View from the Wing

Expedia has launched a new VIP program for their frequent customers that is strangely like… their old VIP program.

The program is called ElitePlus and offers fee waivers on changes and cancellations made through Expedia as well as a special phone number for assistance.

Most of the world avoids Expedia change fees by making changes directly with an airline, for instance. But existing Expedia VIP’s (what they used to be called) got their fees waived. And a special phone number. That last part is a real perk, I’ve heard of 3-hour hold times when contacting Expedia but I’ve always had my calls answered right away.

Sure, there are other throw-in benefits of dubious quality, such as ’special sales’ (more spam?). The announcement email, though not the website, notes that Expedia elite members will get access to a co-branded version of Mileage Manager.

It’s interesting to learn, in any case, the qualification threshold to become an elite Expedia customer — $10,000 in travel spend or 12 hotel nights in a year via the booking site.

Through November 30, American Express Membership Rewards is offering a 50% bonus on transfers to Starwood, Hilton, Priority Club, and Best Western.

In most cases this still won’t represent a good value. In fact, with the bonus, Hilton transfers are still shy of 1 Amex point to 2 Hilton points — which is what you can get all the time with a small dance of going Amex to Hawaiian to Hilton.

Still, in the past I’ve transferred Amex to Starwood using a similar promotion. The normal rate there is 3:1 and this makes it 2:1. But that was before the Starwood devaluation…

(Hat tip to the MilesLink Newsletter.)

Just when I diss Amtrak Guest Rewards (and this doesn’t help with my trust of the program or with their customer service issues), they introduce a new redemption option — 5,000 Amtrak points convert to 25,000 Choice Privileges Points.

The extreme value here is:

• 5,000 Amtrak points yield 25,000 Choice points which convert to 5,000 miles with Air Canada, Alaska, American, Continental, Delta, Mexicana, Northwest, United, and USAirways. Talk about flexibility!
  

• 10,000 Amtrak points yield 50,000 Choice points which convert to 20 Southwest Rapid Rewards credits, more than enough (16 required) for a free ticket.
  

  50,000 Amtrak points yield 250,000 Choice points which convert to 100 Southwest Rapid Rewards credits, which earns you a companion pass and 6 roundtrip tickets (that can be used for you and your companion.

Now, Amtrak still imposes a limit of 25,000 points transferred out of its program in a calendar year (50,000 points if you’re an Amtrak elite). But you can always transfer out 25,000 in December and 25,000 in January.

Don’t park points in the Amtrak program — they make program changes without much if any notice — and don’t park points in Choice Privileges, either, because those points expire. But this is a great new option.

By the way, don’t transfer Choice Privileges points directly into Amtrak, the conversion there is 32,000 Choice points yield 5,000 Amtrak points. Instead, transfer 25,000 Choice points into 5,000 Continental into 5,000 Amtrak.

And finally, this means that Continental points now transfer 1:1 into all of the airlines that Choice points transfer to (up to 25,000 per year, the cap imposed by Amtrak for transfers out of its program).

It’s not just miles and points, I’m looking for deals in just about everything that I do. I don’t always sweat the small stuff, a dollar here or there, but if it isn’t costly to do so I will (I’ll grab frequent flyer miles or Fatwallet cashback even on a $15 purchase).

I scrounge for coupons when making online purchases, I used to find Googling the online store’s name and ‘coupon’ would work but there are so many bogus coupon sites looking for their own referral commissions that it’s a pain to sort through. In addition to searching Ev Rewards for the best shopping portal returns, I also head over to the Hot Deals forum at Fatwallet (and to a lesser extend Slick Deals) and search for the merchant I’m buying from, it’s amazing how many coupons get posted.

Sometimes, though, a coupon will cancel out cashback or miles, so it’s important to either know, check, or just beware.

Unfortunately, though, the costs of my strategy to always get the ‘best deal’ can outweigh the returns, or at least come close to doing so. Sometimes the costs are obvious, such as adding flight connections to maximize miles can mean not just longer travel times but also greater risks for irregular operations and then the whole thing backfires. But sometimes it’s less obvious.

I get my cable and internet through Comcast. I had a signup deal when I moved into my current home 15 months ago, and they finally raised the price on me. So my wife called, first to cancel HBO (we’ll add it back when Entourage and/or Big Love return, but in the meantime we never watch it). Then she decided to sign up for their ‘triple play’ of internet, phone service, and cable. (She learns these things from me.) The price was about $30 a month less than just cable and internet. We had no interest in the phone, we use just our cell phones, but they insisted on actually installing the phone before giving us the deal. We set an appointment for 6am - 9am on Sunday so that it wouldn’t kill our whole day waiting for the cable guy.

Phone installed, no problem (though we don’t have a handset, we don’t plan on using it, and we’ll cancel after a year and put the cable in my name instead of hers to sign up for the best deal again.

Then 10 minutes after the “tech” left, our internet stopped working. Phone call to Comcast, they couldn’t fix it, so they scheduled an appointment for another “tech” to return between noon and 3pm. Ack, we’ll have to wait around home for the guy to come… Meanwhile, back on the phone with Comcast (because just like with the airlines, if you don’t get the answer you want, hang up and call back) the next person seemed to get close to fixing the problem. They couldn’t “see” our modem at first either, but then they managed to reset it. Alas, no internet.

We waited for the tech, who naturally didn’t make it by 3pm. He looked and said “everything looks fine, nothing I can do here,” called Comcast and got them to open a ‘trouble ticket’ (sounds like trouble!). But his cell phone got cut off, he called back and got another tech who insisted on trying to actually fix the problem first. Which he did.

Turns out that when they set up the account for phone service, they turned off our internet. And nobody could puzszle this out before, and most didn’t even bother to try.

Finally got internet back at 4pm. I was productive around the house, and I got a ton of work done without the internet to distract me. But I’m not sure the savings was worth it…

A deal in theory can easily be ruined by incompetence or bad faith on the part of the deal provider. I’ve frequently seen tremendous offers cut off long before their expiration date, or miles ‘mysteriously’ not post preventing me from earning a bonus — most people give up, but a real fight usually prevails.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s even worth it. And then I get angry, that a company like Comcast can suck the life force out of me so.

Scott McCartney’s latest column is on the various flight status websites you can use to track a flight, monitor position, gate changes, etc.

Frequent travelers know that airline websites, and those from the major booking services, are often lacking. The conclusion of the piece? That my own favorite and most used, FlightStats.com, comes out as most useful and reliable. (This is also the one which the KVS Availability Tool integrates with.)

Not mentioned in the piece, one of my favotire tricks for United Airlines flight status is to check United Cargo, when a flight is delayed this site will give you the real reason why — useful when the airline doesn’t want to give you compensation, claiming that a delay is due to ‘weather’.

Update: Upgrade: Travel Better reports that American’s cargo website offers useful delay information as well.

So you have to ride the train, and at least they give you points for that. But that’s more or less all you can say about Amtrak Guest Rewards.

I used to like their 2500 point award, one-way in the Northeast Corridor for unreserved service. I’d keep some tickets on hand. Of course, Amtrak doesn’t even have unreserved service anymore. And they upped the point requirements with just hree weeks’ notice. And they both imposed maximum points transferred out of the program in a year and dropped United as a partner without any notice at all. These more or less made me not trust the Guest Rewards program.

But their problems go even farther. Amtrak Guest Rewards has just implemented online award booking. In other words, they’ve entered the ’90s. But there’s a glitch. In one of my tree trials, the system encountered an error, didn’t complete the booking, but had already pulled the points from my account. (A reason perhaps to stay with telephone award booking for the moment, as much as I hate the phone and even though telephone hours are limited, a customer service problem in and of itself.)

I emailed Guest Rewards, even knowing that their email customer service is lacking. But the response I got was a new low. It wasn’t a generic, random cut-and-paste reply. It was a non-reply. Here it is, in its entirety:

Thank you for contacting the Amtrak Guest Rewards Service Center.
Please call us at 800.307.5000 Monday - Friday from 8 am - 8 pm EST if you have further questions or concerns regarding your Amtrak Guest Rewards account.

It took three full days to receive this by the way. How could i have further questions, when they didn’t bother to try to reply to the first one at all?

Amtrak Guest Rewards - among the worst programs, up there with Radisson’s Goldpoints, and only marginally better than GlobalPass.

Citibank is offering 25,000 bonus miles and first year free for the Ameircan Airlines business and personal mastercards and personal American Express. All cards require $750 in spending within the first four months to qualify for the bonus.

These cards can generally be churned every few months, and signing up for all is 75,000 miles at a pop.

Alaska Airlines has followed the industry trend and announced a new mileage expiration policy. They’re moving from the old standard of three years to two.

Now, they’re still more generous than the current reigning policy in the industry of 18 months. And any activity, earning or redeeming, will keep an account active — no worrying about which kinds of miles extend and account and which do not. And finally, there’s an explicit way to extend expired miles — within a year of expiration, a $75 fee will reactivate an account.

Last year I kept my brother-in-law’s Alaska account active by signing him up for a free Points.com account. I think he earned 20 miles.

The MilesLink newsletter points out that the first date that miles will expire is April Fools’ Day 2008. Heh.

Juniper Bank, which issues the USAirways Mastercard — one of the better airline mileage card values — now has a business card though it isn’t quite as lucrative.

The best offers for the personal card include two years fee-free, 50% bonus miles on first year spending, and 15,000 miles with first purchase.

The business card will match the signup bonus but at a $79 annual fee. (There’s a no fee version with just 5000 bonus miles at signup.)

iDine (aka Rewards Network) has a new Delta dining for miles bonus that offers both redeemable miles and elite qualifying miles (registration required). Four qualifying dines of $25 or more in October and November earns a bonus 1000 miles that even count towards status.

Now, it’s just 1000 miles. But the notable thing is that the bonus offers the opportunity to earn elite status for something other than flying.

Already increasingly common (and in some measure pioneered by Delta) is elite status through credit card spending.

And last year USAirways offered its ‘Everything Counts’ promo at the end of the year where most miles (credit card spending excluded) counted towards status. Some Dividend Miles members became Chairmans Preferred 100,000 mile ‘flyers’ by sending a whole lot of flowers.

So this is another step in that direction, one that clearly recognizes the value of frequent flyer program partners and partner revenue. We’ll likely see more offers of this sort, and from more airlines, over time.

Traditionally frequent flyer miles are redeemed for capacity controlled awards. Airlines offer a limited number of seats for redemption that they expect would otherwise go unsold. And some travelers are frustrated they can’t find the seats.

But in general there’s always been the option to spend more miles in order to get any open seat. With United, it’s the “Standard” award rather than “Saver.” With Delta, this higher mileage option has been known as “SkyChoice.”

But Delta has announced that as of December 1, spending double the miles no longer gets you any seat. Instead, it just gets you access to more award inventory.

Now they’re not the only airline to do this. They’re following Northwest’s lead. But they’re still in the minority.

Rulebuster, Standard — or whatever you want to call them — awards are rarely useful (I prefer hunting and pecking for capacity controlled awards to get the most out of my miles). But when they are useful, they’re very useful.

It’s nice to know that with the mileage balances I have and with just a few hours notice I can get on just about any plane in the world and only pay the taxes (and perhaps a telephone or airport ticketing fee, grrr). It’s nice to know that if I really need to be somewhere, I can be. A last minute trip to a funeral, perhaps, where the tickets are prohibitively expensive.

United used to offer one of the great award values period in their higher-priced mileage chart — until last October, any business class seat from North America to Australia (no capacity controls!) was 150,000 miles. They’ve raised the price of that award, but at least they still respect the idea that more miles can buy you any seat.

Delta has raised the price of its SkyChoice awards, especially international premium class awards. Now that these awards will be capacity controlled as well, you might think they’d lower the price. Alas, I’m not that naive…