Seth writes that FlyBE is removing their most popular award destinations from their redemption chart, they’ll no longer allow their members to redeem for flights to Spain, Portugal and Croatia effective March 31. Why? Because that’s where their customers most wanted to go! It’s nonobvious to my why capacity controls won’t solve the problem of too many customers wanting to redeem on these routes, and they have to instead decide not to allow it at all. Rather reminds me of 2005 when Delta members were simply not allowed to redeem on Air France or KLM over the summer. Of course in that case Delta was paying a partner for seats, one customer service explanation at the time was that Delta had reached its budget for paying Air France and KLM for seats and wouldn’t spend…
50 Continental Miles Per Dollar at FTD and 1800Flowers for Co-branded Mastercard Holders
One of the neat features of the Continental Mastercard is double mileage earning for purchases made via the Continental mall. (One of the other features is the ability to take advantage of their frequent 100 or 250 free mile signup offers, such as for reading a web page that says you can do this or that with your card.) Flowers (and similar gift item) vendors often have some of the most lucrative mileage and cash rebate promos, since the products are fairly high margin. At times the offers through Continental are as low as 10 miles per dollar, and the offers do fluctuate. Currently both 1800Flowers and FTD are showing up at 25 miles per dollar. Which — for folks who have a Continental Mastercard — actually yields 50 miles per dollar via the card’s…
1000 United Miles for Using Mobile Check-in By the End of the Year
Via Lucky, United is offering 1000 miles for registering and using mobile check-in by December 31.
American’s Pilots Want to Be Exempted from the Nude-o-Scopes
The American Airlines pilots union wants to exempt its pilots from the TSA’s nude-o-scopes because they’re, well, stupid. And they are, though what I object to is the idea that pilots would get exempted but not the rest of us. Now, they’d justify special exemptions for pilots because of the frequency with which they go through the backscatter machines and the chance that repeated exposure could have detrimental effects. But certainly frequent flyers go through them as often or more often. And of course radiation risk really just applies to one type of device (backscatter) and not the other (millimeter wave). But at least the Allied Pilots Association is against the nude-o-scopes, the Airlines Pilots Association, which represents pilots at most US carriers, actually favors them. I’d love for someone to figure out why?
Free Wifi for the Holidays is Back (with a lot more widespread availability than last year)
Airtran, Delta, and Virgin America are teaming up with Google to offer free wifi onboard from November 20 through January 2nd. These are among the most wifi-enabled carriers (I believe Airtran’s entire fleet is fully equipped) and the price is certainly right. I’ve come to value the connectivity tremendously, especially on long flights. At four and a half hours I thought the advertised $20 on my Alaska Airlines flight on Friday would be worthwhile to buy myself back some extra productivity. It was a pleasant surprise to see that I was actually only charged $5, even without Google subsidy! Now, if they’d do corporate sponsorship year-round of free wifi I’d actually switch my web broswer to Google Chrome which this deal is supposed to be promoting. Still, it’ll be interested to see when onboard wifi…
USA Today on Award Booking Services
I spoke with Laura Bly yesterday morning before heading to the airport, and today she’s written about my award booking service and about Lucky’s in her USA Today blog. She wanted me to differentiate our services, explain how mine is different or better and candidly I told her I’d never say a negative thing about his and that I often recommend people to him when I happen to have a full plate of clients, in the midst of travel, and working on deadline for my real job. And I offer that recommendation wholeheartedly. Of course I think I’m pretty good at this as my happy clients attest.. In the piece the author is a bit hard on herself, she managed business class awards to South America on her preferred dates but didn’t realize that if…
Some Truly Pedantic Complaints from the Last Week of Flying
Alaska’s “midcon” meal service is truly subpar. Houston-Seattle is 1,874 miles. It departs at 6:25pm. The flight is scheduled at 4 hours and 45 minutes. First class gets a ‘snack’ — on Friday is was mushroom ravioli (5 large pieces) with a salad on the same plate. No meat or fish. No side(s). No dessert. Not acceptable for first class service. On the other hand, the flight was wifi enabled (well worth it to me to catch up on days worth of work), and I had only paid $129 for the one-way ticket, confirmed upgrade at booking with an MVP Gold Guest Upgrade certificate.. Usually I just complain about never seeming to get pre-departure beverages on American. Last night I added something a little more substantive to my usual complaint: On United that would have…
Randy Petersen Retires from Flyertalk
Last night in Seattle, Randy announced to the Flyertalk moderators in attendance that he was going to be stepping down from Flyertalk at the end of the year. It was an emotional half hour where he shared his remembrances of individuals and events over the twelve and a half years since he started the project, and in the three years since he sold the website to Internet Brands. He’ll stay on through December 31 and posted this morning that he’s working with Internet Brands on the transition plan for the management of the community. Flyertalk’s missydarlin pushed me to offer a toast to Randy on behalf of the 58 of us at dinner last night and so in the middle of a Vietnamese restaurant I stood up on a chair on offered my thanks and…
Breakfast of Champions at the Flyertalk Moderator Meeting in Seattle
American’s New Car and Hotel Awards
American Airlines has introduced new car and hotel awards. This isn’t how I prefer to use my miles (read: premium cabin international airline awards) but it’s still an interesting development for a few reasons. First, more options with your miles are always better. Second, though you could always book car and hotel via the AA Vacations site you could only pay for the car/hotel portion with miles and not the air. This offering separates out these different components. Third and most importantly, the miles value for these offerings seems to be better through American than through similar competitor programs, and they’re offering better redemption values for elite members (and better redemption values for higher-level elites than for lower-level ones). Delta has had a similar offering and considering how difficult it can be to use Skymiles…
