A trip report in five parts Air France A380 Business Class, Washington Dulles – Paris Park Hyatt Vendome Mostly Eating in Paris British Airways Paris Orly – London and the Concorde Room British Airways “New” First Class, London – Washington Dulles Looking for something to do for New Years I settled on Paris, there was non-stop business class availability on the Washington Dulles – Paris non-stop. And it’s their Airbus A380. I’m not one to chase aircraft. I’m much more interested in the inflight product than the model of the plane itself. And believe it or not (it’s sort of something I hadn’t even realized until I stopped to think about it), I hadn’t actually ever been on an A380 other than crawling around one of Qantas’ during the oneworld MegaDO back at the end…
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Renting a Wireless Internet Device for International Travel
Renting Wireless Internet for International Travel: I first learned about XCOM Global from this Milepoint thread which is a good discussion of getting wireless internet access while traveling abroad. XCOM Global offers pocket-sized wireless internet routers (“MiFi”) that will work in most any of the destinations you’ll be traveling to, and they give you unlimited data for a fixed per-day price. My Usual Solution On most of my trips I just turn my phone into airplane mode so that I don’t eat any roaming charges, and log into the hotel’s wireless internet. If I want to make calls I use the Skype app and I’m only paying about 3 cents a minute to talk to the U.S. And this works well for me because (1) just about anywhere I stay, I get free internet —…
Alaska Airlines Adds Emirates Redemptions to its Award Chart
As expected, Alaska Airlines has gotten up their award chart for redemptions on Emirates which will begin January 16. I was sleeping last night when this was first noticed — while Lucky tripped over himself, fell, and quickly got up a blog post while bleeding in order to bring you the news first. So hat tip Lucky. Here are the award charts: As is common for Alaska Airlines awards on partners, they do not publish award charts for travel between every region of the world. For instance there is no award on Cathay Pacific between Europe and Asia. You can fly Emirates between North America and the Middle East, India, Africa, and Asia but not, say, all the way to Australia. Alaska Airlines awards on partners are roundtrip only, no one-ways for half the miles.…
You Can Fly Singapore Airlines First Class on Points — Here’s How!
Singapore Airlines offers an almost mythic first class product. The service is great. The seats are top notch. The Krisflyer inflight entertainment system is grand. The food is good, the alcohol very high end, and the amenities copious Mostly though the awards are perceived to be very hard to get. That’s because they almost never make long haul premium cabin award space available to their partners like United and US Airways. US Airways added a footnote to their award chart to say these seats are not an option. Back in July Singapore Airlines awards were made available to partners as a result of a systems glitch. This wasn’t awards at a discount. The error was that the awards existed for partners at all. And there was a feeding frenzy. But the truth is that Singapore…
Getting Another Airline to Give You Status Based on the Status You Hold with Your Current Carrier
… or in the case of American AAdvantage, just because you’re going to be doing a bunch of flying in the coming three months. An airline status match is an old, useful, and venerated idea. I think it was about 9 years ago on Flyertalk that I created ‘The Status Match Master Thread’ to answer one of the most frequently asked questions across frequent flyer-dom, “will a specific airline match my current status with my preferred carrier? And how do I go about getting that match?” Inside Flyer magazine even reprinted the post, because it addressed what was once a fairly secret, unpublished phenomenon — the idea that airlines were interested in acquiring their competitors’ best customers, but elite status had a lock-in effect. Sure, you might want to defect from United to American or…
Citi ThankYou Points Introduces Hilton as its First Transfer Partner
About 10 months back there was a great deal of speculation that Citibank was on the verge of introducing points transfers into other loyalty programs as a feature of its ThankYou Points program. That speculation was followed by a whole bunch of non-denial denials from Citi. I was confident it was going to happen, but it didn’t Until now, that is. Citi ThankYou Points can be transferred to Hilton HHonors at a rato of 1000 ThankYou points to 1500 HHonors, the standard American Express Membership Rewards rate which I don’t generally consider a good deal – and rarely consider to be a good deal when Amex runs transfer bonuses, either. This option now appears on the Hilton HHonors website. And it’s also on the Citi ThankYou site under Points Exchange (must be logged into your…
US Airways Finally Tells the Truth — Lufthansa First Class is Not Offered by the Dividend Miles Program
I was emailing yesterday with Ben and after discussing something on a completely different topic, and mentioned I needed to write about the addition of a new footnote in the US Airways award chart. He replied, “was *just* writing it as you emailed. Hah!” Of course Ben is a professional blogger and got his thoughts up right away. I, on the other hand, had my first day in a new office. I have been overseeing the construction and permitting (egads, it involved getting a County re-zoning), which all completed last week — just in time for move-in. So things were a little bit chaotic. And I’m about 16 hours behind. US Airways Updates Their Award Chart to Say Lufthansa First Class is Not Offered The US Airways partner award chart (.pdf) has been updated to…
American Airlines Pilots Approve Transition Agreement for Merger with US Airways
Former American CEO Bob Crandall told the pilots they needed the details of a transition approved in advance. It had to be clear how the pilot work groups between American and US Airways would be merged, how seniority would work, and — he suggested — even what would happen to their pilot bases. They made clear that they agreed, it did need to be sorted in advance, and that was seen as a barrier to a merger happening prior to American exiting from bankruptcy. After all, US Airways’ pilots weren’t able to agree on these issues amongst themselves after the America West merger. The work groups still haven’t merged. Was this all going to be universally agreed-upon in the coming weeks? Apparently it looks like that may have already happened. The American Airlines pilots union…
Reducing the Cost of Delta Skymiles One-Way Awards
While we’re on the subject of getting the most out of Delta Skymiles, I wanted to point out that it’s possible to get one-way awards for less than the published price on their award charts. First, some context. United, American, and British Airways (among other programs) offer one-way awards for half the cost of a roundtrip. Alaska Airlines and Aeroplan offer one-way awards for half roundtrip cost only on their own flights and not on partners. US Airways and Delta do not.allow one-ways at all for a discount, they charge the full roundtrip award even if you only fly one-way. Different programs have different features, and this in and of itself isn’t an indictment of the program. But I do find it to be a real drawback, since I can’t combine Delta miles one-way with…
Top Eight Best Uses of Delta Skymiles
What do Delta Skymiles redeem for? I give Delta Skymiles a hard time, and deservedly so. I’m known as the guy who coined the term ‘Skypesos’ for their currency, on the whole their miles are worth less than miles in the United, American, and US Airways frequent flyer programs. They’re harder to use. They don’t permit one-way awards for half the cost of roundtrip (neither does US Airways). Their agents are clueless, their award booking website offers limited partners and is generally quite broken. International first class awards aren’t allowed. But because I give such a hard time to Skypesos, I also feel like I have a special responsibility to help figure out how to make the most of them. And I’m the first to say that the miles you should collect and use very…
