Northwest elites whose account addresses are in North America can register to receive 50% Bonus Miles on tickets purchased after registration but prior to June 20, 2008 for Northwest or KLM-operated flights, for travel before August 31, 2008. This is a 50% bonus on redeemable miles on top of the standard mileage and standard elite bonus, but is not an elite qualifying bonus.

Hilton is offering double Northwest miles for stays between May 1 and July 31, 2008. Registration required, and you don’t have to be a Northwest (or Hilton) elite to take advantage of this one.

Just as Expedia has formalized its VIP customer program, so too now has Orbitz.

Expedia has done more to promote theirs, I actually knew that I was an Expedia ElitePlus member. They’ve also offered up clear criteria on re-qualification ($10,000 in Expedia spend in a year or 12 hotel nights — clearly hotels are a profitable product ofr Expedia). And there are a few value-added benefits, however miniscule.

Orbitz on the other hand offers a dedicated customer service line and waiver of its own fees, just like Expedia. They offer free Hertz #1 Club Gold (easily obtainable elsewhere free) and occasional discounts such as this one which I imagine would be useable by anyone:

Save $50 on a 3-night hotel
stay or a 3-night flight + hotel package — in any destination!
Use Promo Code: OPAHPP50

Promo code Terms and Conditions

Book a qualifying hotel or flight + hotel package between April 11, 2008, and September 30, 2008 for 3 or more nights for travel between April 11, 2008, and December 1, 2008 via Orbitz and instantly receive $50 off your purchase through the use of the promotion code. To display qualifying hotels or packages, click “I have a promotion code.” and enter the promotion code, then look for hotels or packages marked with the icon “COUPON.” Limit one discount per hotel room and one promotion code per booking. Discounts are not redeemable for cash for any reason. Any attempt at fraud will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Void where prohibited, taxed or restricted. Orbitz reserves the right to change or limit the promotion in its sole discretion

There are also a few marketing come-ons, like attempts to sell baggage delivery service, the Entertainment Book, and Priority Pass.

In many ways the Orbitz program is substantially similar to Expedia’s, albeit a little less formal (no published requalification period or criteria) and less marketed (an email letting me know about the program would have been nice).

Now, I’ve been a ‘vip customer’ of both booking sites for a long time. They both had dedicated phone numbers and email addresses, and provided the fee waivers (of their own extra fees for changes to tickets only, not airline fees). So these programs really aren’t improvements over their old offerings, and in fact if I had to speculate they’re probably being offered more broadly than the old status so perhaps there’ll be a dilution of service offered.

Interestingly I only noticed a little text link on the upper right hand of my screen yesterday that said “Priority Access member – View benefits” otherwise I would never have known that Orbitz formalized the program. Either that, or announcement emails were caught by my spam server (although I usually check over there fairly thoroughly and would likely have noticed an email from a travel provider announcing elite status!).

The new Four Seasons in Mumbai illustrates the difficulties in building a new hotel project in a developing country, via the Financial Times.

[T]his week, after years of navigating red tape, the 202-room Four Seasons Mumbai became the first luxury hotel of its size to launch in the city’s south in about 20 years…

…Bureaucracy and a shortage of skilled workers make building hotels difficult – the opening of the Four Seasons was delayed by at least two years. The hotel needed 165 government permits – including a special licence for the vegetable weighing scale in the kitchen and one for each of the bathroom scales put in guest rooms. In the end, the hotel cost $100m (€64.5m, £51m), or about $500,000 per room, and prices – which start at $500 per night rising to more than $1,000 – reflect that.

Of course, bureaucracy raising the cost of new hotel construction limits the supply of rooms and raises their price. Reform would allow both more development and lower prices.

(Hat tip to Brad DeLong.)

The Lufthansa First Class Terminal in Frankfurt is certainly a special idea, an entirely different building from the masses.

You’re greeting by a staff member on entering the lounge and they become your designated personal assistant, who will be the one that will come to get you when it’s time to board your flight. To get to the plane you get a chauffeur-driven Porsche or Mercedes.

There’s private security screening and passport control, a lovely restaurant with menu and buffet, a nice bar, a cigar lounge and showers and slumber room and… Well, it’s a truly great lounge.

Transited there a couple times several weeks back. Some of the more snobbish set say the place is going down hill, but the conventional wisdom is that it’s the best lounge in the world.

To me, though, the best overall ground service is departing Bangkok in Thai Airways First Class. Thai can be hit and miss at best in the air, but on their ground in their home airport service really is extraordinary. From the private checkin area your carryons are taken for you, you’re walked through a private passport control, and into a waiting golf cart where they drive you through the business class lounge to the first class lounge. It has private rooms, lovely food service, the attendants are outstanding, but most of all… the spa.

First Class passengers can have a 30 minute neck and shoulder massage or an hour-long full body massage. I started with a shower, then the full massage, followed by another shower. 

One tip not everyone knows is that Thai Airways business class customers can receive the 30-minute neck and shoulder massage, subject to availability (that is, if they aren’t otherwise serving first class passengers).  So swing by the spa and make an appointment if you’re flying in business.

Back to the first class lounge, and when it was time to board an attendant came to fetch me, escorted through security, and then golf cart to the plane.

The Singapore Airlines first class lounge in Seoul serves caviar. It’s not high-end stuff, but I don’t know of any other lounge (as opposed to on-board) which does. I haven’t visited there yet.

I also haven’t been through the new first class lounge in Singapore Changi’s terminal 3 (back in March I was connecting to business class, and stayed in terminal 2) but for all of the early anticipation I’ve heard mostly negative reactions, lack of light, perfectly fine in all regards but not special.

Still, I haven’t heard anyone compare either lounge to the Lufthansa First Class Terminal or to Bangkok’s First Class Spa.  And other airlines are offering spa services, too.  British Airways replaced their Heathrow provider Molten Brown with Elemis.  (Virgin no longer provides spa services onboard.)  Qantas even offers a restaurant and spa in their First Class Lounge at Sydney, and I have family that speaks well of it, though I haven’t yet been.  But can it really exceed Thai’s offering (even if Qantas offers a wider variety of treatment options)?

I guess my real question is, what am I missing?  I’m not so much a oneworld guy, I haven’t visited Cathay Pacific’s The Wing and The Pier.  But really, the reports aren’t amazing. 

So whose ground service is best, and what else do I need to try if only to be complete?

Via TravelTech Talk, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has tips on securing your data from the prying eyes of U.S. Customs when crossing the border into the US.

In short, unless you’re aware of a pending lawsuit or criminal investigation, you have no obligation to preserve data. And it’s perfectly fine to erase or encrypt it. They’ve got some links to help you, since the US government now claims the right to search your data based solely on your entering the country.

Yesterday Gary from Free Frequent Flyer Miles dropped me a note, wondering why I hadn’t said anything about the recent change in the ability of transferring Amtrak Guest Rewards points out to other programs.

I admit, I missed the recent change.

Back in December I posted that Amtrak would only be allowing transfers out of its program for elite members and those holding their co-branded credit card.

This program has been both useful (laundering Continental miles to United in large quantities) and infuriating (changing program rules and partners with no notice whatsoever) over the years. Finally I gave up on it as perhaps the least trustworthy rewards program I’ve ever dealt with in any extensive way. Changes in rules without notice and poor customer service can only be pushed so far.

So when there was a thread on Flyertalk pointing to the change in the terms and conditions of points transfers, I assumed it was a rehash of the same — only for elites and Amtrak Guest Rewards credit card holders. I already wrote about it, and I’d written the program off, no more to see here, move along.

But they actually snuck something else in there! Amtrak Guest Rewards credit card holders are supposed to have over $200 in Amtrak purchases on the card in a calendar year in order to make transfers. (It isn’t clear to me whether > $200 purchases in one year means you can transfer in the next, or whether the > $200 has to come at the beginning of each year before you can make transfers for that year.. I imagine they can test this through the posting of bonus miles from the credit card.)

Folks who grabbed the credit card to preserve their ability to transfer, or to earn points for the purpose of making transfers, are out of luck unless they make purchases from Amtrak itself. And in many cases not just a single ticket, either.

Fair enough, this limits the usefulness of the program for many. But again it’s a change without notice, a mere months after the last change in this same benefit without meaningful notice. Another example of why this program is just bad, bad, bad.

Sure, I’ll give my Guest Rewards number when I have to ride the train. Might as well. But I don’t go out of my way to earn points with them.

The United Visa used to be the easiest, most reliable churn there was. In other words, you could sign up for the card over and over (by some reports, as frequently as every 60 days) and grab the signup bonuses each time. Each member could net perhaps 200,000 miles a year that way with annual fees waived.

Then a year or so back they shut down churning and started awarding bonus miles only for first-time cardmembers. Now there are mixed reports, some people say churning is back. I’m testing this myself. I applied for a new card last week just to see what would happen. I’ll report here when I learn the results.

Even so, you can definitely have more than one United Visa at the same time, and more than one of the same type at the same time. And if you’ve had a personal card you can get a small business card and get the bonus even if you can no longer churn.

I’ve written about several different United Visa offers. My favorite still is the 25,000 mile bonus after spending $250, along with annual fee waived the first year. (As the year ends, either close the account or call up Chase and have them fold the credit line into another card with no fee). That’s been a great offer the past 18 months since I first saw it.

They’ve gotten even more creative lately, offering gift cards in addition to bonus miles and upping the ante on miles, alas usually not waiving the annual fee along with the bonus.

• 21,000 miles and a Morton’s Gift Card

• Structured 40,000 mile bonus, good if you plan to keep and use the card

• 25,000 bonus miles and fee waived for a year on the small business card

• 25,000 bonus miles and fee waived for a year on the personal card

Here’s another offer, just came through via a friend’s email box. It’s not targeted, no fee waived, but 30,000 miles after $250 in spend. I’ve heard of offers as high as 50,000 miles recently but those are paper offers rather than offers open to anyone online.

Balance as of 5/14/2008:		XXX,XXX miles
Bonus miles:		30,000 miles
New total:		XXX,XXX miles

You will also enjoy these Mileage Plus Visa benefits:

• Earn 1 mile per eligible $1 spent 
• Exclusive cardmember redemption opportunities 
• No pre-set spending limit

Apply by June 15, 2008!

Via One Mile at a Time United has entered into a codesharing agreement with Hawaiian (now that former partner Aloha Airlines has ceased operations).

Aloha offered both another avenue for redemptions to the Islands. Now there’s Hawaiian, which partners with just about everyone else in the US so I can’t imagine redemption seats are easy to come by, but perhaps the gap that they’ll fill for Mileage Plus members is the ability to use Mileage Plus miles for intra-island flights.

I’m not yet aware of the details of the partnership, whether or how you’ll be able to combine say United across the ocean to Hawaii with Hawaiian’s intra-island flights on the same award… Or what the cost of standalone intra-island awards will be (Aloha was a great value at just 5000 miles).

It doesn’t make up for the United’s increased change fees, award booking fees, and elimination of 500-mile minimum accrual on short flights. But good news is good news!

Jason Reitman’s next project is a film adaptation of Walter Kirn’s Up In the Air.

The book’s corporate social commentary didn’t work for me when I read it back in 2001, but any novel ostensibly about a mileage maven’s quest for 1 million miles was something I had to pour through…. although in the novel the fictional airline allowed accumulation towards lifetime status through mileage earning from any source — which only American does, it isn’t hard or worthy of the stretch goals portrayed in the book. 

Well, maybe Walter Kirn didn’t really capture business travel, but in a good-enough-for-Hollywood way I’m hopeful that Reitman will.

Rick Seaney says to go price your United tickets NOW:

A short time ago, United REMOVED its fuel surcharges in approximately 18,000 of its markets. Most of those fuel surcharges added $130 to the price of their airline tickets. The fuel surcharge is now ZERO.UPDATE 4PM EASTERN: United Spokesperson Robin Urbanski described this as a “clerical error” and said the fuel charges would be reinstated at 8pm Eastern time.

However, many of those “fixes” won’t be loaded until Midnight Eastern time, so you may have until then to get a very good deal.

So buy your tickets NOW and save as much as $130, before United reinstates the fuel surcharges.

I love the concept of spending money to cleanse your soul of sin. So arguments about the logical fallacies of carbon offsets notwithstanding, the concept generates a certain aesthetic appeal to my inner postmodernist.

But offering rewards for purchasing carbon offsets seems odd to me.

And offering frequent flyer miles for the purchase of carbon offsets — giving customers free flights — seems downright paradoxical.

My inner postmodernist approves!

Much virtual ink is being spilled hand wringing over United’s announcement yesterday that they would be following USAirways’ lead in no longer awarding 500 miles as a minimum for short flights. They’ll be awarding actual miles flown instead, and this change applies to both base miles and elite qualifying miles.

This means that those East Coast to California mileage runs can’t be supercharged with a few extra intra-California segments.

What it also means – for me – is that whenever I have flights meaningfully less than 500 miles I won’t be crediting those segments to Mileage Plus or to Dividend Miles. Instead, I’ll likely be crediting another Star Alliance program (bmi Diamond Club, no doubt).

It is possible, though admittedly a potential pain, to to credit more than one program on a single itinerary. I’ll have to pull up my notes on how this is done technically if anyone turns out to be interested in the strategy. (I don’t like to pull my Mileage Plus number entirely from the reservation since I will want to credit the longer flights to them in order to retain status, and I’ll want to use status benefits on the itinerary of course.)

Log into your Citibank ThankYou Network account on the promotions page and enter promotional code CITICCI508IN.

The points post instantly and show up as Citi Bank,N.A-Retail – Bonus Points.

Orbitz is offering 15% off hotels booked by May 26, 2008 for travel through July 31, 2008 using promotion code EMSAVE15.

Back in March I posted about American Airlines snacks inthe United Red Carpet Club.

Now lucky’s got Northwest glassware on a United flight.

Suppliers gone awry, and staffers don’t care?

Thrifty is offering 2,000 Delta miles on rentals of two days or longer between May 15 and August 15.

Of course, these are Delta miles and you have to rent from Thrifty to get them but it’s not a bad offer.

Via Frugal Travel Guy, the Citibank Platinum American Express has comes packed with goodies:

• 15,000 Thank You Points after spending $300 on the card

• Free Priority Pass annual membership, with first three lounge visits included ($24 thereafter)

• For the first 24 months of cardmembership, receive 5 Thank You Points per dollar spent at supermarkets, drug stores and gas stations and 3 ThankYou Points per dollar on all other purchases.

• Annual fee waived the first year ($125 thereafter, I’ll consider keeping it for year two given the spend bonuses but definitely won’t keep it for year three).

Thank You Points can be deceptively valuable I haven’t checked to see whether this card is eligible for Citi’s fixed point redemption chart, but if you link it to an Expedia account the points can be used with the fixed chart which provide up to 2 cents a point in value on domestic coach airfare and 3 cents on domestic first.  (Don’t ever redeem points for the standard one cent apiece offers..)

Via Frugal Travel Guy, Northwest is offering new members who enroll by July 15 up to 6,000 bonus miles for flights.

You will receive 1,000 Bonus Miles for any flight you take on Northwest Airlines or KLM within six months of enrolling. If you take a second roundtrip flight on Northwest Airlines or KLM during this six-month period, you receive 5,000 Bonus Miles.

United is increasing a variety of fees for redeeming awards effective May 15.

• Change fees go from $100 to $150 (matching changes United made to many of its revenue fares).

• Telephone ticketing goes from $15 to $25.

• “Close-in Processing Fees” (1) now $100 (from $75) for ticketing less than 7 days from departure (2) $75 (from $50) for tickets less than 21 days from departure — where the $50 used to apply less than 14 days from departure, so they’ve stretched out the period for this fee.

This doesn’t appear to change the fee waivers of United 1Ks (100,000 mile flyers) who can still change their award tickets at no cost over and over, constantly striving for better routings and carriers to meet their needs (thank goodness).

(Hat tip to One Mile at a Time.)

I booked a South African Airways ticket on Expedia yesterday. The person I booked it for wanted to include their South African frequent flyer number with the reservation. But Expedia doesn’t include South African in their long drop down box of potential programs. So I dropped a note to the Expedia Elite Plus email address. A couple of hours later I received this strange reply:

Unfortunately, due to technical, regulatory, and/or other limitations, we currently do not support frequent flyer programs from all airlines. In this light, you would need to contact South African Airways directly and provide them with the passenger’s frequent flyer number. The number is 800-722-9675. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Technical, regulatory, and/or other limitations?Certainly there’s no regulatory barrier to adding a South African Airways frequent flyer number to a reservation. And a technical problem? Like that their website doesn’t support it? And if that wasn’t it, they are prevented by “and/or other limitations.” Well, that’s enlightening.

So Expedia’s Elite Desk tells me to pick up the phone and call South African. Now, they’re the issuing agent. They have the phone number. Couldn’t they just, like, pick up the phone and call South African? Then they could have emailed back “We apologize that our system doesn’t currently allow you to add a South African Airways frequent flyer program to a reservation through our website. I spoke to South African Airways and had them add the number to the reservation instead. Pleasant travels!”

Then I would have gotten my $7 booking fee’s worth!

Well, I guess perhaps I got my $7′s worth anyway, just not having to deal with South African’s website of which I’m not a fan. But how hard would it have been to offer superior customer service in this case?