Hilton has recently launched a ‘Winter Holidays Sale’ on its website, where it is offering 25-33% on hotel stays at Hilton properties and other Hilton brands across the globe. The sale went up 25 Nov 2011 onwards and lasts till 1st Jan 2012. The stay has to be completed between 8th Dec 2011 and 8th Jan 2012.

The offer is available on pre-paid rates, which need to be booked at least 7 days prior to the stay date, and turn out to be cheaper than the advertised Advance Purchase Rates also. Hilton’s website states that the sale will be broadly 25% off for American properties and 33% on European and Asian properties. Plus, for each stay of at least two nights, Hilton HHonors members will earn 1,000 Bonus Points. This could also be coupled with the Q4 promo which is still running.

So, that makes it one more offer for you to look out for this winter if you are going on that ski trip or heading to a warm beach down south!

Jet Airways recently hopped on to the American Express bandwagon. This meant you could now transfer your MR points to Jet Airways in India. Although, like always with any card tieup in India, Jet Airways JP miles are priced higher than the other conversions like Kingfisher or Air India Flying Returns.

However, to celebrate their alliance, Jet and AX have come together to make a new online offer for booking ‘revenue’ tickets on Jet Airways. From now until October 31, 2012, if you booked tickets on JetAirways.com using your American Express card, you could potentially earn 5,000 JP Miles in your Jet Privilege account. All you got to do is to book tickets worth INR 100,000 (USD 2,000) on your AX, over the period of the promotion, and make sure you quote your JetPrivilege membership number everytime you book. Jet Airways or AX will do the book keeping, and consider the Base Fare, Fuel Surcharge and Congestion Charges part to count for the INR 100,000 amount which has to be acheived over a period of time.

Every time you get the 100,000 number, you get 5,000 JP miles bonus. The bonus only gets credited after the travel date. What you got to note, is that the travel date has to be also within the 31 Oct, 2012 period set for this promo. The miles, will take a few months before coming so it will be a while before you got to use them!

And since this is a Jet Airways promotion, obviously, you do not get the JP miles on usage of other co-branded AX cards like the Kingfisher AX Credit Card/Kingfisher AX Corporate Card and the Air India AX Card. Hence, I intend to be using my AX Gold Card for this promotion over the next 11 months I will be travelling with Jet Airways. I easily see quite some free miles coming my way!

All the fine print is listed on the Jet Airways website.

I just got off the phone with Citibank. This was one long tiresome negotiation we put each other through. And my misery is finally over.

A few months ago Citibank and Jet Airways started taking away the benefits on the Citibank-Jet Airways Credit Card offered in India. I wrote about them and also contacted the Airline and the Bank to have a hard look at the whole setup and see what the competition was doing. As expected, I drew a blank there.I used to love this card since it contributed quite a bit to giving me my free round trip to the USA in Jet Airways Premiere Class this year, but the new terms did not look attractive anymore. It meant spending double the money to get an upgrade voucher, and with upgrades on Jet Airways international being very hard to come by, it looked like a useless thing to do.

As a result, I saw increasingly no use of keeping this card in my pocket anymore. It was there, but it was hardly being used. I was increasingly turning to my American Express cards (the Kingfisher AX specially, which gives you complimentary Gold status, a free 11,000 miles to start with, 2 free domestic RT tickets and 1 mile per INR 40 spent).  Though now I think I like the AX Gold Card better since I don’t have to compulsorily convert my MR points only into KF miles. And it also throws free MR points my way for shopping on weekends.

Citibank made me call them 10 times over 15 days and everytime they asked why I wanted to close the card, I told them the same reasons I have explained in this space before, including the devaluation of benefits. Most people at Citi were not appreciating the decision but wanted to retain me nevertheless. Eventually, I had to hit the hammer on their head today, calling them again to either cancel the card or somehow just let me go.

Being the decade old customer I am with them, clearly it was not easy for them. So we discussed another proposal to switch me to the Citibank Ultima card, however, while I was pondering over the proposal, another miles oriented card came into the picture. And that is what I got, though I’ll be happy to write more about it once I get the package on hand with the interesting offers inside!

For now, it is bye bye to Jet Airways Citibank CC, you were once loved, but no more are a dear friend! Sigh