128mb memory card, free after rebate.

Anticavity fluoride mouthwash, free sample.

Biz laundry boost, free sample.

eBay Anything Points is being phased out.

eBay is discontinuing a 2-year-old incentive program for sellers and partners in the United States, the company announced on Monday.



eBay Anything Points, which operates like a “frequent flyer” program to stimulate customer loyalty, will be phased out by Feb. 28, the company said. Points earned under the program will be honored through August 2006.

…

eBay will prevent sellers from offering the incentive points on new listings starting Aug. 15. eBay said it would, on Sept. 30, remove remaining points from listings still offering them.

The Anything Points program on eBay Canada will continue.

This is very disappointing news for me. Other than signing up for some free trial offers a year ago, I only used this on my Priceline bids. But the value proposition was compelling — 1000 to 1500 Anything Points on a successful bid, which converted at better than 1:1 into Cathay Pacific Asia Miles. And since 60,000 Asia Miles buys a British Airways business class ticket from the US East Coast to most destinations in Europe, the program offered $3000 – $5000 in airfare for 45 – 55 Priceline wins.

Soon I’ll have to go looking for the next best Priceline deal.

The travel section in today’s New York Times carries a review of Wynn Las Vegas… as though the property didn’t get enough press when it was opening.

This $2.7 billion hotel seems far from offering a flawless experience, and most folks seem disappointed. TripAdvisor reviews are decidedly mixed. I haven’t stayed there yet.

Now, no 2700 room property can possibly be a luxury hotel. Personal service seems impossible. Complexes are sprawling. Wait times will occasionally seem interminable, no matter how well the property is designed, when unusually large cohorts of guests decide to make us of the same thing at once (pool, elevators, checkin/checkout).

I have nothing against large resorts per se. I have an upcoming stay booked at the Westin Diplomat, and I enjoyed a trip to Wyndham’s El Conquistador in San Juan last year.

And the sprawling kitsch experience is what I actually want in Vegas. Sure, there’s a Four Seasons, and in most cases that might be more my preference. But when in Vegas I’ll want Vegas. And though the Bellagio is probably the nicer property, I have a particular strange affinity for the Venetian.

Since I’m not a gambler, I don’t have much juice in Vegas. So I like that all the rooms are suites (one one sort or another). And I like themes a la Paris, New York, etc.

The Venetian comes cheap, too. One trick to Vegas is to sign up for the various hotel newsletters to receive their special offers. The Venetian frequently offers midweek rates of $100/night. I often see offers from the Venetian below the rates that people are winning the hotel for on Priceline, and the Venetian offers might come with a room upgrade, match credits, or other benefits.

(Side note, for reliably inexpensive accomodations, The Orleans is a pretty good standby. It’s a basic, clean casino hotel and I’ve seen midweek rates on the hotel’s website as low as $13.)

Register to receive double miles on Delta for flights in September and October that are booked on Delta.com and paid for with an American Express card.

Click on this link by July 26 and choose “Reserve Your Free Gift Voucher” in the upper-right hand corner.

You’ll get a voucher for 500 free KLM miles when you book a ticket on klm.nl between by January 1, 2006.

Thanks to Free Frequent Flyer Miles for the link.

A new Destiny’s Child pre-paid Visa debit card was introduced last week.

It’s probably been in the works for awhile, so I’m sure there were plenty of groans when the executives involved learned that Destiny’s Child is breaking up.

Steven Levitt studies terrorism as an academic and realizes this makes him a threat to the state. It’s dangerous to carry pictures of 9/11 terrorists when you fly…

It’s also dangerous, by the way, to claim not to have a bomb or to carry a bible through a security checkpoint.

The new United Mileage Plus Visa Signature Platinum Class, detailed earlier this month, has an offer of 20,000 bonus miles with first purchase along with the other card benefits detailed in my previous post.

The application link won’t spell out the bonus miles — these links usually don’t — but the link is from an email clearly promising the bonus miles. In my experience with the United Visa, this works out perfectly well (although if you have any problems receiving the correct bonus, email me at gleff -at- yahoo.com and I’ll forward the text of the email).

• Free Dove deoderant sample
  
• Free $10 OfficeMax gift card for taking a survey from DHL.
  
• Free Bausch & Lomb ReNu contact solution sample. (I signed up for several at the same address, received them all.)

The thirty-minute no pee rule at Reagan National has been repealed.

Last year I explained why airlines instituted ‘fuel surcharges’ instead of simply announcing ‘price increases’.

One reason is that customers seem to accept price increases more readily when there’s a story that accompanies the change. Another reason is that surcharges are often permitted in negotiated corporate travel contracts that have fixed prices.

The dance that accompanies surcharges leads to some absurd explanations.

Northwest has announced that it will no longer ‘absorb’ passenger facility fees (which they have to pay to airports that they carry passengers cross), and as a result will be adding those fees onto tickets.

Gosh, I never knew that they were kindly ‘absorbing’ a fee for me. Turns out I was getting something for nothing!

Airlines have recently instituted ticketing fees for using their call centers or buying at the airport. One common explanation is that there’s a service which was previously being given away, now it will be purchased as though from an a la cart menu. Heh. I thought that it was just their cash register! Little did I know it was an extra optional service.

Northwest’s decision to increase fares for flights connecting through Houston and Memphis — which do not charge PFCs — puts the lie to Northwest’s claim that it is passing along a fee that it used to absorb.

Brad DeLong points to the fine print in a hotel’s complimentary breakfast offering

Fresh Fruit Parfait–Granola and yoghurt topped with Fresh Fruit OR Two farm fresh eggs, scrambled (Only) with choice of Bacon or Sausage. Served with country potatoes and a Croissant. Toast is not included with Hotel breakfast, Nor can it be substituted for the Croissant, however it can be purchased for $1.95. Coffee, Tea, Milk, Lemonade, Orange Juice, Apple Juice, or Pass-O-Guava Juice Only Is included with Hotel Breakfast Please No substitutions on Hotel breakfast. A $3.95 credit will be applied to other entries on the breakfast menu if you choose outside the box.

Two comments.

First, as Brad DeLong observes, the hotel squanders much customer goodwill through its complicated rules.

Second, this hotel has to be a good candidate for a six sigma project. Their rules are so complicated that the costs of enforcing them have to be higher than any incremental revenue the policy brings.

David Rowell notes in his latest weekly email that Florida has settled with 23 hotels that were accused of price gouging during last year’s hurricane season.

At One hotel in particular

the daily rate for rooms at the motel increased from $55 per night to $75 and, in some instances, $100 per night.

As a result

the Airport Inn will provide restitution to guests affected by the price gouging practices, many of whom were over age 60.

(I’m not sure why being 60 years old makes paying $75 for a hotel night especially problematic?)

I addressed this issue when it came up last year:

Via Chris Elliott, Florida’s attorney general filed complaints against two hotels for price gouging in the aftermath of Hurricane Charley.

The attorney general has issued a press release to let voters know he’s fighting evil, greedy corporations.

“Hurricane Charley is the worst natural disaster to befall our state in a dozen years, and it is unthinkable that anyone would try to take advantage of neighbors at a time like this. We are taking a two-pronged approach to fight this egregious behavior, ” said Crist. “Families putting their lives back together should not have to worry about price gouging.”

The conduct in question is a Days Inn charging $109 for a room when a billboard advertised $50 rooms, and a Crossroads Motor Lodge charging $61.27 (including all taxes and fees) rather than $44.79.

My blood doesn’t really boil at $109 hotel nights, even when it’s for an airport Days Inn. While there may be an advertised teaser rate of $50, the cheapest rate over a range of dates on the Days Inn website and on Expedia is $62.99, although I also found a pre-paid rate at Res99.com for $55.99 – along with a “DAYS INN ROCK BOTTOM RATE PROMOTIONAL RATE” of $71.99 and a “Standard Rate” (presumably rack) of $79.99.

The complainant indicates that they were renting one of the last rooms at the hotel, and the rates charged are presumably within the maximum posted daily rate for the property (that absurd room rate printed on the back of your hotel room door). Naturally the last rooms available at a property fetch a higher price, hotels and airlines refer to this as ‘yield management’ and economists call this allocating scarce resources to their highest valued use.

The Florida Attorney General outlines the details of Florida’s anti-gouging rule:

Florida’s price gouging statute requires that the cost of necessities like food and water must remain at the price that was average during the 30 days immediately preceding a major storm like Hurricane Charley.

I’m not even sure what it would mean to determine average prices for a 30 day period preceding an emergency. Hotels do calculate average daily room rates, but on any given day the price that any traveler will pay varies substantially. Would the Florida statute require not just avoiding price increases, but setting the mean price as the price ceiling for the duration of the declared emergency?

This seems an absurd conclusion given the industry’s status quo pricing practices, and an offensive one on basic freedom grounds. Thus I take umbrage with Chris Elliott who encourages readers to file complaints with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Though I don’t take too much umbrage because there’s something cool about sending such a complaint to Florida’s Commussioner of Agriculture, one Charles Bronson.

Tyler Cowen offered some interesting thoughts on why we don’t see more price gouging after Hurricane Isabel last year.

Joe Turner got food poisoning on a JAL flight. Not fun, and I can relate — I picked up salmonella last month on Qantas (in first, flying Melbourne to Los Angeles).

Doesn’t discourage me from flying, though, I’m just not sure how to ‘be more careful’ and avoid such things in the future. Thoughts?

Watch what you say. Don’t make fun of the law, or joke that you might be breaking the law. An air marshall might be listening.

Apparently an air marshall overhead some men on a plane talking about having crossed into the U.S. illegally so he had the plane met and the men taken into custody.

Some might say: great, law enforcement is present and acting against criminal activity.

I’m actually frightened by this, on several levels.

The expansion of law enforcement in our midst has been accepted as a way of fighting terrorism (though it’s unclear this particular method is effective in that fight). Now, once in under the cover of fear of terrorism, law enforcement has far greater access to our conversations by simple virtue of being closer to those conversations in daily life (not to mention more extensive searches, which have been used in questionable drug arrests).

Law enforcement officers no doubt are charged with enforcing laws rather than ignoring violations of law. And my own personal opinions of immigration law notwithstanding, most Americans would presumably like to see greater crackdown on violations of law rather than not. But the societal monitoring that is now taking place scares me, it really does.

A story in the Wall Street Journal yesterday has been much talked about on the web, the man who turned down 12 round-trip coach tickets for two from the U.S. to anywhere in the world American flies. (He won the ‘We Know Why You Fly’ contest, I’ll save mocking American’s ad campaign for another post.)

The man turned down the prize because American reported that each ticket would be worth $2200, and so his tax liability was going to be $800 per ticket. The tickets expire within a year, and he quite reasonably didn’t think he’d get as much value out of them as he’d be liable for in tax.

As the Journal piece notes, it is possible to dispute the reported value of a prize.

Contest winners do have alternatives, according to tax experts. Those who don’t agree with the way a company has valued a prize can submit an alternative price with their tax returns, says Martin Nissenbaum, the national director of personal income tax planning for Ernst & Young LLP in New York. He once had a client who won a stereo on “Jeopardy!” that the show valued at $2,000. His client saw an advertisement with a much lower price and sent the Internal Revenue Service the ad with her return to support the lower valuation. It often helps to submit an expert opinion; one from a travel agent would help in Mr. McCall’s case, Mr. Nissenbaum said.



Mr. McCall says he was aware of the possibility of challenging American’s valuation of the vouchers on his tax return, but he thought that tactic was too risky. “The problem with that is that if the IRS didn’t buy it, I’d be” in trouble, he says. “And if I report something different than what American does, that’s a red flag for an audit. And who wants to be audited by the IRS?”



Nora Butler, an IRS spokeswoman, says an audit wouldn’t necessarily result from such a return. Still, she said the agency might need further clarification. “The best option for a person in this situation is to try to work it out ahead of time” with the company giving the prize away, she says.

The article doesn’t explain how this process works. Though not to be confused with tax advice, here’s my understanding of it from personal experience:

First, you should attempt to negotiate with whomever provides the prize. The official way to do it (since in most cases you won’t be successful just asking for an adjustment) is to call the IRS at (800) 829-1040. It’s best to do so early in the morning in my experience, since you’ll have a better chance of getting through.

Explain that you received the 1099 and disagree with the amount that was reported on it, and that you’ve tried to resolve the situation but have been unable to.

Tell them that you were advised to have the IRS complete a Form 4598, “Form W-2 or 1099 Not Received or Incorrect.” It’s not something you can just download from their website.

You’ll need to give the IRS the payer information from the 1099 you received and the details of how you arrived at your own valuation figures.

The IRS will send the complaint form to the payer, who has 10 days to respond (you should receive a copy as well). Hopefully the payer will simply send a corrected 1099.

If you don’t receive a satisfactory response by the due date of your return, you have two options.

One is to include the amount that you believe to be correct on your return and attach the Form 4598 and an explanation. The IRS may later send you a notice of the discrepancy, so keep your records in good shape.

The other option is just to enter an adjustment as a negative amount. (You can even do that without going through the process of seeking to adjust with 1099, but your case may be more strongly documented if you’ve taken that step.)

If you received a Form 1099-MISC that shows $1,000 in box 3 for a prize yon won in a contest, but you know that a local store has the same item available for $750, you argue that the fair market value is $750. You can enter the $250 difference as a negative adjustment under Other Miscellaneous Income. One of the popular tax software packages advises that you enter “PRIZE FMV ADJUSTMENT” for the description and “-250″ for the amount.

No matter what course of action you pursue, you’ll want to document your adjustments, such as with ad clippings. If the prize was miles, and the fair market value was listed at a cost per mile greater than what the airline charges, simple printouts of the ‘purchase miles’ web pages should do the trick.

Last month I detailed Northwest’s Fly Free Faster 5 bonus. Over the past week I’ve gone through the hoops to earn it.

Last weekend I applied for a Northwest Visa Signature, I received the card on Friday . That qualified me for the Fly Free Faster 5 bonus. I promptly registered that credit card to earn Northwest miles at iDine (er, “Rewards Network”) restaurants.

Last Monday I transferred 1000 Goldpoints into 125 Northwest miles and 1000 Diners Club Club Rewards points into 1000 Northwest points.

This weekend I racked up two iDines with the Northwest credit card.

Once those points post, and I receive the Visa bill, I’ll have 5 partner credits and I’ll receive the 10,000 bonus miles. The Visa will provide another 25,000 miles, and I’ll earn about another 2,000 miles from the partner activities.

I’ve had fabulous oceanfront rooms and rooms with the neatest gadgets imaginable. I’ve stayed in suites at Ritz-Carltons.

Though not the largest or most technologically advanced I’m probably happiest with my room at Bora Bora Nui, if only for the view from my deck (here’s the view to the right). The ability to feed fish from the tub isn’t bad, either. The sunset, the view from the spa, and the incredible colors of the water made this the most beautiful physical property I’ve ever seen, though service at the property was a bit lacking.

Recently I’ve been musing over what properties are on my ‘must see’ list.

While reserving the right to change the list at any time, the hotels I’m meaning to see in the near future include:

• Cala di Volpe on Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda, and while in the same part of the world I figure I’ll stay at Hotel Villa Cirpriani in Italy and Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens, this last is one it’s hard to believe I haven’t visited yet — several friends have been and it doesn’t take that many Starwood points to stay there either.
  

• Four Seasons George V in Paris
  

• Banyan Tree Phuket in Thailand
  

• Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur
  

• Peninsula Bangkok in Thailand
  

• Four Seasons Chiang Mai also in Thailand (a theme is developing here)
  

• Little Nell in Aspen (since it’s supposed to be far nicer than than the Broadmoor)
  

• Parrot Cay Resort in Turks and Caicos
  

• The Montage in Laguna Niguel – I’ve been to the Ritz there, admittedly pre-renovation, but this is supposed to be a lot better
  

• Four Seasons Resort Bali at Jimbaran Bay in Indonesia

The nice thing is that I’ll be able to redeem Starwood points to stay at the first three hotels I’ve mentioned.

What hotels are on your list?

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There’s been a lot of buzz about a new United Airlines co-branded credit card. It’s expensive but has some great features. I haven’t chosen to carry it myself, but for frequent United flyers it may be just the right card.

First, the fee is $140 per year. That’s more than the regular Signature Visa at $60 and more than the Gold Class Visa Signature which is priced at $85 (and which comes with 2500 anniversary miles, double miles on United purchases, and up to 10,000 miles a year for balance transfers).

It’s also more expensive than the $30 Starwood American Express, to my mind the gold standard in mileage earning credit cards.

However, there are some interesting benefits to the new United card.

In addition to the 15,000 bonus miles with first purchase, 1000 mile upgrade certificate, and free companion ticket (all fairly standard offers), you get:

• double miles for United and Star Alliance ticket purchases
  

• double miles for ‘everyday purchases’ of groceries, dining, gas at the pump, and items from home improvement stores — a bonus which matches the Delta and Hilton American Express products.
  

• No mileage earning limit, something that the other United cards offer to United alite members.

But perhaps most intriguingly,

• 5,000 Elite Qualifying Miles after your first purchase

• 5,000 Elite Qualifying Miles when you spend $35,000 each year with your card
  

• One elite mile per dollar spent on ticket purchases at united.com, up to 5,000 total elite qualifying miles a year.

So if you’re a heavy spender who flies United and buys tickets online, you can rack up 15,000 miles towards elite status in the first year and 10,000 miles towards elite status in subsequent years. Some flyers will find this exceedingly valuable in the quest for status.

By the way, you’ve got to love the constant escalation in naming of Visa products. Once upon a time a Gold card was prestigious. Then Platinum came along. Then Signature. The United product offered a Visa Signature Gold Class. And now there’s Visa Signature Platinum Class. I don’t think Visa Signature Signature Class sounds particularly good, so I wonder what’s next in the naming arms race? After all, Visa Infinite really hasn’t caught on here (the ‘white card’ which was intended to compete with the Amex ‘black card’).