Mobissimo is an airfare search engine worth booking. Like SideStep, it’s a metasearch tool: you enter your search query and it goes out to various other travel sites and brings back the results. Unlike SideStep, you don’t have to download software. On the plus side, it searches the various online services (such as Destina, Travelocity, Zuji, Opodo, Onetravel) in addition to the travel providers themselves. On the downside it doesn’t suggest alternate airports and search those automatically.Searching last minute fares to Los Angeles from Washington National, Mobissimo outperformed SideStep and Orbitz (finding a $311 fare on Northwest with only two days advance purchase and no Saturday stay). SideStep, though, found a $207 fare on Frontier from Dulles to Los Angeles that — even when specifying Dulles as departure airport — Mobissimo didn’t find. So it’s…
Paper is expensive!
Aeroflot signed a deal with Sabre that will allow the airline to offer e-ticketing and online booking.Going electronic will no doubt also help the airline mine its frequent flyer databases.The airline estimates that ticketing and distribution costs will fall 20%, saving the airline $10 to $20 million a year.
Easier than actually flying
An airport checkin agent awarded himself miles for flights of passengers he checked in to the tune of five million points. While working for Air Canada, Singh would check in passengers but instead of crediting them he would add their miles to one of his own 13 air miles accounts, the National Crime Squad (NCS) said. Singh, who lives in west London, pleaded guilty at Isleworth Crown Court to false accounting, obtaining services by deception and obtaining property by deception. He will be sentenced on May 21 at the same court, NCS said. Among the trips Singh arranged through the scheme were business class flights for a family of four from Singapore to New Zealand and flights for a couple from Frankfurt to Mumbai. Singh and his brother flew first class from Heathrow to Singapore…
Passed along without comment
It took two full days for the TSA to permit a woman to leave Orlando by plane. She is fighting cancer and has lost weight as well as her hair, so she looks different than her drivers license photo.
Sweepstakes
Priceline has a scratch-off game that you can enter every day through May 19th. You can win vacations, airline tickets, and William Shatner bobblehead dolls. And you get extra entries for watching a streaming video of a Priceline commerical. Travelocity is giving away a Carnival cruise. VH1 is running a sweepstakes for a luxury trip to New York including a concert at their studio. Frontier is offering free airline tickets for subscribing to their email list. Usually I caution waiting for a better deal before signing up — but in this case the signup isn’t tied to a frequent flyer account, so you can always sign up again later with a different email address if another offer comes along.
Northwest Fly Free Faster Four
Registration for Northwest’s “Fly Free Faster 4” promo begins May 15th. Traditionally the offer is 10,000 bonus miles for one “qualifying activity” (such as a flight, obtaining a Northwest Visa, changing long-distance carriers, or buying miles) and five “partner activities” (such as hotel stays, Northwest mall purchases, dining for miles).By pairing this promo with a new Worldperks Visa (15,000 mile bonus), signing that card up with iDine, and then going to five different participating bars and ordering a beer at each it should be possible to earn 25,000 miles for about $80.
1500 American Miles for Priceline bookings
I mentioned earlier this month that Priceline.com purchases could earn eBay Anything Points.The offer is now available for booking via eBay’s travel page. The offer is 1500 points for airline tickets or hotel stays (fewer for rental cars and more for vacations). With the current Points.com bonus for American Airlines transfers, those 1500 points convert to 1570 AAdvantage miles. Not bad for tickets and stays that otherwise wouldn’t earn miles at all! And in most cases a better reward than ebates which rebates only 2%.Update: Two notes.First, as of about a week ago ebates no longer rebates 2% on Priceline hotel bookings. One more reason this deal is so great, relative to other options. Second, it’s only this lucrative until June 30th. After that the points.com transfer bonus goes away. It’ll still be worth doing,…
$690 for flights to Tahiti AND New Zealand
Air Tahiti Nui is offering flights from Los Angeles to Auckland for $690. Since this is one-stop service via Papeete (Tahiti), you’re allowed a two-day stopover and Air Tahiti will even throw in the couple of nights hotel.Purchase by April 30th.
Mileage earning partner lookup tool
SmarterLiving.com keeps a partner database that you can search when buying things online — helping to ensure that you earn the most miles possible for your transactions. The drawback has been that it’s partner listings were fairly limited but it looks like they’ve updated it. Check it out, and it’ll help you earn miles for the things you were going to buy online anyway. They’re also offering encouragement that finding award seats over the upcoming long weekend holidays shouldn’t be too difficult.
Pricelining Sold Out Hotels
Just because a hotel — or nearly every hotel in town — is sold out, doesn’t mean there isn’t Priceline availability. It isn’t often that this winds up being the case, but it’s an important lesson nonetheless. This week the World Bank is meeting in DC. There are protestors. And there’s a huge pro-choice walk/protest (scheduled around the World Bank, believe it or not… as a way of picking up extra folks to participate who will be in town anyway). Plus it’s school trip time for DC. There just aren’t hotels available in town. The Best Western downtown wants $667. The Washington Terrace Hotel where I can often call up and get a $99 rate wants $1000. So I had someone coming into town tonight and couldn’t get anything on Priceline at the 4* level…
