View from the Wing

I’m betting this deal will not be honored — just my gut — but the Conrad in Bangkok is showing up at $16/night for a suite and $51/night for the Presidential Suite. Discussion over at Flyertalk.

You can book a prepaid reservation at Priceline (using their conventional booking tool, not their “Name Your Own Price” bidding system). This can also be found on Travelocity and American Express Travel without prepaying.

Prepaid bookings might have a better chance of being honored, but as with all these things there are no guarantees. I’m betting name changes and date changes certainly will not be allowed if the deal is honored at all. So choose a booking, get in on the offer if you wish, and then wait and see. Certainly don’t book other prepaid travel around this stay until it’s certain whether or not the deal is being honored.

There’s all kinds of misinformation and speculation being reported as fact as to why John Mark Karr flew business class back to the United States.

On an early news show this morning I heard it was for security, that somehow there was less chance of Karr escaping custody (from 35,000 feet?) from the business class cabin. Another theory espoused in the news piece I’m linking to here is that by treating him well he might spill the beans a bit more.

Regardless, the description of Thai Airways business class is somewhat amusing (in a twisted sort of way, given the underlying subject matter):

Before takeoff, Karr took a glass of champagne from a flight attendant and clinked glasses with Spray, who sipped orange juice.



Dinner on board, served on a starched white tablecloth with silverware, was one many passengers would envy. Karr started with a pate, then had a green salad with walnut dressing. The main course was fried king prawn with steamed rice and broccoli, followed by a slice of Valrhona chocolate cake for desert. Karr drank a beer, crushing the can with his hands when it was empty, then moved on to a glass of French chardonnay with his main course.

…

After dinner, he flipped through the movie channels and watched “The Last Samurai” starring Tom Cruise. He also dozed on and off, and two guards accompanied him on several trips to the bathroom, each time leaving the door slightly ajar.

United is offering 5000 to 15000 bonus miles for flying its new non-stop between Washington-Dulles and Tokyo between October 28, 2006 and March 31, 2007.

15,000 miles is for paid First Class and Paid Business Class (except for Z fares). 7,500 miles is for Z fare business class and expensive coach fares (Y, B, M, H, Q fares). 5,000 miles for less expensive coach fares (V,W,S,T,K fares).

The bonus can be earned up to 3 times, and flights between December 20, 2006 and January 10, 2007 do not earn the bonus.

Registration is required.

You do need to be a Toyota owner, though, since they ask for your vehicle identification number. Sign up here.

You’re asked to enter a promo code, just click the ‘need help’ link beneath the promo code box and you’ll be given a code to enter.

Miles apparently post within a couple weeks, at least according to reports on Flyertalk.

Points.com is offering 5000 American, USAirways, or Alaska miles for upgrading to a ‘Gold’ membership for $49.95. The membership isn’t worth much, but buying miles at one cent apiece is generally a good deal.

There’s no clear expiration date on the offer, so verify that your mileage choice is available before offering up payment.

This has already gone out over Fare Alert so not sure how long this will last. As discussed on Flyertalk, there’s a $156+tax first class fare from Harrisburg, PA (just a few hours drive from DC) to St. Croix on USAirways.

Go to Travelocity (or the USAirways site), enter MDT and STX as your origin and destination, and select discounted first class for your fare type. (Or don’t specify fare type, it will still pull up this fare as it’s the cheapest fare in the market even for coach.)

Service is only on Saturdays — and only from Aug 12 to Sep 2 and starting again November 4 — so you either fly in and out same day (just under an hour in the airport!) or stay for a full week.

It’s an A fare which is a discounted first class fare and you are given the first class seat map to choose from. So yes, this is a first class fare.

Not all Saturdays will work. Since A fares are ‘discounted first’ they won’t be available on all flights, especially those that are already heavily booked.

Passed along to me this morning, thanks to Don: American Express is promoting
adding an authorzed user to your Starwood Amex account by offering 2500 Starwood points with the first additional card requested.

The offer comes via email — the web page for adding an authorized user to your account does not mention the bonus. No offer code is listed. The terms and conditions (which don’t mention this as targeted or restricted in any way to recipients of the email) are as follows:

Terms and Conditions (when applicable)


1. The Additional Cardmember must be 18 or older and never have had a defaulted account with American Express. Any account you have with American Express must not be in default.



2. 2,500 bonus Starpoints will be awarded to your Starpoints Account in 8-12 weeks for an approved Additional Card submitted with this application. Bonus offer applies to first Additional Card only.

Now, I already have one authorized user on my own account. I don’t know whether I can earn the bonus by adding one more user or not. Perhaps they screened out cardholders that already have an authorized user on their card account, which would explain why I didn’t receive this myself, but that’s speculation based on a single data point.

You might call Amex for clarification, though the odds of the customer service rep having any idea (or getting the correct answer if they do) is probabilistic at best.

Still, the chance at 2500 Starwood points may be worth the effort, especially since no fee is involved for adding a card to the account.

Taking off your shoes at the security checkpoint is now mandatory — as though it wasn’t before.

Okay, it varied by airport, with some incredulous TSA staffers asking passengers “WHAT are you doing taking off your shoes? You don’t have to do that!” (in the same tone one might ask, “have you soiled your underwear AGAIN?”)

But generally shoe removal was ‘recommended’ but optional — though if you chose not to, you received secondary screening that included taking off your shoes. Now you have to take them off in the first instance. And no more soiled comments from screeners.

The joke of it is that the x-ray machines you’re putting your shoes through can’t actually detect explosives.

So what’s the nonsense reason for taking off shoes? Consistency! Oh, and in case you’re concealing a James Bond-style (or is it Maxwell Smart?) gun in your 1/4 inch heel:

TSA spokeswoman Yolanda Clark said putting shoes on the X-ray machines makes the screening process more efficient and eliminates confusion. “We do not have a specific threat regarding shoes,” Clark said. “In an abundance of caution we require all shoes to be removed and X-rayed to mitigate a variety of threats,” such as potential weapons.

The New York Times mentions one of the neat tricks about international travel. If you’re going to buy a business class ticket somewhere, it’s often no more expensive to buy a business class round-the-world ticket and get a lot of extra flying for free. Where you buy the ticket and start the journey makes a ton of difference in the cost, as the Upgrade Travel Blog observes:

Start in Sri Lanka. If you’re going around the world twice or more, consider buying the second (and third, etc.) ticket someplace like Colombo, Sri Lanka. I’m not kidding. You can buy a business class RTW ticket there for about the same price as a coach RTW ticket in the US or most of Europe, on the same airlines. The article mentions this, but it’s really worth driving home.

And if you’re buying lots of premium class international tickets, consider crediting miles to the bmi program.

I’m a little late to the game here, most items are already sold out, but the W Hotels Store is having a blowout sale with items up to 80% off. At least it appears that they’re adding items to the sale, so keep checking back as well. I just picked up a couple shirts.

I get pitched pretty regularly with emails touting the next great travel tool, item for purchase, or community and wouldn’t I like to write about it on this website?

Two recent emails I’ve gotten, though, highlight some things that may be actually useful. One is About Airport Parking which the website’s creator describes as:

I just wanted to let you know about a new site we just
launched, www.aboutairportparking.com. We’ve collected information, including prices, on all the major lots we could find in the U.S. We then integrated this data with Google Maps to make it easier for people to find the right lot for them. We also include some traveler tools like current flight status and average security wait times, but it’d be a great idea to also include real-time parking availability down the road.

The other site is ev’reward which is a search tool for frequent flyer rewards. They say they offer all rewards — not the just shopping rewards you’ll find at one of my favorite sites, RewardsDB — but I really do just like it for finding the best frequent flyer rewards for online shopping. It apparently updates itself automatically rather than manually (a la RewardsDB) so should keep pretty current. Invaluable.

(Virtually everything you can buy online should earn miles if you first start out at a rewards portal, but the key is knowing whic portal works with which merchant and which one generates the most points. That’s the usefulness of sites like RewardsDB and evrewards.)

I’m quoted in a Sunday Washington Post story on missing frequent flyer miles. Michael Shapiro goes looking for why frequent flyer miles we earn don’t always post to our accounts.

Most of the time it isn’t the fault of the airline or hotel whose miles you’re accuing. Generally they have to be told what miles to credit by the partner you earned the miles with. The most frequent reason miles don’t get posted is because you haven’t given the number to the partner in the first place.

Sometimes, of course, that’s not your fault. I’ve had American Airlines reps not know how to enter a Mexicana Frecuenta number. And websites like Orbitz don’t even give you a chance to enter partner frequent flyer numbers (this feature is one thing I prefer about Expedia).

There can be glitches in the way data is transferred. Some partners don’t report miles very often, or partners that actually send over data on tape have problems with the medium. But usually it’s as simple as not entering a number in the first place. (Online shopping points can be a bit trickier, relying on web technology and cookies for tracking information.)

It’s rarely the case of an unscrupulous partner who just doesn’t want to pay for the points (though this does happen once in a blue moon, especially with smaller merchants or vendors going out of business).

My best advice is to track the miles due to you in a spreadsheet, and follow up when points haven’t posted in the correct amount of time. Then keep following up. Relentless pursuers of miles get the credits. While it may seem annoying and hardly worthwhile, keeping on top of miles adds up and yields the award tickets at the end of the day.

Starwood is offering two VIP tickets and backstage passes to a Shakira concert for 20,000 Starwood points.

Eleven concerts are listed and 10 packages are available per concert. The offer is limited to ‘elite members’ apparently, but not just Platinums. Not a bad experiential redemption if you’re into that sort of thing.

Upgrade Travel Blog has a detailed explanation about why the myth of buying tickets Wednesday at midnight is wrong.

The myth goes this way:

What’s the absolute best time to purchase a ticket directly from the airlines? Turns out it’s Wednesday from midnight to 1a.m. in the time zone of the airline’s “home base.”[...] Why? That’s when the computer systems of most airlines get rid of the reserved but unbooked lower fare reservations.

However,

1. Held reservations don’t all expire Wednesdays
2. Most fares that are put on hold aren’t that cheap to begin with
3. Midnight isn’t when new fares are loaded — they’re distributed at 10:00am, 12:30pm, and 8pm EST and loaded about 2-6 hours later in the GDS and airline sites.

Read the whole thing.

Alaska Airlines is ending its 1000 mile online booking bonus September 5th. Beginning September 6th, though, you’ll be able to earn the bonus only by paying with an Alaska Airlines Visa.

And somehow the article introduces this as an exciting new improvement, titling as New 1,000 Mile Online Booking Bonus. Heh.

The New York Times ran a piece on the science of dealing with jet lag. But who’s going to do this?

Dr. Charmane I. Eastman, director of the Biological Rhythms Research Lab at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, said she had found one way to virtually eliminate jet lag from, say, a New York-Milan flight.



It involves resetting your body clock with small doses of the hormone melatonin for three days before flight time — combined with going to bed an hour earlier each day — and then taking in bright light, natural or artificial, after arriving in Italy about six hours later. She recommends using a light box, widely used to treat the “winter blues.”

Better is the article’s suggestion to drink some coffee and take a better. Better still, here are my previous tips on jet lag.

Worldperks University has added a new, third course — read a couple quick screens, take a three question ‘quiz’, and get 100 bonus miles. The offer says miles post in 3-4 weeks, but they actually post instantly.

When you complete the quiz you also become eligible for

Book and fly one roundtrip flight on an NWA- or KLM-operated flight within the next 90 days and earn an additional 2,000 Bonus Miles.

Back in March Northwest introduced the first two easy quizzes, I’m glad to be able to ‘enroll’ in another one at the start of a new semester…

(Hat tip to Slippahs.)

Air Tahiti Nui has long been a partner of American Airlines, has recently added Northwest Airlines, and was supposed to add Delta — for redemption only. You can spend lots of points to get to Tahiti but if you’re flying Air Tahiti Nui on a paid ticket you’re not going to earn miles — unless you pay to join Air Tahiti Nui’s own program (doesn’t make sense for most) or book the flights as Qantas codeshares.

That’s now changed.

As of August 1, you now can earn American miles when flying Air Tahiti Nui. These are not “elite qualifying miles” so they won’t help you keep your Gold, Platinum, or Executive Platinum status. But they’re redeemable miles.. the kind that will help you earn towards your next award flight to Tahiti!

Most coach fares (Y, M, K, H, T, L) earn miles — however ‘V’ fares do not. Air Tahiti Nui web specials, for instance, are offered as both T and V — with the real cheapies in V — so just a heads up that sometimes the rock bottom specials won’t earn miles.

Business class earns a 25% bonus and first class earns a 50% bonus on miles flown.

Give your American mileage number to Air Tahiti Nui when booking. If the miles don’t post, or you haven’t given them the mileage number, you can send the boarding passes in for credit…

Via the Upgrade Travel Blog, USAirways is selling day passes to its lounges for $25 through August 31 — rather than their usual $40 — by mentioning promo code ES25. Details here.

Most US carriers sell day passes for $50, though $25 is the usual price for access to the Alaska Airlines Boardroom without a membership. (Boardroom members can buy day passes as gifts for only $15, and a year and a half back Alaska was selling these around Christmastime for only $12.50.)

Hotel Chatter interviews the custom party planner for Hooters Hotel in Vegas, who will arrange ‘anything that’s legal’. He’ll arrange “Celebrate your Divorce” packages and put stripper poles in your room.