The United Mileage Plus Visa is available with a 15,000 mile signup bonus and fee waived the first year. This was sent as part of a targeted email, but past practice suggests that it should work for anyone. Apply at the link above and print out the page which indicates the fee is waived. In addition, my experience is that existing cardholders can take advantage of these offers and obtain a second card.
Discounts at Site59
Site59, the last minute travel package site, is offering $50 off $500, $75 off $750, or $100 off $1000 through May 14th with Promo Code: S59SALE.
Two for One to Paris
Air France is offering a two-for-one sale from the US to Paris. Book by May 15th for travel October 15th through March 2005. December 17th – 24th is blocked out, and a Saturday stay is required. Prices from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and DC start at $505 for two roundtrips with other cities slightly higher. Taxes are extra.
How to Find the Best Hotel Deals
Priceline A great, straightforward and simple introduction to successful Priceline bidding is this 2003 article from the Washington Post by Michael Shapiro. About.com has a good, clear explanation of how free re-bids work. That’s probably the single most important ‘trick’ to learn. The best uber resource for informed Priceline bidding is Bidding For Travel.com. Some users are unhappy with the level of moderation there, but it is indispensable for the lists of hotels by zone and quality level and the tremendous amount of successful and unsuccessful bids that have been posted. Their Hotel FAQ is also important reading to understand how to get the hotel(s) you want in the right location and at the best price. Furthermore, their discussion boards contain really interesting tips such as advanced rebidding techniques that increase your free re-bids beyond…
How to Find the Best Airfare Deals
Websites to Use When Searching for Airfare Orbitz. I find to be the best general airfare site. Especially good at piecing together multiple airline trips to save money. SideStep is a downloadable program that detects when you’re searching for travel and sends out whatever you enter into a website to the various airlines, searches their sites directly, and then collates the results. Mobissimo is even more powerful than SideStep. It is also a metasearch tool. It goes out to the airlines and the other travel booking sites like Travelocity to get its results. It’s web-based rather than a software download. It even searches consolidators (such as onetravel) and international sites (like zuji and opodo). Powerful, but not good for searching over a range of dates or airports. Kayak is similar to Mobissimo but with an…
Why Priceline Acquired Travelweb (and Lowestfare.com)
Jared Blank offers a basic point that I was too dense to see. Priceline acquired Travelweb, the hotel booking service, for the same reason they began offering retail airfare — so that they could sell travel to consumers whose bids failed. They don’t expect consumers to start at Priceline for their retail travel, but they don’t need to lose all of their customers who are unsuccessful with their opaque bidding product.
The Business of the Backend of Bookings
Expedia, which processed most of its airline bookings through Worldspan, has inked a relationship with Sabre. It’s unclear how much Expedia business will move over, but I was surprised to learn that Expedia accounts for more than 10% of Worldspan revenues.
Boston Attacks Airport Congestion Sort Of
Boston’s Logan Airport plans to adopt peak pricing for landing fees. Prices certainly matter, but the specific plan amounts to Mn attempt to pacify all sides, from airlines likely to balk at the fees, to passengers concerned about long delays, to regulators that want to head them off. The specifics are unfortunately driven by an attempt to pacify litigious constituents, and ignore some really great ideas. A couple of months ago Lynne Kiesling wrote about the potential for auctioning off slots to allocate them to their highest valued uses and control congestion. (I argued then that technological solutions to improve air traffic control were equally important.)
New Service to New Zealand
Air New Zealand is offering $748 roundtrip airfare to inaugurate its new San Francisco-Auckland service.Service starts June 30th, and also represents a great opportunity for frequent flyers with miles in United or USAirways accounts to head Down Under. There are likely to be award tickets available as these flights are just now bookable.
Miles for Music is Now Online
The Sony-United Airlines music download partnership is now online. They’re promoting it with a live Sheryl Crow concert about a United flight from Chicago to Los Angeles. This new website allows you to redeem 10,000 United miles for 100 song downloads or 10 album downloads. At a rough rule of $1 a song, this deal translates into a value of one cent a mile — hardly the best use of miles, but also about average for mileage-to-merchandise redemption opportunities. And it could certainly be a good use for acounts with either stray mileage or an abundance of miles (after all, how many first class flights to Hong Kong or Sydney can one person take?). The partnership also provides 2 miles per dollar spent on music downloads when paying with the United Visa instead of the…
