As many of you know, I probably book more frequent flyer award tickets than anyone else in the world. So I get a lot of regular experience dealing with a wide variety of frequent flyer programs. After Delta, United is my second least-favorite to deal with (Singapore is no bargain, either). All for different reasons. Delta just offers the least amount of premium cabin international award availability at reasonable mileage prices, and has all sorts of hidden rules like too many segments bumping up mileage prices (when they’re the ones who force you to go looking for extra segments to find available flights in the first place). While United as a Star Alliance carrier has access to some incrediblle partners and award inventory, regular readers of this blog kow that they are the only Star…
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A Mileage Redemption Wish List for the Holidays and the New Year
The holiday season sometimes brings so much joy that all my hopes, at least for award booking, seem possible. And with a New Year, there’s an unwritten future. So I dare to dream. And I’ll share with you, my dear readers, the content of my five wishes as we close out 2009 and usher in 2010. 1. An end to United Starnet Blocking I genuinely believe that United Mileage Plus offers the best top-tier elite level. But their award redemption is truly sub-par. They block award seats that their partners are making available, something that no other Star Alliance airline does. Their award chart isn’t cheap relative to the competition, in many cases it is more expensive than say the US Airways chart or the Air Canada chart. Both of those airlines let you book…
US Airways Announces Mileage Increases to Star Alliance Award Chart — And They Aren’t So Bad
One Mile at a Time points to changes to the US Airways Star Alliance award chart. While increased mileage costs are never good, I’m not sweating this one. Here’s the old chart and the new chart (both .pdf files). Last month US Airways announced changes to awards booked on US Airways flights. Those changes were not good, and Randy Petersen really took them to task over it. At the time I expected that US Airways would have to make changes to their Star Aliance award chart as well. It seemed unlikely that they’d leave awards booked on their own flights as significantly more expensive compared to awards redeemed on their partners. The archetypical example of what had to change was US to Europe in business class — going from 80,000 miles on the US Airways…
Chinese Human Rights Activist Living in Tokyo Narita Arrivals Hall
Wandering Aramean shares the story of Feng Zhenghu, a Chinese citizen who is living in the Tokyo-Narita international arrivals concourse. Feng has been denied entry to his native country eight times over the past month, four of them after actually arriving on the ground in China; the other four times Japanese officials denied his boarding attempt because they knew he’d be denied on arrival. Not good at all. So Feng has decided to live in the arrivals hall at Tokyo’s Narita airport, and he’s been doing so for over a month now. According to CNN, he’s a human rights activist and China won’t let him back in the country. Japan has offered asylum, but he won’t accept. Clearly he’s having some success calling attention to his cause. I’ve just followed him on Twitter.
Using the US Airways Holiday Shopping Promo to Get Business Class Tickets to Europe for $570
Frugal Travel Guy outlines how to take advantage of the US Airways 250% Shopping Bonus to effectively purchase miles at 7/10ths of a penny apiece. If you make 5 purchases or more (up to 10) then all of those purchases earn a 250% bonus. Fewer than 5 purchases and the bonus is lower. But one merchant in particular is crazy-valuable: TrackItBack which gives you stickers with codes on them to attach to things. In theory if you lose those things, people report the item to TrackItBack and they handle getting the item from the person and then to you. Purchases through them earn 40 miles per dollar normally, so you know it’s a high margin business they’re in. With this 250% bonus, purchases will earn 140 miles per dollar. Put another way, you’re buying miles…
Which is Worse for Award Redemption, Delta or Delta.com?
Hunter says Delta.com has gone off the rails. And he calls the Delta.com helpdesk “We’re a Bunch of Monkeys Chained to Phones.” Gee, Hunter is just realizing this. And he actually flies Delta. I do my best to avoid it, though in my case it’s because on Delta ful fare trumps status in the upgrade queue and the idiots treat cheap government fares as full fare. I live in DC, where everyone but me is flying on a government fare. But that’s beside the point. My beef with Delta.com is its award search. Delta occasionally publishes premium cabin international inventory for award booking without paying extortionate double or triple mileage pricing. But its website would never know it. Flights that actually have ‘low’ price awards will still price at the medium or high mileage levels…
Randy Petersen Calls Out US Airways For Egregious Changes to Their Award Chart
Randy Petersen‘s opening remarks in the December, 2009 Inside Flyer are on US Airways’ planned changes to their award chart going into effect in January. Bottom-line, Randy points out that US Airways is especially stingy in making awards available on their own flights to Dividend Miles members. They’ve gone from redeeming 9.1% of their miles flown as award tickets down to a meager 4% — less than half the rate of Continental, which has never been known as especially generous on awards. And already US Airways imposes transaction fees just for redeeming an award. Those fees are often as much as the cost to the Dividend Miles program of the award seat itself. Their change fees are uniquely high among their peers (think $250). Now that an award seat in business class to Europe can…
Possible Amazing Opportunity with Continental Miles to Redeem for Singapore Airlines First Class
According to this Flyertalk thread, Continental isn’t fully linked up with Singapore Airlines yet. In order to book award tickets they have to do a ‘long sell’ where they manually request award availability. And it seems like more often than not, that availability is coming back confirmed. Long-time readers of this blog know that Star Alliance members can look up award availability by signing up for an All Nippon Airways account and using their award search page. That gets you all except Air China, Shanghai Airlines, and Swiss. It seems that Continental is somehow managing to confirm awards that the ANA website suggests are not otherwise being made available to Star Alliance members for redemption. I haven’t tested this myself, but one hypothesis might be that Singapore — which offers expanded award availability to its…
Continental’s Entry into Star Alliance Makes United’s Award Blocking Even More Untenable
Today’s Washington Time “On the Fly” column offers kudos to Continental for their transition to Star Alliance — offering liberal award routing rules such as flying from the US to Australia via Asia and permitting both an open jaw and a stopover on an award (though not permitting US to Asia via the Atlantic, though there have been some rumblings that this may be permited, perhaps for additional miles, in the future). The major contrast drawn in the piece is to United. With Continental’s decision to make most Star partners available for award search online, it becomes much clearer when United is blocking award inventory — if United says a given flight is unavailable, isn’t being offered by the partner airline for an award, or doesn’t even exist, it may well be showing as bookable…
Am I Being Too Hard on Skyteam?
Jared Blank thinks that in my excitement over Continental’s entry into Star Alliance that I’m too hard on Skyteam. He agrees that Star will be better for Continental Onepass members in terms of “first class options, lounge access and choice of carriers ” And he agrees with some of the limitations of Skyteam Was it the best alliance out there? No. Did they have a large array of world class carriers associated? No. Did Continental and Delta have miserable – truly miserable – reward availability, especially in business? Yes. But he defends Air France, KLM, and Alitalia business class availability. And his priorities were “quick trips to Latin America, or a long weekend in Europe.” But I think the defense of Skyteam here is a bit of a straw man. I’m not saying it’s impossible…
