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…
Double iDine Miles on America West
iDine is offering 20 America West miles per dollar through June 30th, except on Fridays and Saturdays. Registration required.America West is also offering double FlightFund miles for travel to London on Virgin Atlantic Airways Upper Class between May 1 and July 31, 2004 and 6000 miles for 3 stays at Starwood hotels.
Free cigarettes
Print out form here. If you don’t smoke, you can trade ’em for cool stuff on the inside. While you’re at it, you can get free Reach Access Dental Floss, free dog treats, free Habanero HOT sauce, free Claritin and free Advil Allergy Sinus.
Quiz time!
Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
A New Hyatt in Afghanistan
Via Instapundit, a new Hyatt Regency will be built in Kabul, Afghanistan. Currently reasonable accomodations are more or less limited to the Hotel Inter-Continental. While it doesn’t look bad, on-line booking is limited to an email query form on the Ariana Afghan Airlines website. Interestingly the Hotel Inter-Continental is not in any way related to InterContinental Hotels & Resorts. Similarly in Iraq, there’s a Sheraton in Baghdad and Basra. Sort of. (The Basra Sheraton was bombed last year. Here’s a photo of the looting. The Baghdad Sheraton was attacked last month.) The hotels aren’t part of the Sheraton hotel chain which is owned by Starwood Hotels and Resorts, and you won’t be collecting Starwood Preferred Guest points there. It turns out that the properties were ITT Sheratons prior to the Gulf War. They continued to…
The European Commission Does Something Right! (Maybe)
The European Commission is funding a test of a system designed to allow mobile phone use inside a passenger aircraft.
