Tag Archives for mileageplus.
You can rent someone’s car on Turo, as an alternative to renting from a company like Hertz or Avis. It’s not always as seamless a pickup at airports, but you’re renting a specific vehicle rather than a broad category. You can choose much nicer cars, or cheaper cars! Sometimes you’ll get a much better deal renting from a private party. And you can organize dropoffs at your hotel, too.
It began last week watching the prices for Lufthansa and ANA first class awards skyrocket but apparently United wasn’t done devaluing its MileagePlus miles.
Days ago business class intra-Europe over 800 miles was 27,500 miles. Now it’s 45,000 to 49,500. Short-haul business class is now 33,000 miles. The devaluation stretches to intra-Asia redemptions as well.
Lufthansa first class appears to have gone from 121,000 to 154,000 miles each way per person – meaning that a saver award now costs 308,000 miles roundtrip. That’s a 27% increase. And these are tough awards to book, because Lufthansa only makes them available to United’s program members within a few days of departure.
Meanwhile ANA first class from the Midwest and East Coast appears to have jumped to an eye-popping 242,000 miles – an instantaneous doubling in price.
United Airlines plans to announce ‘family pooling’ of mileage this wee. This is a nice benefit where your kids can help you earn miles towards an award more quickly, and your once a year traveling in-laws can too. Miles get used faster, and become more useful.
Delta talks publicly about its expectation of generating nearly $7 billion from American Express this year, and that it has a goal to stretch this to $10 billion. And because of this, it’s commonly believed to be the best at extracting revenue from its SkyMiles program. Yet SkyMiles is the least rewarding of the major frequent flyer programs. Its miles are indisputably worth less than competitor currencies. What’s going on here?
United MileagePlus has increased the cost of transatlantic awards on its own flights by one-third, and on partners by 39% – 46%. We’ll see what the effects are on other regions.
United Airlines MileagePlus is somewhat less lucrative for the airline than American’s and Delta’s frequent flyer programs. You can get some insight into the economics of their loyalty program from their latest SEC 10-K filing as well as disclosures made around raising debt backed by the revenue from its mileage offering.
Connecting space within 2-3 days of travel can now be booked in Swiss first using United miles.
United occasionally runs short-term award sales, and doesn’t always tell everyone. For Cyber Monday they ran up to 50% off coach awards to Europe and Asia Pacific.
Today they’re doing up to 47% off of Hawaii awards, with the best deals for elite members who also have a co-brand credit card.
Choose the charity you support, based on groups actually seeking miles (that get deposited into an account for them to redeem real award tickets against), this isn’t a ‘corporate charity program’ it’s something much better than what other loyalty programs offer – the ability for real charities to raise miles from members rather than through a corporate partnership with the airline meant to burnish the airline’s image. Kudos to United for doing this.
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 »
