This USA Today story provides a good introduction to Priceline. (I’m quoted in the piece.) With hotel rates and occupancy as high as they’ve ever been in some major cities, Priceline has seen less inventory and higher rates… but still occasionally some incredible deals, as the spread between Priceline rates and otherwise-available rates is even higher. I’ve personally moved away from Priceline for much of my travel over the past several years, in large measure because I’m addicted to the upgrades and other benefits of hotel loyalty programs, but for city stays where I don’t really value a suite Priceline still offers a real bargain, especially for multi-night stays and bookings involving more than one room, where the savings multiply. And I’ve probably made about 80 Priceline bookings a year for other people. I save…
Qantas Explains Frequent Flyer Program Accounting and Value Proposition
Via the Global Traveller, Qantas’ half-year results (.pdf) include a discussion of how airlines account for their frequent flyer programs on pages 45-50 of the document (pages 29-34 of the 38 page Acrobat file). Nothing revolutionary, and regular readers of this blog will be familiar with most of it, but it does represent a clearr explication of the concepts (with visuals, whereas I use only words).
What to Do with An Expiring United Systemwide Upgrade?
Tonight I received my weekly MilesLink E-Newsletter from Randy Petersen’s shop. It contains an Ask Randy feature, with advice for a frequent flyer who wanted to know whether there was anything that they could do with their otherwise-expiring United systemwide upgrade (such as trade it with someone else for a future expiring upgrade)? Randy outlined the Coupon Connection forum on Flyertalk. Quite natural advice. I’d add that every United 1K member should know about an unpublished practice over at Mileage Plus: In each of the last couple years, United has been willing to extend the validity of one systemwide upgrade for a year upon request. There’s a long discussion of the phenomenon in the United Mileage Plus forum on Flyertalk.
Advances in the Corporate Travel Space
Sabre’s version of Facebook is coming to an Amex Corporate Travel booking engine near you. But no one can tell you exactly why they’re spending money on this, other than the promise of cost savings like once employees know they are traveling to the same location, they can arrange to share ground transportation, for example. Technology investments predicated on reducing taxicab expense seem like a great idea to me.Not to worry, the business rationale promises to be “more of a play that might compete with applications that do social networking for the entire enterprise, such as ones delivered by CoreSpeed and IBM, to benefit beyond the travel program and into a space where Sabre is competing with these generalists,” Or something like that.Oh, it’s also about inverting the corporate travel dialogue, so that travel managers…
Can I Redeem My Miles for a Job in the Obama Administration?
Now that Intrade has Obama over 80% likely to win the Democratic nomination (post-Wisconsin and better than 70% likely to win the most delegates in Texas, though lose Pennsylvania and Ohio), I’d love to transfer some of my millions of frequent flyer miles into Obama points. Maybe I could try to redeem for a job as Secretary of Transportation? That is sort of how the system works, right, and miles are just a proprietary currency? After all, I once had a friend do her taxes and try to deduct her political contributions as a ‘job search expense’….
Disputing the Value of a Prize (or Don’t Pay the IRS More than the Prize is Worth!)
Having just done my taxes, and having dealt with a series of 1099s (alas, no prize income this year), I thought I’d resurrect this post from 2005 on how to dispute the value of a prize as reported to you on a 1099. If you win a stereo, the provider of the prize says it’s worth $2000 but you can find it in a store for $750, what do you do? Very important not to pay tax on that $2000 — you might wind up sending as much to the IRS as it would have cost to just buy the item in the first place! Though not to be confused with tax advice, here’s my understanding of it from personal experience: First, you should attempt to negotiate with whomever provides the prize. The official way…
A Tale of Two Programs, Or Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
Continental no longer lets you book Qantas First Class awards for 135,000 miles. As of Friday the price is now a whopping 285,000 miles. I still don’t understand what Joe Sharkey meant by a potential merger with United reducing the value of his Continental Onepass miles. But the occasion of a 111% increase in mileage cost for what was probably the best award that Continental offered is probably a good time to underscore a piece of advice: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Sure, if you’re working on elite status credit those flight miles to your home program. And if you have a particular award you want to redeem in that program, credit partner miles until your account balance suffices. But once you’ve gotten there, credit partner miles (that aren’t necessary to retain…
This will help only a small subset of my readers
… but Etihad is offering 50% off on award redemptions through May 31, on all routes except Amman, Bangkok, Dhaka, Dublin, Kathmandu, and Manila.
Starwood’s Annual Recategorization of Hotel Award Categories Goes Into Effect March 4
Starwood has announced its new hotel award categories which will govern redemptions beginning March 4. Each year they recategorize hotels which means different point amounts required for redemption. Last year was the mother of all recategorizations, tons of hotels around the world costing 42% or 60% more points than in the previous year. Set off a firestorm, really. The Starwood program sets each hotel’s category not by the hotel’s quality (as some people often misunderstand, eg “that hotel was awful, how can it be a category 4?”). Rather, they set the category based on a hotel’s average daily room rates in the prior year. With higher hotel prices, it’s taken more points than before to redeem. But that’s not the only thing that drove last year’s recategorization. The way that Starwood accomplishes its heralded ‘no…
Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan Gives Customer Exactly What He Wants – Customer Complains
One of Holly Hegeman’s readers rants about frequent flyer miles and concludes I’ve just cut up my Alaska Visa card and feel much better. Only I don’t get it. They wanted to fly from Spokane to Los Angeles, and the non-stop flights were available on awards. But they didn’t like the plane being flown on the route (as if this was the fault of the frequent flyer program) and were annoyed that the specific connecting flights they wanted weren’t available so they were faced with long layover. The non-stop flights were available as awards, as far as I’m concerned end of complaint. Then they redeemed their miles for premium awards on British Airways. They took business class but they didn’t like that they couldn’t get assigned seats on British Airways … an annoying British Airways…
