I’ll be recording another session, but in the meantime you can listen to this week’s upgrd podcast where we talk about “United Airlines award levels, website issues, and evil StarNet blocking; US Airways award levels and availability; and Continental’s award chart and how they match up with United.” Give it a listen.
Free Hotel Night Giveaway: Don’t Forget to Enter!
You have just a little over a day left to enter to win a free Hilton hotel night courtesy of BoardingArea.com.
Proof the Air Marshall Program Needs an Overhaul
Even Kim Kardashian can spot them.
50% Bonus on Hotel and Car Partner Activities Through April 30
You need to register and have at least three qualifying activities to earn a 50% bonus on all of your hotel and car partner earning through April 30th. Regular readers know that I’m not a huge fan of Delta Skymiles. And it’s not the 150% bonus offer that Delta mistakenly offered in November, 2008. But I am a fan of bonus miles. This would, for instance, make a 2-day Avis car rental that would otherwise offer 2010 miles especially value (3015 miles!). Mileage transfers count, so 20,000 Starwood points normally generate 25,000 Delta miles. If you’ve got two other qualifying partner transactions, then a 20,000 Starpoint transfer would yield 37,500 Delta miles. This isn’t lucrative enough to actually get me to burn my Starwood points, they’re too value and Delta miles aren’t. But if you…
A Surgeon Should Know Better to Fly With His Pregnant Wife on Spirit
Tony Woodlief brings us the story of a pregnant woman being refused water by Spirit Airlines during a two-hour tarmac delay. I agree with the standard fare outrage in this story, sometimes you just need water, pregnant woman, blah blah. It’s pretty indecent to refuse the request, even if the flight attendants couldn’t be moving around the cabin a great deal at that time, even if they weren’t in a position to provide water service to everyone. There would have been a reasonable way to handle the issue and this wasn’t it. The only thing I suppose that’s worth adding here is that a bit of personal responsibility is in order here. The person ejected from the aircraft was the woman’s husband, and he’s the Chief of Obesity Surgery at Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital. No…
1000 United Mile Bonus for Hertz Online Booking
Via Frugal Travel Guy, Hertz is offering 1000 bonus United miles for online bookings. They’re also offering triple United miles, “up to 1500!” Rick described it as, “2500 United Miles Per One Day Hertz Rental???” but I don’t think that’s correct. It’s a 1000 mile bonus and triple miles, which presumably are triple the standard United mileage offer of 50 Mileage Plus miles per day for all qualifying paid rentals of 1 to 4 days. Earn 500 miles for qualifying rentals of five or more days at any airport and downtown location worldwide. So a 1-day rental would earn (50 x 3) + 1000 = 1150. And it would take a 5-day rental to earn 2500 miles. Though I’d love to be wrong on this one! Nonetheless, good if you’re renting from Hertz anyway. But…
Randy Petersen’s 17 Million Frequent Flyer Miles
Forbes runs a piece on Randy Petersen, where he talks about how he got started giving miles and points advice, about the 17 million miles in his accounts, and why he doesn’t burn them. I guess when you have 17 million you’re not worried about a little bit of devaluation!
United One-Way Awards Will Include Partner Travel – Likely Starting This Summer
Nicholas Kralev speaks to the head of United Mileage Plus and learns that the initial rollout of United one-way awards have been United metal-only because they started with the website, and the web doesn’t offer the ability to book partners. (I don’t expect that functionality anytime soon; perhaps if United and Continental merge they can keep the Continental site?) But the intention is to roll out one-way awards with partners. For the time being, United’s one-way “awards,” as well as its new “miles and money awards,” are limited to its own flights for technical reasons — those tickets can only be booked on its Web site, which doesn’t offer access to partner “awards,” Mr. Atkinson said. When phone agents are able to book them — sometime in the summer — partner-carriers will be included, he…
Priority Club Comes Down On Online Quiz Double (and One Million) Dipping Members Like a Ton of Bricks
TM Travel World reports on a Priority Club glitch. They offered a ‘quiz’ you could take for 100 points. But you could take the quiz over and over, and earn the points each time. With the assistance of a computer script, there were some members who ‘earned’ millions of points. Apparently Priority Club has frozen the accounts of folks who ‘took advantage’ of the quiz, earning 2 or more bonuses. They cancelled award reservations that had been booked by those accounts. And they haven’t been much for notifying affected individuals. I can sympathize with Priority Club. They view it as a form of fraud, even if their own IT systems are partly to blame. Personally I would have just deducted the points they didn’t intend to award. Perhaps they could have scalated things with the…
El Bulli to Close Permanently
A couple of weeks ago I reported that El Bulli (I wrote a trip report of my dinner there in 2008) would be closing for two years — the 2012 and 2013 seasons — and re-opening in 2014. Now Ferran Adria, the chef-owner, has decided to close the restaurant permanently, after the 2011 season. The restaurant and Barcelona workshop combined lose a half a million Euros per year. In fairness, that’s really by choice. The restaurant is said to get 10,000 requests per table. It’s certainly been the most difficult reservation to get in the world. They could easily raise price (my wife and I ate there for about 500 euros all-in, which isn’t unreasonable for a Michelin 3-star and certainly not for arguably the best restaurant in the world). But Adria has long said…
