I got an email this morning from my brother regarding his ORD-FRA flight last night. Haven’t had a chance to discuss the details with him yet, but the email gave me a good chuckle.
Landed. Very nice flight. There was a guy in F, however, who was playing the drums on his tray table as people were trying to sleep. Will give you details later.
I, for one, have a hard time picturing this! 
It’s time for a reader photo. Thanks to Peter for sending in this one.
Correct Answer: Copenhagen, Denmark
Winner: JLSocks
If you’d like your photo featured, please email it to me at onemileatatime@hotmail.com, along with the correct answer.
Well, my brother and mom began their trip to Egypt this morning, and boy am I relieved!
They were originally booked on IAD-ZRH with United, and fortunately it was showing the new premium product in first class. A few weeks ago when United eliminated Starnet blocking I decided to play it safe and book them on ORD-FRA with Lufthansa instead (in first class on the A340-600). Well, as it turned out IAD-ZRH ended up being the old configuration today, so I’m incredibly happy that I rebooked them on Lufthansa. I’m sure their experience will be superior to even the new United First Suite, minus the risk.
That being said, I got an interesting call from my brother from the Lufthansa gate at ORD. Apparently my mom’s seat was broken, and they wanted to reseat her in business class since first class was sold out. In exchange they were offering to refund the miles, but of course I wanted more details, since I knew it wouldn’t be that simple for Lufthansa to refund United miles. As I advised my brother to ask for clarification, the agent informed him that the mechanics had fixed the seat while on the ground in Chicago. While the seat was fine when I spoke to them shortly before the door closed, I reminded him to to request compensation if it ended up not working (which wouldn’t surprise me). Regardless, I look forward to hearing about their experience, including the journey and the destination.
The Star Tribune has an interesting article about the eventual merging of the SkyMiles and WorldPerks programs. While the article doesn’t contain anything unexpected, it does seem to confirm that:
While it’s not specifically mentioned in the article, Northwest Platinum members receive a 125% mileage bonus, while Delta Platinum members only receive a 100% mileage bonus bonus. I’m betting they’ll stick with Delta’s bonus on this one.
It will be interesting to see if they offer any other benefits that would make the program better since they’ll likely have a lot of disgruntled customers.
First of all, my apologies for the lack of posts over the weekend. I caught a nasty cold late last week, so I spent most of the weekend sleeping. I’ve almost recovered, so should be back to posting more frequently.
Now, on to more important things. As most of you probably already know, Delta seems to have discontinued their 150% bonus miles promotion. What the hell was Delta thinking with this promotion to begin with? Many of us go by the saying “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” but that doesn’t seem to be the case with Delta. They’ve had great promos whereby you can get 10,000 miles for renting a car, 20,000 miles for getting a hair loss consultation, etc. Simply put, I didn’t think this promo was totally out of line for Delta. If United had published this promo, I probably would have asked what the catch was, but not with Delta.
Instead of joining the bashing bandwagon (although I am disappointed), I gotta ask the question — what was Delta thinking? I can think of a few explanations, but none of them seem plausible.
Suffice it to say that I won’t be taking the risk and going with my original plan, but will instead sit on the sideline and watch other people play this game.
Kayak has a really handy chart comparing the various fees of airlines, great for determining the true cost of a flight.
Hat tip to my friend David for pointing this out.
It’s time for a reader photo. Thanks to Eric for sending in this one.
Correct Answer: Male, Maldives
Winner: rrgg
If you’d like your photo featured, please email it to me at onemileatatime@hotmail.com, along with the correct answer.
I’m still trying to sift through all of the details of the Delta promotion, and won’t be pulling the trigger on anything for at least another week, since we seem to have more and more ideas by the day.
View from the Wing has several good ideas for the promo, which he blogs about. My issue is that I don’t have a lot of Delta miles to start with, since I don’t really find their miles to be worth a whole lot. My mom has 23,000 and I have about 3,000, so here’s the plan:
Transfer about 70,000 AMEX Membership Rewards points to my mom’s Delta account, which already has 23,000 miles. Right now there’s a promo good through December 31 for a 30% bonus on transferred points. Also, I hope I’m reading the T&C’s correctly regarding:
“Members will receive a 30% mileage bonus on all miles transferred during the offer period. Bonus miles will be posted one (1) week from the transfer receipt by Delta.”
If I understand this correctly, the bonus miles will indeed post shortly after the actual miles post, so this should be easy to accomplish with the time we have.
For this we should be earning 75,000×1.3 miles, which comes out to 97,500 miles. Add that to the 23,000 miles she already has, and we’re looking at a total of 120,500 miles.
– The plan then is to transfer 120,000 miles from her account to my account. Since the miles have to be transferred in chunks of 30,000, that’ll cost a total of $1,320, which will net us a total of 300,000 miles, plus my existing 3,000 miles, bringing us to a grand total of 303,000 miles.
Have I missed anything obvious in my plan? I’m thinking of holding off for another few weeks before doing this, but it seems to make enough sense. 75,000 AMEX Membership Rewards points and $1,320 for 300,000+ miles can’t be beat, even if they’re from Delta. That’s three business class award tickets to Europe, or two Singapore Airlines First Class awards.
Thoughts?
I never thought the day would come, but US has made the decision to return 500 mile minimums for elites, as well as return elite bonus miles. Best of all it’s retroactive, and it doesn’t come with an announcement of another “enhancement.” I have no clue why it took the airline so long to realize that eliminating elite bonus miles is idiotic, but at least they’ve woken up a bit. I think the credit for this goes to Randy Petersen, who has fought like crazy to “Save Dividend Miles.”
As usual Delta is giving away miles for basically nothing, for everything except flying. There’s a pretty ridiculous offer right now where you can earn a 150% bonus (that’s right bonus, not 150% total) for a lot of partner activity. I’m not so sure I totally understand the promotion, since as usual their terms are as vague as humanly possible. Could this mean that transferring 20,000 SPG points translates into 62,500 miles? Does this mean you can earn over 50,000 miles just for signing up for a Delta credit card? The details are still unfolding in the FlyerTalk thread, but this could be worthwhile even for us non-DL folks.
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