I’m still a little unclear on all of the implications of Air New Zealand’s changes to its rewards program. Here is one summary. Air New Zealand has unveiled a revolutionary change to its frequent-flyer scheme, becoming the first major airline in the world to give rewards based on ticket price instead of distance flown. (Side note, America West used to do this. Independence Air currently does this.) An unpopular feature of frequent-flyer programmes such as the Air NZ airpoints scheme is the difficulty in redeeming rewards for flights. This has been changed, with any seat on any flight available for airpoints users. … Air New Zealand, backed by a supplied auditors report from accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, says that 61 per cent of all flight redemptions will require fewer “equivalent airpoints”. A further 15 per cent…
Science Fiction at the Grocery Store
The future of payments is here. That is, if here is the Piggly Wiggly in South Carolina. San Francisco-based Pay By Touch has launched its finger-scanning payment system at four Piggly Wiggly supermarkets in South Carolina. Beginning today, Piggly Wiggly customers will have the option of paying for groceries by using a finger scan which is linked to their financial accounts. Customers enroll in the Pay By Touch program by creating a “Pay By Touch Wallet” which includes: scanning their finger, selecting a PIN, swiping a supermarket rewards card and entering a debit card, credit card or their checking account information. All data is kept in a secure center. The finger scanning technology does not store actual fingerprints; it creates a set of data points that cannot even be reverse engineered back to a fingerprint.…
Who’s Better in Bed?
Forbes prefers the Westin bed over the Marriott bed. I agree.
1000 Free United Miles
Sign up your Safeway Club card to earn United miles here and earn 1000 bonus miles. (Link via Free Frequent Flyer Miles.)If you don’t yet have a Safeway club card, go to a Safeway store and get one — but don’t sign up to earn miles. Then go to the link which provides the bonus miles for signing up. For Alaska Airlines fans, I mentioned a a similar offer the other day.
25,000 Delta Miles as a Signup Bonus for Intercontinental Ambassador Club
Priority Club is offering 25,000 Delta miles for signing up as an Intercontinental Hotels Ambassador Club member through October 31, 2004. Just as a mileage-earning deal, this is excellent. Ambassador Club costs $150 to join, which means that the 25,000 miles cost 6/10ths of a cent apiece. Plus Ambassador Club gets you Gold status in Priority Club and special benefits at Intercontinental hotels. The terms and conditions of the offer say that you need to be a Priority Club member (sign up before taking advantage of the offer) and that you have to have selected Delta Air Lines as your preferred earning partner (so set this up also before taking advantage of the offer). Further, I suspect that the offer was intended for a limited audience, though the website suggests no such restrictions. It’s a…
TSA Intentionally Makes Screening Times Longer at Phoenix Airport
The TSA security director at the Phoenix airport has been placed on leave amid allegations that he intentionally slowed down screening to increase wait times in order to justify expanding his staff. A Valley newspaper reported Wednesday that federal authorities responsible for security at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport intentionally lengthened wait times at passenger checkpoints at a time when they were asking Homeland Security administrators in Washington to provide more screeners. … The e-mails written by Fred Carter, screening chief at Sky Harbor, to Florian alerted staffers to the wait-time move on April 5. One of Carter’s emails stated that shifting staff away from checkpoints would allow passenger lanes to be shut down so wait times could be lengthened. Clearly unacceptable and a failure of leadership. Poor security, hiring of criminals, and violations of…
Comments Have Been Disabled
I’m sorry to say that the comments feature has had to be disabled. It’s not that I don’t want to hear your thoughts on what I write — I do — but in the past 24 hours the comments feature has been spammed with about 400 ads for online gambling and other such services. It’s a bit unmanagable and so until we come up with a solution we’ll just have to forgo the comment feature. Sorry for any inconvenience, but I didn’t want to make readers sift through pitches for Cialis as a condition of discussing miles and points.Update: Looks like the crack technical folks have gotten things cleaned up a bit and I’m hoping that we’ll have comments back shortly.
1000 Free Alaska Airlines Miles
Alaska Airlines is offering 1000 miles just for enrolling (free) in their mileage-earning partnership with Safeway grocery stores by August 31.
Delta Considers Charging Customers for In-Sourcing
Since the beginning of the year, E-Loan has been offering consumers the choice of whether to have their loan paperwork processed in India or the United States. Processing in India is accomplished two days more quickly. Now Delta is considering a similar offer with a twist. They would charge a fee to have calls handled by U.S. agents. Both versions involve the consumer bearing a cost, but E-Loan’s model is pitched at offering consumers a benefit, “choose to have your loans processed abroad and we’ll finish things more quickly.” Delta’s model is pitched as a tax, “we’re going to charge you for what you want.” They’re two sides of the same coin, but customers aren’t accustomed to paying for this kind of service.If Delta moves forward with the idea, they would be advised to take…
How many frequent flyers worldwide?
Sometimes it takes an article from India to learn about interesting frequent flyer facts here in the US. [W]orld-wide more than 120 million people were covered with frequent flyer programmes of various airlines. “There are over 500 to 500 million cards related to frequent flyer programmes possessed by air travellers,” he pointed out. (The story was prompted because Randy Petersen was in Mumbai for the the launch of revamped Jet Airways frequent flyer program.)
