Tag Archives for awards.
I have an upcoming award stay at a Marriott property, and I received a note from the hotel warning me that if I don’t show up on the day scheduled, and haven’t cancelled at least a day in advance, they’ll charge me over $2000 cash.
If your flight diverts on the way to this award stay and you can’t check in as scheduled, call your mortgage broker for a second or third lien – quick!
Effective August 14 Singapore Airlines is imposing new rules on waitlisting for awards. They want you to be pay attention to now being able to manage wait list requests online and receiving proactive updates on your requests from the airline.
However there’s only one change that matters,
Here’s a search of available first class award space for two passengers in November. I searched Los Angeles – Sydney, but it brings up Los Angeles – Melbourne space where there’s connecting availability to/from Sydney, and Dallas Fort-Worth – Sydney where there’s connecting availability on American between LA and Dallas.
Some space appears to exist October through February, in other words when Americans want to travel to Australia.
I’m not looking forward to this, but I’m hopeful that partner award prices don’t change for awhile and that perhaps American (and United) can be convinced to be transparent about partner pricing going forward even as they price their own flights dynamically.
That is of course where the best value lies today from both programs.
Two weeks ago I reported that American would launch award redemption for premium economy this month. Awards go live tomorrow (Thursday, January 24).
We will not see any change to upgrades at this time, or upgrade awards for premium economy. This new redemption option will be for American miles on American flights only — they will not enable redemption of premium economy seats on partners, and American’s partners won’t have access to premium economy awards either.
In December 1994 the Department of Transportation sent a letter to US airlines It said that failure to make award seats available to customers could be a prohibited deceptive practice. They never even thought to address airlines which failed to make award seats available on a route ever.
Continental posted several changes to their frequent flyer program today: You can now receive your BusinessFirst upgrade rewards until 24 hours prior to your scheduled departure. Previously, 72 hours were required. Effective February 1, 2006, you may redeem reward travel within the 48 contiguous U.S., Alaska and Canada on round-trip flights of 1,500 miles or less for only 20,000 miles. Effective April 1, 2006, some Easy Pass BusinessFirst reward mileage requirements will change: Routes between: Miles requiredbefore 4/1/06 Miles required4/1/06 and after N. America and Asia 240,000 250,000 N. America and Europe 200,000 250,000 N.Amer & India/Africa/Mideast 240,000 250,000 N. America and Tel Aviv 200,000 250,000 Hawaii and Europe 220,000 270,000 Hawaii and Tel Aviv 220,000 270,000 Asia or Europe & S. Amer. 240,000 280,000 The introduction of 20,000 miles for flights under 1500…
Back in November I reported that Qantas had gutted its frequent flyer award chart, with awards increasing in price as much as 92% (Sydney to New York-JFK in First class was going up to 392,000 points)! It should come as no surprise that Qantas frequent flyer members reacted to this news by booking as many international awards as they possibly could before the new point requirements went into effect, and as a result there are reports of very limited award availability — that most of the international awards on Qantas have simply been snatched up. It’s difficult to know the real numbers without a systematic award search, but the theory itself seems plausible.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
