Tag Archives for elite benefits.
World of Hyatt is making changes to elite benefits for 2024, and they are mostly good. All awards like upgrades and free nights become transferable, and more benefit choices are being added as members stay every 10 nights. It’ll be possible to confirm a suite and try out top tier benefits after fewer nights, while their Guest Of Honor benefit will be more flexible – but no longer unlimited.
Southwest Airlines has announced changes to make earning status easier from flying and from credit card spend, a new benefit to top tier status, and greater flexibility for all members in redeeming their points.
There are four major hotel loyalty programs, at least for Americans: Hyatt, Hilton, Marriott and IHG. Hyatt has the smallest footprint but the best benefits for frequent guests. Marriott is great on paper but most inconsistent at the property-level delivering promised benefits. IHG never had much in the way of benefits at all until last year when everything changed. And Hilton stands alone, promising almost nothing.
The brand new St. Regis Chicago wasn’t offering Marriott Bonvoy Platinum members breakfast as they’re required to. They claimed that their restaurant was operated by a third party, and this got them out of the obligation. This all was addressed quickly, in just a couple of days.
In the meantime, however, there were a flood of consumer reviews of the property on TripAdvisor – most of which were very bad (and likely fake).
Several changes that have been made to the IHG One Rewards elite benefit terms and conditions. These have been published to their website, but they haven’t otherwise told anyone about them which always strikes me as a poor practice.
Some airlines just give call priority, others give dedicated agents, and there can be a tradeoff. If dedicated agents are overwhelmed sometimes you just want to get through to someone. During actual high call volume periods an airline might roll over its elite members on hold to the top of the general reservations queue.
Such dynamic call handling makes sense. At American Airlines, though, Platinum Pro members’ calls get priority but will now roll over into general reservations instead of to dedicated elite agents for international bookings according to an internal airline memo.
Now that the year has reset, so have a number of credit card benefits, and elite ‘tasks.’ Here’s what I went through first thing in the morning on New Years Day.
You can read full benefit details here. Now that benefits are (mostly) live at hotels we’ll start to see how compliant properties are and how the new program works in practice. Regardless, there’s only improvements here in terms of benefits, addressing what has been the key weakness in the IHG program.
United Airlines probably does the best job of making additional award space available to elite members (even Silver) along with cobrand credit card customers. That extra inventory is real.
What a lot of American AAdvantage members don’t realize is that Executive Platinum (and Concierge Key) members also have extra award availability.
American Airlines took a $200 million stake in Brazilian carrier Gol, after Delta stole LATAM from oneworld and a pending joint venture. Delta had to divest its ownership position in Gol to pull this off.
Gol is American’s exclusive codeshare partner in Brazil, and American is Gol’s exclusive codeshare partner in the U.S. And the relationship doesn’t just come with reciprocal earning and redemption of miles. Elite customers receive benefits across the two carriers.
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 »
