why can’t finding a hotel be easy…so many sites, reviews, opinions. I guess I don’t really have this problem, I know what sources match my travel preferences the best. Once upon a time people would work with a travel agent on these questions. There were good travel agents and bad travel agents, travel agents familiar with the destination or not, travel agents who would push particular providers because of higher kickbacks, and travel agents who happen to understand your travel style and those more suited to other styles (luxury vs. backpacker, and huge gradations in between, different sorts of details matter to different people). True full service agents offering actual travel strategy and advice are now few and…
Lufthansa Discounts Coach Redemptions from Canada to Germany
For bookings through July 16 and travel through July 20, Lufthansa Miles & More is offering award seats from Calgary, Montreal, or Toronto to Germany roundtrip for 35,000 miles in coach. That’s a 42% discount from the usual 60,000 miles. Travel only permitted on Lufthansa, not their partners, and one transfer in Germany only is permitted. (Hat tip to FFBonuses on Twitter.)
How Do I Get Kickbacks for My Blog Posts?
This is a long way off from reality, but the Federal Trade Commission is looking at whether and how it can take jurisdiction over bloggers making false claims or failing to disclose conflicts of interesting regarding commercial products. This part of the story stuck out for me: Many bloggers have accepted perks such as free laptops, trips to Europe, $500 gift cards or even thousands of dollars for a 200-word post. What I want to know is how, and where do I get my hands on laptops and thousands of dollars for my posts? I’ve never been offered anything meaningful in exchange for my posts. I get PR hack mass emails all the time, touting this or that product or hotel most of which are of little to no interest. Occasionally I get a custom-tailored…
40% Off Beds and Bedding at W Hotel Store
The W Hotel Store 40% discount appears to be back with code WX4T7. I don’t know the expiration. This offer comes up frequently (see for instance here, here, here, here, and here) but I haven’t seen it in awhile. Every time it pops up it’s worth noting because it really is a great deal, I bought my W Hotel bed (plush top with featherbed) in March of 2007 and I’ve been happy as can be. 40% off makes the price reasonable, shipping is free and they’ll remove your old bed for free as well. And the discount applies to bedding as well, though I personally didn’t choose mine from the W Hotel Store. If you want automatic notification of the next time this deal pops up you might want to subscribe to this Flyertalk thread for…
Top 10 Ways To Earn Lots of Miles
1. Credit cards, credit cards, credit cards. The signup bonuses are great. Chase-issued cards are generally one-time (but there are at least 4 different United Visa products, for instance, and you can get the signup bonus for each), in the limit so is each Amex card (but you can of course get each different type of Delta American Express, each type of Hilton Amex, each Starwood Amex, each Membership Rewards Amex, etc). Citibank cards can still be churned, they will unbelievably still gift you 30,000 American Airlines miles after spending $750 each time you successfully apply for the card (which at a minimum is once every 60 days). I’ve discussed in the past that you want to take a long breather from this before going to get a mortgage (short-tun requests for credit drop…
View from the Wing on Twitter
I’m finally becoming active on Twitter, you can follow me to get my most recent blog posts and also minor deals and fares that don’t make it onto the blog. Of course, subscribing to the RSS feed (http://viewfromthewing.com/feed/) for this blog remains an outstanding way to keep up on the latest deals and strategies that I post.
