Hyatt is offering double credits towards elite qualification on stays during the first three months of 2008. Registration required.

Randy Petersen puts the smack down and gets the straight story on Amtrak transfers to Choice Hotels.

I recently reported that Amtrak reduced the value of transfers to Choice Hotels with no notice and then removed the option altogether.

From NotiFlyer

[Members are] again be able to transfer points from Guest Rewards to their Choice Privileges account at a rate of 5,000 to 15,000 points, and transfers will be completed for members who were in the middle of a transfer when the closure occurred. According to Blakey, the exchange option will remain in effect through the end of 2007, at which time changes to the program will be instituted. As of Jan. 1, 2008, the Guest Rewards exchange program will only be available to elite members (Select and Select Plus) and members who hold an Amtrak co-branded MasterCard. Elite members will be able to transfer at a rate of 5,000 Guest Rewards points to 15,000 Choice Privileges points.



A few members have reported points being removed from their Choice Privileges accounts, points which had been transferred from Amtrak Guest Rewards. According to Blakey, the only members who have been impacted by these removals are those who opened more than one Amtrak Guest Rewards account, which violates the programs’ terms and conditions. He told us that any points removed from Choice Privileges accounts will be returned back into the members’ Guest Rewards account.

Amtrak twice made changes with no notice, then retracted some already-transferred points, but is putting those points back in accounts. They’ve also made the transfer option available again but just for the next two weeks, and next year you’ll need to get their co-branded credit card to be able to make Choice hotels transfers (at the new, lower rate).

At least they’re honoring redemptions already made, and coming clean on what they’re planning.

It was too good a deal to last — especially with a program that has such a bad reputation as Guest Rewards.

Singapore’s A380 really is amazing in first class, as this trip report from the recent inaugural flight clearly shows.

Good luck getting an award seat, though. Singapore isn’t an easy redemption in first class to begin with. Their premium product is near impossible. And it’ll be awhile until there’s a full A380 fleet as well.

USAirways has apparently added a $5 surcharge to flights booked on its own website. CrankyFlier has the goods.

This seems inconsistent with USAirways’ own policies

There is no booking fee for tickets purchased or redeemed on usairways.com.

However, when CrankyFlier confronted USAirways with evidence — that the website was pricing out itineraries $5 higher than the airline’s published fares — they acknowledged it, but refuse to call it a booking fee.

[T]he $5 increase you’re seeing is essentially a fare increase to fares booked at usairways.com.”

Regardless of the semantics, it is now $5 more expensive to book tickets at usairways.com than it is to book at some other online engines such as Priceline.com (their traditional airfare booking site, not the name your own price site – Priceline doesn’t add booking fees).

Even booking through Expedia, Orbitz, or Travelocity is superior as you can access those sites via a cashback portal (eg FatWallet, but always check EvRewards for the best current offers) and receive a rebate that in many cases is larger than the booking fee those sites charge.

Back in July, I wrote up a primer on securing Star Alliance awards. In it, I alluded to Starnet, the system that United uses for booking these awards for Mileage Plus members.

Its search capabilities are primitive (you often can find better availability searching segment-by-segment that you can telling the agent your origina and destination, simply because it doesn’t search many possible connections).

But most vexxing for frequent flyers is that the system filters availability. That is, a partner airline may be offering a seat for award redemption — but United’s system will still tell you it’s unavailable. The agent will usually blame the partner (“they aren’t offering any seats”) when that isn’t true at all. Instead, United doesn’t want to pay for the seat.

United is known to ‘filter out’ availability especially of Luftansa flights within Europe and Thai Airways premium class flights between Europe and Bangkok. But I never grasped just how extensive the filtering was on these routes until I started playing with an award from North American to Asia via the Atlantic (strange as it may seem, the distance is seven miles less for my destination and preferred routings than crossing the Atlantic.. availability supposedly better.. and offering a potentially better premium class experience).

Alas.

This morning I searched 53 dates in May and June using ANA’s award booking tool and found 51 flights on which Thai Airways was offering not just one but two award seats in First Class from London-Heathrow to Bangkok.

When I called United, I was told that there were no flights available with two first class awards during this period of time.

Then I asked United to check Franfurt-Bangkok. This is a tougher route, with only 9 flights showing two first class award seats available during this time. So unsurprisingly, United won’t book a single one.

Let’s be perfectly clear about what is going on here. United’s partners are offering award seats. United just won’t book them.

When pressed, United might say ‘different award inventory is made available to different partners’ but even that is a slight of hand — they’re really saying ‘different partners (ie, us – United) make different award inventory available to our members than other airlines make available to theirs.’

Lufthansa or Thai may well have inventory open in the “O” bucket (award first class). StarNet pretends it’s not there.

Shame on United — for refusing the offer seats your partners make available, and for claiming it’s your partners’ faults.

Continental Airlines inflight currency, the kind that pays for drinks and headsets, is acceptable onboard by Northwest. I never realized that, and apparently many Northwest flight attendants don’t, either. (In addition to selling scrip at checkin kiosks, Continental gives these out to their OnePass Platinum members.)

It’s confirmed by Northwest on a Flyertalk thread that the Northwest flight attendant manual is clear on this fact under amenity coupons (section 365.1.4 if feeling particularly confrontational about the subject).

A very minor issue, to be sure, but something I never knew for sure. Drink up!

Flyertalk member cockpitvisit has created a Windows downloadable program to see a graphical depiction of the route maps of over 100 airlines.

It’s interesting in its own right, to be sure. But for me it’s a useful tool in coming up with award itineraries. Say, for instance, that I’m trying to book a premium class award with United miles and I’d like to include a transpacific segment on Signapore airlines. I may already know that Singapore flies from LAX to Tokyo, Tapei, and Singapore. And from San Francisco to Seoul and Hong Kong. But I could easily have forgotten the option of flying Vancouver to Seoul.

Here’s the download link for the zipped file, a screen shot of the program, and the Flyertalk thread discussing it.

Admittedly for the true airline geeks among us.

First Amtrak reduces the value of points transfers to Choice Hotels with no notice whatsoever. Now the option to transfer to Choice is gone entirely, a matter of days later.

This just piles on the history of customer unfriendly business practices for this program (limiting the number of points transferred out of the program in a year with no notice, dropping their partnership with United with no notice). The Carlson folks run the program like a true clown operation.

According to Inside Flyer magazine (subscription required) the Barack Obama campaign has launched a points program for volunteers. Earning opportunities include marching in a parage or signing a supporter card (or getting someone else to do so) for 25 points, and working a phone bank for 50 points.

They haven’t published a redemption chart, and BaltimoreSun.com cites the campaign’s online organizer as saying the points system is primarily a way for supporters to measure they impact they are having on the campaign.

But really, this just formalizes a process that all campaigns have — what you give is a primary determinant of what you get. They could easily partner with the custom rewards engines at American Express or Diners Club, where enough points could be redeemed for a dream experience… Like Secretary of Commerce in an Obama Administration.

Priority Club offers ‘any hotel, anywhere’ as an award — you redeem your points for an Amex Gift Card for use on hotel purchases. These can be used to pay hotel bills anywhere you wish. The idea is that you aren’t limited to Priority Club hotels with your Priority Club points. The usual downside? You get less than half a cent in value per Priority Club point. Standard hotel redemptions offer far better return.

However, through December 15th, Priority Club is offering these ‘Any Hotel, Anywhere’ redemptions at half off. You can get better than 4/5th of a cent per point (double the value). This actually makes for a pretty good deal.

First, because you’re paying for your room instead of redeeming points. And that means whatever hotel you’re staying at should be earning you points.

Second, because Priority Club is iffy at best at offering elite benefits on award stays. So if you are spending ‘any hotel anywhere’ cards at a Priority Club property, you may experience better elite treatment than if you had booked an award.

Finally, since the reduction in value of Priority Club points (for instance, an Intercontinental property redemption went from 30,000 to 40,000 points per night), Priority Club points aren’t frequently worth more than 4/5ths of a cent anyway. In fact, the breakeven point between the top-level hotel gift card redemption and an Intercontinental room night redemption is a room rate of $332 — leaving points earning and flexibility aside.

For this reason I’m going to be snagging a bunch of these gift cards!

The front page of Spirit Air’s website is currently advertising a MILF sale — “Many Islands, Low Fares” — and an airline that’s really not otherwise worth writing about finally gets some buzz.

(Hat tip to Rick Seaney.)

Reader Keith asks:

One of your latest posts, about the Starwood to BA bonus, made me wonder whether you think it would be worth moving the miles from Starwood to BA even if I have no current plans to use an award. I generally park miles in Starwood, but a 30% bonus seems tempting, so I was thinking about moving over enough for a business class ticket. I’m not sure how I’d use them, but I live in Chicago, so I wouldn’t think redemption options for BA would be that hard.

I wouldn’t. BA miles just aren’t a great place to park miles, or a value even with a 30% transfer bonus. These are all great bonuses if you need to top off a BA account, or need an award for which only BA miles are a good solution. But otherwise keep your points in Starwood. Allow me to illustrate.

From Chicago to most of Europe a business class award will run you 120,000 British Airways miles. Normally you’d need 100,000 Starwood points to get there (transferred over the course of two days you’d get 125,000 British Airways miles.). With this promo it takes 80,000 transferred over two days, and you wind up with 130,000 BA miles.

Without any promo you can transfer 65,000 Starwood points to Cathay Pacific and get enough AsiaMiles for a business class ticket to most of Europe on Cathay’s partner… British Airways. (And that’s after the October devaluation of AsiaMiles — it used to take only 50,000 Starwood points for a British Airways transatlantic business class ticket departing the U.S. East Coast.)

So, no, I wouldn’t speculatively transfer Starwood points out to BA and park them there.

There are times this promo would be very useful, but BA’s award chart is generally pricey enough for premiunm

Via InsideFlyer (subscription required), American Express has added Hawaiian Airlines and Virgin Atlantic to its ‘Flight Finder’ tool which allows you to search for award seats, transfer books, and book the flight in a single transaction.

Previously, Airtran’s program was the only one incorporated into the Amex tool. If they keep adding partners, this will be an enormously useful technological improvement — simplifying the award booking process for Membership Rewards members. (Folks like me still don’t mind separating out award search from points transfers, especially with Amex partners that are ‘live’ – meaning that the points transfer happens instantaneously.)

Transfers of Starwood points to British Airways generate a 30% bonus from January 1 to March 31, 2008. The bonus applies both to the base points transferred and to the 5000 bonus points for each 20,000 transferred. So 40,000 Starwood points become 65,000 BA miles instead of the usual 50,000. (In order to maximize your bonuses, don’t transfer more than 60,000 Starwood points in a day.)

Through February 29, Diners Club transfers to British Airways come with a 50% bonus. I long for the days of the 100% Diners transfer bonuses to BA, but those are long gone. At least they’ve stabilized at 50% coming along regularly.

Also through February 29th is a 30% bonus on Hyatt transfers to BA and a 30% bonus on Hilton transfers to BA.

T-Mobile is offering 10,000 Delta miles over the course of your first year.

Subscribe to an Unlimited National Annual or Month to Month subscription plan and earn up to 10,000 miles over your first year of service by earning 500 miles per month of paid service and 2,000 bonus miles for every six months of paid service.

This is better than the standard 5000 miles they’ve offered, though not worth signing up just for the miles. If you’d subscribe to T-Mobile anyway, I haven’t seen a better bonus.

Talk about a non-event. Through January 6th, Alaska Airlines is offering 10% off to Newark as part of its gay travel promotions.

Of course, you don’t actually have to be gay to get the discount. You just have to use the promo code EC06607.

This is similar to Orbitz gay hotel discounts and $100 gay discounts.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

And yet Alaska is taking heat for their marketing, with an activist portraying the airline as imposing a 10% tax on heterosexuals.

“They are giving preferences to male passengers who want to wear dresses on the planes, and giving them preference over married couples,”

Now, of course, this isn’t true or a reasonable way to describe Alaska’s marketing efforts. But if Alaska wanted to impose a surcharge on bigots I’d personally favor it, though the market probably wouldn’t support it (bigots would just buy their tickets from another airline).

Personally, I’m comfortable entering the discount code and claiming the 10% off. Save the hate mail folks, I’ll just claim that

I’ve been outed! I wasn’t even in!

Back in October I singled out Amtrak Guest Rewards for real shame because of their poor customer service and history of making changes to their program with no notice whatsoever.

Then, last month, I did flag Amtrak for offering something new of real value — transfers out to Choice Hotels at a ratio that would allow members to convert their points 1:1 into most airlines (because Choice hotels has a variety of airline transfers). 5,000 Amtrak yielded 25,000 Choice and then 5,000 miles in many programs. That was huge.

Though, given Amtrak Guest Rewards’ history, I suggested anything of value like this couldn’t last.

Then, yesterday, with no notice whatsoever Amtrak reduced the value of their transfers to Choice Hotels. Instead of getting 25,000 Choice hotel points for 5,000 Amtrak points, you now get only 15,000 points with Choice. Less than six weeks after the redemption offer was introduced, it was slashed, again with not even a day’s notice at all.

Shame, shame.

Through December 15th, 1-800-Flowers.com is offering 10 Delta miles per dollar spent plus a flat 2500 bonus miles on each order.with promo code DL8.

A $30 flowers order would generate 300 miles + 2500 miles, a total of 2800 miles and an astounding 93 miles per dollar.

Of course it isn’t that simple, you have to pay shipping charges and those don’t earn miles, but it’s still an outstanding deal on flowers orders. The less expensive the item, the better a deal that it is since the 2500 bonus miles are fixed per order.

I haven’t purchased from 1-800-Flowers in awhile, the better miles offers (and more reliable posting of miles) have come from FTD, but the last time I did it was possible to get airline miles (via promo code such as this one) and cashback via referral link (such as 7% back from e-bates). Not vouching that this is still true, and I’d hate to lose out on the monster bonus miles as a result of going through a referral link, but it would probably still work – interested to hear in the comments from the experiences of readers that may have used promo codes and cashback links together with 1-800-Flowers recently.

In any case, this is the best offer on flowers I’ve seen in four years, since 1-800-Flowers was giving away 100 miles per dollar spent. My understanding at the time was that they had pre-purchased large blocks of Delta miles and those miles were expiring at the end of their three-year validity (if not awarded). So they ran a crazy promo to generate some cash. However they didn’t anticipate the power of the internet, and they wound up massively oversubscribed… Perhaps something similar is going on here.

Via Online Travel Review, Robert Mugabe commandeered an Air Zimbabwe plane to take him to Mozambique, causing the plane’s passengers to have to wait six hours at the airport for their flight.

No great surprise, that’s how things work in that part of the world (and his wife has been known to take the national airline’s planes on shopping trips), though I get annoyed at news stories referring to dictators as ‘President’ as though their governance entails some form of legitimacy.

Still, the one thing that’s rather shocking is the non-chalant explanation for the whole affair:

“Mugabe’s plane probably developed problems. Most Air Zimbabwe planes are not working as there are not enough parts to repair them.”

Virgin America is offering a free companion with a paid ticket.

Book an itinerary for two and use promo code DIGGNATION by December 7, 2007 for travel through March 19, 2008 (with December 19, 2007 through January 6, 2008 and February 14, 15 and 18, 2008.blacked out for travel with this promo).