Continental is a Star Alliance member now, and they’re promoting the news on Twitter with a sweepstakes. You just need to follow @Continental and tweet something with the hashtag #StarTreatment to enter. You can do this up to 5 times a day through November 3rd for more entries to with 2 business class tickets to any Continental destination or one of two $1000 Continental Vacations gift cards. The big news of course is Star Alliance lounge access, and earn and burn in the Star Alliance. Especially burn. Continental was miserable for redemption as part of Skyteam, but now members have access to the wonders of the Star Alliance — including first class products, something Continental itself doesn’t offer. A real kudos to the Continental IT team, they’ve made redemptions on United Airlines, US Airways, Air…
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Reader Mail: Should I Get a Hilton Amex, Should I Redeem an Award to CDG?
Reader Robert writes: Hilton Amex talked me into upgrading from Hilton Amex Plat to “Surpass” mostly because of Gold status; it’s $75/yr + ~ 15k bonus miles?; I have Plat Amex and Plat Intercontinental (ambassador); I almost never stay w/Hilton. Should I back out? and just ask for a match? Should I use US Air winter discount (60k ea) for Envoy to CDG from BOS for my mom & me just to burn? we ea have ~65k dividend mi or is there something better? (membership rewards, CO, Delta, AA) So here’s my rather rambling reply, a bit off-the-cuff and unedited. The value in the Hilton Surpass card is $40k in spend gets you Diamond (top tier) status with Hilton. If you can put $40k in spend on the card, it’s great. Otherwise not worth a…
Continental is Liberated from Skyteam, Star Will Be Much Better for Onepass Members
Continental exited Skyteam last night. Or as I prefer to think about it, they were liberated. That’s because on Tuesday they join the Star Alliance. Continental has always been known to be stingy in offering award inventory. And this was a huge deal, because their partners were known to be the stingiest as well. Skyteam award inventory isn’t nearly as generous as Star or oneworld counterparts. Just try booking more than one business class seat at the same time on the same flights between the U.S. and Asia. Going forward I still expect Continental to manage its own award inventory in a similar way. After all, Continental offers relatively small international premium cabins and employs a strategy to actually sell those seats (at a discount) rather than offering them for redemption. Continental is also known…
The Practical Implication of the Hilton HHonors Devaluation, or How I’m Changing My Behavior
I’ve written about Hilton’s plan to devaluae their points here and here. Come mid-January many properties will require 25% more points, bizarre in a world where hotels are getting killed, rates are down and so is occupancy. One Mile at a Time‘s comments, “I have about 300,000 Hilton points I need to burn, so I guess it’s time to start thinking about where I want to go.” This got me thinking, how will I change my behavior as a result of Hilton’s gutting the value of my HHonors stash? The thing is that I’ve always found HHonors points to be situationally useful, especially for redemeptions in small cities on personal travel when I don’t want to come out of pocket. Or other pedestrian travels where the hotel is a place to sleep, rather than the…
Starwood Introduces Cash & Points Awards for Category 1 and 2 Properties
Loyalty Traveler Blog covers the news that Starwood has introduced Cash and Points awards for Category 1 and 2 propoerties in Asia, the U.S., and Canada (though he can’t find any category 1 and 2 properties in the U.S. currently offering cash and points availability). Starwood’s Cash & Points awards are useful because they stretch your points. And they’re almost always more valuable than a points-only redemption, it amounts to selling you the difference in points at a deep discount (usually just over a penny a point). Unlike regular award nights, cash and points awards are not always available when a hotel has standard rooms available. Starwood will reimburse a hotel its full average daily room rate on a regular award night when a hotel hits 90% occupancy. Not so with cash and points, Starwood…
United’s Unlimited Complimentary Domestic Upgrades: the Other Shoe Drops
As I posted yesterday, United is ending 500-mile upgrade certificates and going to unlimited complimentary upgrades. This change on its own is on the whole good for 1K (100,000 mile) flyers. They won’t have limited free upgrades, having to pick and choose which domestic flights to use them on. It’s not good for lower-tiered elites, who will now have to compete against 100,000-mile flyers (and Global Services members) on every flight. Unsurprisingly, though, this change comes along with some other tweaking which is not good. As speculated yesterday, confirmed regional upgrades go away. Currently 1K members get up to 8 of these a year (promotions aside) and they’re good for confirming a domestic (including Hawaii) upgrade at time of booking from any fare. While there are no more 500 mile upgrades to worry about, there…
Recurring Bad Advice on How to Secure an Upgrade
TripBase offers upgrade advice from Jonathan Marks, a global investment banker and frequent flier has an envious track record of bagging flight upgrades. He’s agreed to share his secrets, helping us to reach that first class cabin! There are a million of these silly upgrade articles out there, why am I bothering to comment on this one? Because I got pitched the post, they wanted me to link to it. I was going to ignore it but I htought I would take stab number 72 at putting the silliness to bed. As usual there’s a kernal of truth, but on the whole the advice is msileading at best. Ah the elusive flight upgrade. Everyone wants one but noone knows how. Read on for my upgrade secrets, guaranteed to improve your chances of flying like a…
The Best Mileage Management & Tracking Tools
I don’t just participate in a coiuple of airline and hotel loyalty programs, I participate in dozens. That’s great for taking advantage of the best promotions on offer, and it’s great when the time comes to redeem miles because I have s omany options. But it’s cumbersome to manage — all those account numbers, all those passwords, and a lot to keep track of like how soon will points in a given account expire? Fortunately there are plenty of solutions that make this easier — aggregating account information in a single place, allowing login to an account with a single click, updating all account balances at once. And offering it all for free, for a couple dollars a year, or at most a bit over a dollar a month. There are really three sites worth…
Continental’s Star Alliance Award Chart is Out!
Continental joins Star Alliance at the end of October, and their miles become much more valuable as a result. Continental has long had a reputation for being terrible with award redemption, which was really a two-part problem. (1) They were always stingy with flights on their own metal, when awards were available they were at inconvient times. Continental has always been much harder to redeem, at least except close-in to departure. And with small international premium cabins those prized awards were doubly difficult. (2) Being a member of the worst alliance, with the worst partners. Continental wasn’t just stingy with awards, their partners were stingy with awards too. Northwest and Delta were almost as bad as Continental historically. Moreover they were aligned internationally with Air France and KLM and Korean (while finding a single transpacific…
I Charged For An Award Booking
I’ve written in the past about how frustrating it is to offer help to people who don’t appreciate it. And for awhile I became disenchanted with doing the legwork for all of the folks contacting me that I didn’t know, whose awards I would make possible, but whom I would never hear back from with even a simple thank you. (Frankly, if I help a party of four book premium award tickets to Asia, a “hey, can I send you a nice bottle of wine?” might be an appropriate response.) I think readers of this blog will agree that I give away plenty of information for free. There’s very little that I know that is truly ‘secret’ or unique to me, though some certainly has been. I’ve just accumulated knowledge and through practice have learned…
