Over on Milepoint a member named Cartera Commerce appeared to take responsibility for running the AAdvantage Shopping Mall and claims they’re not liable for providing any miles. Attention AAdvantage eShopping(SM) customers: Cartera Commerce, Inc., operator of the AAdvantage eShopping mall, displayed an incorrect offer for certain products available through Verizon Wireless on the AAdvantage eShopping mall website on Tuesday, August 10, 2011. The incorrect offer of 83,871 AAdvantage® miles for online purchases of certain Verizon wireless accessories was the result of a Cartera system error. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Due to Verizon’s Terms & Conditions, which reward American Airlines AAdvantage miles on service plans only, Cartera is relieved of awarding AAdvantage miles for shoppers who clicked on the offer and purchased Verizon Wireless accessories online. The specific Verizon Wireless AAdvantage…
Can You Really Trust Online Mileage Mall Shopping Portals? Or the Biggest Mileage Bonanza Ever, Gone Awry
Randy Petersen posed an interesting question on Milepoint two evenings ago, Recently an offer provided through the US Airways Dividend Miles Mileage Mall featuring EasyCGI was found to have had some fulfillment problems and a recent statement from EasyCGI that “EasyCGI has never approved or gave permission to be a part of frequent flyer mile program.” seems to be leading to confusion as to if this offer was legitimate or not. If you have any experience with this offer, we’d love to hear from you. Looking for members whose miles have posted, members whose miles have not posted and more importantly, members who have actually been able to enroll in the services provided by EasyCGI so that officials of these organizations can track down exactly what happened. Wow, frequent flyer miles don’t usually generate mystery…
El Al Matmid Club Free Signup Plus 30 Points for Joining
Kosher Kouponz is offering $25 signup fee waived for joining the El Al Matmid frequent flyer program. Signup also comes with 30 free points. Now, odds are that if joining El Al’s program will be useful to you, you’ve already done so. If you’re going to fly them and want to upgrade, for instance, you want to be a member. Most Americans will redeem for El Al travel via American Airlines AAdvantage. But if you’ve ever considered joining, it’s worth not paying the joining fee. And signing up lets you search for El Al award availability online so you know what flights are available before ringing up AAdvantage, say if you don’t have an Expertflyer account in order to accomplish the same thing. (Via Dan’s Deals.)
Which Airline and Third Party Booking Websites are Most Popular? Some Surprises..
Via @Expertflyer, Tnooz has data on the most visited travel websites. Pretty interesting findings, some a bit unexpected at least by me. Rank Website % of Visits 1 Expedia 13.35% 2 priceline.com 10.51% 3 Orbitz 6.87% 4 Yahoo! Travel 6.11% 5 Hotwire 6.02% 6 Travelocity 6.01% 7 CheapOair 4.71% 8 Kayak 4.28% 9 bookingbuddy 3.13% 10 Cheap Tickets 2.97% Expedia makes the most sense. I find its booking interface to be the friendliest and easiest to use. Transactions there are just simple in my overall experience, at least compared to other travel website. Orbitz is far more powerful for cosntructing bookings segment-by-segment across multiple airlines, but it’s slower and the buying process more…
83,000 American Airlines Miles for $5?
The AAdvantage shopping mall currently shows 83,871 American Airlines miles for buying a $59.99 MOTOROKR S305 Bluetooth Stereo Headphones from the Verizon Wireless store. It’s the fourth item in this list. I think the offer is supposed to be 2 miles per dollar spent, and I don’t have an interest in these headphones at $60, but I’ve gone ahead and purchased one anyway. If they’re offering almost 84,000 American Airlines miles at $60, I’m certainly in. I’ve made screen shots and .pdfs of the offer for myself. I’ve made the purchase via American Express, which I’ve had good luck in purchase disputes when needed in the past. I recognize that the Verizon Wireless store has a tough return policy (14 day, I believe there’s also a $35 re-stocking fee). In the end, I’m not being…
Post-mortem on Airline Ticket Taxes and Why Airlines Raised Price to Compensate
In some of my coverage of the suspension of airline excise taxes I explained why no one should have been surprised that most airlines raised their fares to offset tax savings during the time that the FAA lacked re-authorization (and thus the authority to collect these taxes). I tried to give a simple explanation of ‘tax incidence’ which some commenters found useful, but the majority of writing on the topic was filled with outrage that the airlines would pocket the money rather than passing on the savings to consumers. I wasn’t outraged because I wasn’t surprised, and because this is exactly what the economics would have predicted would happen. Matt Mitchell from the Mercatus Center put together a short video illustrating the economics, that when supply is inelastic, producers bear the primary burden of a…
Free $42 Priceline Credit ($6 per night up to 7 nights)
Via Online Travel Review, Priceline is offering a coupon for $6 off per night, up to 7 nights. It’s ‘bonus cash’ which means that they add $6 to your bid amount, if you bid $40 for a hotel night, they treat it as though it were a $46 bid. So using this coupon you’ll want to bid $6 less than you otherwise would. The coupon can be used through December 31. And remember that by going through Ebates you’ll earn 2% cash back on your Priceline purchases. Update: Per Mike L in the comments, of course Big Crumbs offers 2.4% rebates on Priceline. Better than ebates.
Delta 100% Bonus on Purchased, Gifted, and Transferred Miles
Through September 30, Delta is offering a 100% bonus on purchased, gifted, and transferred miles. Only accounts that have been open for at least 10 days and have earned at least a mile are eligible to receive miles this way. They want to avoid folks opening accounts just to take advantage of the offer, for instance as a conduit to ‘buying’ discounted business class award seats such as on Air France when folks aren’t otherwise ‘real’ members of the Skymiles program. With the buy miles option, you’re purchasing miles at 1.75 cents apiece plus 7.5% tax (so about 1.9 cents apiece). That’s more expensive than miles purchased from US Airways under their similar 100% purchase offer. The mileage transfer option is better, it’s 1 cent per mile transferred and that means at a 100% bonus…
My Chicago Talk on Award Booking is 90% Full
Rick, Frugal Travel Guy, emails to let me know that the Chicago Seminar, where I’ll be speaking at the end of October, is filling up. Now here’s what that means. There are still 200 tickets left, which means it is 60% full. But since there are concurrent sessions, the maximum attendance at my talk on booking award tickets the morning of October 29th is 90% full. The maximum number of folks in my session is 300, and apparently 268 have signed up. Only 32 spots left to hear me explain the best uses of frequent flyer miles, how to find available award seats, and how to navigate phone calls with the airlines to get them to construct your award. Other talks include Lucky on Hyatt and Priority Club loyalty programs, a talk on priceline bidding…
Delta Awards to Become Non-refundable, Non-Changable 72 Hours Prior to Travel
Wandering Aramean points to a significant change in award travel rules over at Delta Skymiles that a lot of members are none too pleased about. Recently Delta announced that tickets had to be canceled prior to departure or they would retain no value. In other words, you couldn’t just not fly and cancel an award later, getting back your miles (for free if you’re a Platinum or Diamond elite, for a fee for everyone else). They said ‘over 400,000 seats’ went empty due to this practice. Notably, they didn’t mention 400,000 seat over what period of time, but the natural assumption when hearing a number like that would be a year (perhaps the announcement didn’t include a reference to time knowing that would be the assumption, but that may just be too cynical of me).…
