Rewards Network used to be called iDine, and Transmedia before that. It’ll always be iDine to me. They co-brand with lots of different loyalty programs. In the old days the standard earning rate for an airline was 10 miles per dollar spent, but then they cut that to 1 mile per dollar unless you had signed up for an online account and took their emails in which case the earn rate was 3 miles per dollar. Nice for meals you’re going to eat anyway, but not enough to really re-direct my dining. Fortunately ‘VIP members’ still earn 10 miles per dollar spent (5 miles per dollar plus another 5 for rating the restaurant).

But you have to get to VIP status for that to happen. Fortunately right now the United iDine partnership is offering a fast track to VIP (registration required) — three qualifying dines of $50 or more by November 30th will upgrade you to VIP for next year.  VIP status usually requires 12 dines in a year.

And once you’re VIP it’s much easier to keep, because those ten miles per dollar will make you want to seek out iDine restaurants whenever possible. So a great bonus with the United program. Even if you’re already a member of another partner program, it might be worthwhile to join this one as well and earn VIP status. Just sign up different credit cards and you can decide when eating at a participating restaurant which program you want to earn miles with to top off an account.

A couple of months ago Flyertalk member AndyAndy reported that the offer of 2500 Priority Club points for an AT&T Wireless purchase could be used for a refurbished Nokia 2610s which runs $25 and includes a $25 airtime card.

Now, I wouldn’t spend $25 for 2500 Priority Club points unless my only use for those points was PointBreaks (where 5000 points can be redeemed for a free night), then it’s worthwhile. Otherwise I value Priority Club points at around 2/3rds of a cent apiece.

However, since you can sell the phone on eBay even without the airtime for close to the purchase price, for those willing to go through the machinations this could be a great deal to generate more or less free points and free airtime. (Some will use different sim cards with the same phone and not be considered about a phone number change even because they use a GrandCentral phone number that’ll forward to whatever number they’re currently using, but that’s way more complicated than most will ever care to get.)

This is especially useful since AndyAndy has confirmed in the thread that you can earn the 2500 Priority Club points multiple times, and for him the points posted without any followup required.

The previously announced devaluation of Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles set to take place on November 1 has been delayed until November 19th due to technical issues. So two and a half weeks more to redeem at the old rates.

Book by tomorrow with promo code JetOct08 and received $30 off travel through December 15 (with Thanksgiving travel blacked out for the promotion).

(Hat tip to Channel 9.)

Status match programs are exceedingly common in the U.S. but extend to very few programs elsewhere. British Midland is known to regularly offer complimentary status based on elite levels in other programs. British Airways will offer status matches as part of corporate contracts. And at least a few years ago Mexicana offered status matches as well.

But beyond that, they’re almost unheard of. Although occasionally there will be a Star Alliance-wide offering, sometimes tied to distress of a competitor carrier or losing a member airline (e.g. Varig).

Through December 15 there’s an offer for Alitalia elites to comp on over to the Star Alliance member of their choice. Only this time not every Star carrier is participating, notably absent are Lufthansa and Singapore. But Alitalia elites can receive status on Asiana, Thai, Air New Zealand, ANA, EgyptAir, SAS, South African, SpanAir, TAP Portugal, and Air Canada — in addition to usual status match possibilities United, US Airways, and bmi.

As it happens, I am an Alitalia elite member, a vestige of the $33+tax business class fare to Cyprus from a couple of years ago. (And surprisingly I’ve found myself needing Skyteam status a few times this year even though I do my best to avoid Skyteam carriers.)

So I may have to consider my possibilities here. First tier Alitalia elites get the equivalent of Star Alliance Silver on the Star carrier of their choosing. And second and top tier elites with Alitalai get the bottom level of Star Alliance gold on their carrier of choice.

I need to do a bit of due diligence, for instance Asiana offers an extremely long requalification period normally for status. We’ll see what works out best, but I think I’d like to try out a comp on a carrier whose program I don’t usually use just to try them out.

Tyler Cowen wonders if he should travel to Iceland to benefit from the collapse of their currency.

Icelandair is running some amazing airfare deals.  There’s a whole group of folks trying to figure out how to take advantage of Round-the-World airline tickets departing from Iceland (and thus priced in local currency, which means about a 55% discount on flights relative to bookings out of Stockholm).  But best anyone has been able to figure, airline tickets are all being issued in hard currency with the ‘old’ exchange rate.  Ciredt card companies are using old rates on purchases.  While banks will only buy – to the extent they’ll buy – Kroner at the ‘new’ rates, they’ll only sell at the old.

Some great deals should be able to be had provided you get yourself to Iceland, bring a load of hard currency with you  (and yes, the US dollar qualifies), and find a way to exchange it on the black market once you’re there. 

But provided you can do this, buy yourself a bunch of first class Round the World airline tickets, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime!

This Flyertalk thread highlights current Travelocity promotion codes for two, three, and four night hotel stays (you can of course make separate bookings to capitalize on extra savings, e.g. a six night stay could be a 4- and 2- night stay to use both the $100 and $50 coupons):

AMAZING50
Save $50 when you book a two-night hotel booking or flight + hotel Package (minmum spend $250) and travel between October 10, 2008 and October 31, 2008.

AMAZING75
Save $75 when you book a three-night hotel booking or flight + hotel Package (minmum spend $400) and travel betweenOctober 10, 2008 and October 31, 2008.

AMAZING100
Save $100 when you book a four-night hotel booking or flight + hotel Package (minimum spend $500) and travel between October 10, 2008 and October 31, 2008.

Frugal Travel Guy has three new deals worth nothing this morning — the first I saw on Flyertalk yesterday and the other two were in my email box this morning, but Rick beat me to the punch!

• AirMilesMart has added Starbucks as a merchant, go through their site to reload your Starbucks card and you’ll earn three points per dollar spent which can be transferred 1:1 into Starwood points.

• New American Airlines Rewards Network Dining Members can earn 1500 points for a qualified dine of $25 or more by November 30th.

If you’re already a dining member with another program, you can still sign up for an American dining account using a new credit card. American is one of the programs frequently offering the best bonuses as well.

• Restaurant.com $25 certificates are 80% off through noon Central time on October 15 using promo code EIGHTY (usual price $10, now $2 with this deal, I frequently see discounts but not this low). I don’t usually find these useful given their restrictive terms and conditions, but at this price sure I can find one that’s worth it.

The Global Traveller takes a promotional flight of Qantas’ new Airbus A380 and comes away impressed by their first class seat.

It’s not the incredible over-the-top offering of Sinagpore’s new enclosed suites. And no showers a la Emirates. But he comes away impressed, arguing that it puts Qantas into the top tier of first class seats. As for me, I’m jealous, I haven’t yet set foot onboard an A380 — even in business.

(or maybe he was just a British Midland gold member?)

The New York Times covers a federal govenrment procurement scandal and centers the narrative around the perpetrators activities in the US Airways lounge at National airport.

They huddled in a quiet corner at the US Airways lounge at Ronald Reagan National Airport, sipping bottomless cups of coffee as they plotted to turn America’s missile defense program into a personal cash machine….

He set up a makeshift office in the US Airways lounge at Reagan National Airport, where he followed up on pitches for money to lawmakers and hid out from his Defense Department bosses. He identified lobbyists who could prove useful and contractors — many of them campaign donors — with projects that needed nurturing….

From the US Airways club, Mr. Cantrell could see the symphony of the arriving and departing planes, the Potomac River and off in the distance, the Capitol dome. One day in 2000, Mr. Cantrell met in the airport lounge with Mr. Ennis, his deputy, and a Maine contractor to figure out how to pocket some of the government’s money….

For nearly six years, from 2001 to 2007, the men collected kickbacks from contractors. During one visit to the US Airways Club, Mr. Ennis picked up a briefcase stuffed with $75,000 in cash, according to federal court records. Mr. Cantrell also got checks, ranging from $5,000 to $60,000, once or twice a month, court records show.

Naturallly, the focus of the story is the $1.6 million the man pocketed for himself. But the real story isn’t even the $350 million he obtained used his influence to obtain. It’s that these activities are repeated every day, in every department, and in every appropriations bill. And if you think the $700 billion financial bailout package will be managed at all differently (or that the bill didn’t generate feverish lobbying), I have a missile defense launching base in Kodiak, Alaska to sell you.

As lucky notes, JonNYC — who is usually right about these things — posts over at TravelingBetter.com that American Airlines is going to start charging for their status challenges (accelerated periods in which it takes fewer miles to qualify for elite status). The price is expected to be $80 to sign up for a Gold challenge and $150 for a Platinum challenge.

American Airlines challenges are explained on this old site by Flyertalk member FewMiles.

In a nutshell, it’s the “back door to elite status”. Basically, you sign up for the Gold or Platinum Challenge under the premise that you can demonstrate a quantity of qualifying flight activity within a limited time period that justifies your request for fast-tracked elite status.

Me, I’m not an American Airlines flyer, really much at all — but I do have lifetime status with them (so for me this will not be an issue) since they’re the only program offering such status based on total mileage accumulated in an account rather than based solely on flown miles. All those credit card miles count, and 1,000,000 total accumulated means lifetime Gold while 2,000,000 means lifetime Platinum.

Meanwhile, I’m tempted to follow lucky’s other lead and grab a status match to Northwest Platinum before the Worldperks program goes away…

It’s basically a “free” match, at least I’m guessing it will be. Generally status matches are once in a lifetime, but since DL/NW are merging, using my once in a lifetime NW status match isn’t going to cost me anything in the future, since I assume I’ll still be able to match to DL sometime down the road.

One Mile at a Time points to some interesting redemption offers from ANA, which are especially useful as ANA is an American Express Membership Rewards transfer partner.

In addition to special awards discussed in the past on this blog and on lucky’s, like Virgin Atlantic Upper Class New York – London for 63,000 miles, this entry points out:

• New York-JFK or Washington-Dulles to Doha on Qatar in business class for 90,000 miles.

• New York-JFK or Newark to Brussels on Jet Airways in business class for 68,000 miles (or onward to Dehli for 105,000 miles).

ANA does impose taxes and fees greater than US-based carriers, to be sure. And their phone agents aren’t always the best to work with. But they do have some unique partnerships and their distance-based award chart can be a blessing on specific routes (although is also a killer on others).

Last week I outlined Virgin America’s award redemption offerings and noted that a co-branded credit card was on the way. Now details of that credit card are here.

The card is a Visa Signature co-branded with Barclays bank, the same issuer as the US Airways Mastercard and comes with:

• 3,500 bonus points with first purchase. Apparently the ‘usual’ offer is intended as 2,500 bonus points, as the 3,500 offer includes 1,000 for ‘pre-registering’ on the credit card’s website.

• The card comes with a free one-way flight after first purchase, with details described as:
  

  [A]pply by November 30, 2008, and use the card to make a purchase by January 31, 2009. Travel must be completed by May 20, 2009.

• No annual fee.

According to a PRNewswire release, additional details include:

• The card launches October 23rd.

• One point per dollar of spend plus 3 points per dollar on Virgin America spend.

• 0% interest and 1 point per dollar on first balance transfer (up to 2,500 bonus points)

• 300 bonus points for every $5,000 in annual spend (up to 1,200 annual bonus points)

This card certainly isn’t a game-changer. The bonuses aren’t that high, the program itself isn’t that generous, but considering the program offers capacity control-free redemptions (albeit with a sliding scale on points required) there will be those whose reward goals are precisely Virgin America flights and they’ll find this card a useful addition.

Still, the fundamental problem with the program in my view is that the reward for flying Virgin America domestic hops — and topping those off with credit card spend — is simply more Virgin America domestic hopes. There’s little aspirational going on here.

High Anxiety notes that American Express is terminating its domestic companion airfare program, about a year and a half after it started. A real bummer.

The outsourced program (to API) was annoying to work with, very much non-transparent as to which flights were eligible and a cumbersome booking process (by phone, not the sharpest agents, and then the need to get transferred to reconfirm everything once the booking was over). But it was also a value that is being taken away from Platinum cardholders, and I will miss it.

Fortunately there are still several companion airfare offers that are worthwhile, such as the Alaska Airlines $50 companion ticket that comes with the Bank of America co-branded credit card and the US Airways $99 companion ticket that comes with both the Bank of America co-branded Visa and the Barclays co-branded Mastercard. And not only do you get those tickets annually with each card, but the cards are churnable as well so you can get as many as you need (though none of the cards are regularly offered at no fee).

Frugal Travel Guy reports that the old Citi Chairmans Hilton Gold offer is again (still?) available.

In fact, the code is even still CTCH, just enter it at this link and open up a new account.

That will open a new Hilton gold account for you, and if you already have a Hilton account you can combine the old one into this new gold one as well.

At times in the past Hilton has removed the complimentary gold status from ineligible accounts, other times they haven’t, and even when they have they have not done so across the board to all accounts. So whether this sticks is ‘your mileage may vary.’ Still worth a try for those of you without Hilton Gold status already, it generally means free breakfast at least.

Frugal Travel Guy offers his basic tips on award redemption, which start with being friendly to the agent on the other end of the phone (make them a friend willing to spend the time and do the work necessary to find you your award), be flexible in cities and dates, and be willing to overnight if necessary — plus know your possible partners and routes and suggest them to the agent you’re working with.

All good tips, to be sure. But especially since I’ve been getting several requests for award booking assistance since the October 2008 issue of Conde Nast Traveler reprinted a comment I made on Wendy Perrin’s blog offering award booking help, let me outline my own award booking tips…

Whose miles do you need, and how many?

First, what miles are you collecting? It really does make a difference. I find the best options and available come from Star Alliance carriers but that’s partly a function of where I’m looking to go (most frequently Asia, where Star has a ton of partners). If I were primarily interested in flying US to South America I’d probably be a oneworld guy and find myself redeeming miles on American on LAN. (On the other hand, TAM’s entry into the Star Alliance will help shore up its Latin American deficiency somewhat, largely created by the exit of Mexicana and collapse of Varig.)

Second, having miles across programs is hugely helpful. Obviously you first need to build up a single account to the point where you have a big enough pool of miles to achieve your desired redemption, but once you get there it’s hugely helpful to build up miles in other accounts as well. That way when it comes time to redeem you multiply your chances of finding the seats you want. No availability with American miles? Try your Delta account. No availability there either, try United.

Third, make sure you plan ahead to have the miles you’re going to need, the most frustrating thing for me is when someone comes to me for help with an award booking right before they want to travel and are short the needed miles or they have just enough in one account and almost enough in a second without the time to efficiently earn the balance. Sometimes that means signing up for credit cards, other times just a simple Netflix promotion, or making sure that you just earn miles for the online shopping you’re going to do anyway.

Fourth, consider whose miles you want to spend if you have more than one option. If you have less valuable miles like Delta’s and that program has availability, you probably want to use those miles and conserve your more valuable currencies. If you have multiple accounts that can be used to redeem for the same flight, consider using the account whose award chart requires fewer miles. For example if you have American Express Membership Rewards points and can transfer them into a Continental, Virgin, or All Nippon Airways account to redeem for Virgin Atlantic Upper Class pay attention to the reward charts — Continental requires 100,000 miles, Virgin requires 90,000 miles plus a ton of taxes and surcharges, and depending on the distance of the flight ANA might require only 63,000 or 68,000 miles plus some surcharges but in my experience only half the amount charged by the Virgin program for the very same flight.

Once you have enough miles in your account — and if you’re close it can sometimes even be worth buying the needed miles, I recently helped a co-worker with a first class flight to New Zealand over New Year’s and they had to buy 30,000 miles but they still spent less than a coach ticket and wound up booking international first — it’s time to figure out how to claim your award. And that starts before you ever call up the agent to make friends.

Build your award itinerary yourself, and then call to book.

I do find that most of my redemptions are done over the phone, and that’s because websites frequently don’t access all partners and don’t allow booking stopovers or all possible combinations of flights. They won’t offer all flight options. But then again, the options you’ll get offered by agents won’t either, the software they’re using tends to be pretty unsophisticated. And in my experience that’s the biggest reason people fail to secure the awards they’re after, they are simply told “nothing’s available” and they believe it. Frequently that’s just a function of the software online or that the agents are using, typing in an origin and destination and dates and not seeing anything but not realizing (or in some agents’ cases, not caring) that it’s possible to construct all sorts of options that don’t come up automatically.

You need to figure out what’s likely available before you even get on the phone with an agent. While websites are fairly lacking in the needed functionality, there are several manual workarounds and tricks you can employ to construct your own award and then direct the agent in finding your seats.

Take as the simplest example awards using miles on a Star Alliance carrier. Say that I have US Airways miles and I want to go to Asia or Europe. I have an All Nippon Airways frequent flyer account, which is an indispensable tool because ANA offers online access to award inventory on most Star Alliance airlines (notably absent are Swiss and Air China, but Swiss can be checked online using a Lufthansa account even if you don’t have any miles in that account).

The ANA award booking engine is powerful, but limited. It won’t come up with every available option, it will only check a few possibilities for any given city pair and it will only check single connections. So it’s a bit of a cumbersome process, you need to check pretty much every segment on its own. Start with the hardest to obtain, usually the overwater segments. If I am looking to fly from the US to Asia, I’ll check each North American departure gateway (eg Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington DC, Seattle, New York-JFK, Vancouver to name many but not all). And on the other end I’ll check each arrival city one at a time for each (e.g. Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Tapei, Beijing, Shanghai, Osaka, Ho Chi Minh City to again name many but not all). Once you’ve found the key overwater segments then just work backwards and forwards from there to build your connections from your departure city and to your preferred destination.

I actually find the easiest way to search using the ANA award booking site is via a paid program called the KVS Availability Tool, for which I pay ~ $60 a year but also includes lots of other nifty features including detailed inventory from several different computer reservation ssytems, one-click access to seat maps and flight information, and one-click access to many itineraries. But this is by no means required.

Checking for oneworld inventory can be accomplished with a Qantas frequent flyer account (though you won’t find Cathay Pacific inventory that way) or a British Airways account. The former is incorporated into the KVS Availability tool. Oneworld flyers find the best paid service to be Expert Flyer which is useful for searching awards and upgrades and which will even email you when specific inventory you’ve flagged becomes available.

If you’re trying to redeem Delta or Northwest miles, my suggestion is to find another program. (Hah!) At least with their partner Continental, you’ll soon be able to use those miles on Star Alliance carriers. So their miles are going to become much more valuable. But Delta and Northwest offer very poor redemption possibilities relative to other major carriers, and they’re members of the stingiest alliance for awards, Skyteam. Still, there are some awards which are possible and one place to start is Northwest’s Japanese site which offers several partners (but notably absent from online availability are Korean and China Southern so you’ll have to call for those in most cases).

Working with your phone agent

Frugal Travel Guy suggests putting a hold on a ticket once you find one you want, even if you’re looking for more than one seat. I actually suggest putting a hold on a ticket long before that. Once I find a key segment I want I’ll put a hold on it, construct whatever else I can even if it’s far off anything I’m willing to accept. There comes a point in a phone call with an agent, perhaps after 30 or 45 minutes, where there’s only so much more patience I or that agent have. It’s time to lock in the gains and start again on improving it later.

Of course this strategy does not work with Delta, they will no longer hold an award over the phone. But it certainly works when I redeem my United (72 hour holds most of the time, but in a few cases such as when including Singapore on the itinerary only 24 hours, boy I long for the days of 30-day extendable holds!) or American (5 days, recently cut from 14).

The real key to working with your phone agent is to be pleasant, not to be pushy (or sound too knowledgeable too quickly), and recognize when to bail. Some agents are just unhelpful. I recently spoke to one who claimed that they had checked a full 6 weeks of availability on Asiana between Seoul and every US gateway and found nothing but coach. I knew this was impossible in a matter of 30 seconds, but I couldn’t very well call them a liar. It wouldn’t have done me much good. So I thanked them for their time, hung up, and called back and got a better agent that was able to help me.

Some agents will go to the ends of the earth and back for you, and with some airlines that’s necessary — especially United. While the Star Alliance offers amazing redemption possibilities, United is alone among its partner carriers in denying their members access to award seats being offered by other Star carriers. This is frequently referred to as StarNet blocking. I once checked 51 days where Thai Airways was offering two53 separate flights, and United wouldn’t book a single one of them.

This isn’t nearly as easy at it used to be, but it was once possible to get agents to do a ‘manual sell’ — basically sending a message to the operating carrier asking if award availability existed, and if it did it would come back confirmed. The simple clue to whether this would work was when the United agent didn’t see the flight as existing — that generally meant that they were blocking the flight in their system from being booked, but if the agent manually requested that flight it would come back as confirmed.

As I say, it used to be relatively easy. You couldn’t just ask for a manual sell, you’d start by building the award flight by flight with segments that actually showed availability in United’s system and in so doing both build credibility with the agent and get them on your side wanting your quest to succeed. Then say something like, “I found this flight available before but had to check with my spouse, the agent I was talking to said they were having some strange computer problems and had to type in the flight number in order to get it to come up.” Then bingo.

Now that really doesn’t work very well, United agents have been put clearly on notice that they’re not permitted to manually sell and award, in fact it’s a firing offense.

But the broader point is true that you can get an agent on your side by having early success with segments (“wow – that is available!”) and they will want to help you close out the award successfully nad be more willing to try alternate routes and work with you over a long call. Agents usually want to succeed rather than disappoint you when it seems like it’s within their power to do so.

Of course this whole Starnet filtering fiasco points out again that whose miles you’re trying to redeem matters a good bit. While US Airways is unfriendly towards its customers, and elites in particular, in many dimensions when it comes time to redeem Star Alliance awards it’s much easier than using United miles. The same holds true for Air Canada, for example.

Victory is almost as sweet as the trip!

There’s an amazing feeling of accomplishment after going through the arduous exercise of finding the ideal award itinerary, redeeming your miles for a $20,000 international first class ticket when most of the world believes it’s impossible to use miles (on that $300 hop down to Florida, usually).

Congratulations!

The media is making hay over AIG executives participating in a retreat at the St. Regis Monarch Beach after being taken over/bailed out by the federal government.

And it doesn’t look good, I suppose appearances do matter. But most of the criticism misses the mark.

The conference was booked long before the bailout. Sure, the hotel bill (including payments by the hotel on behalf of the event to other vendors) was $443,000. But AIG had already provided a $403,000 deposit. They couldn’t just cancel, they’d have no doubt owed most of cost of the event if not the full expected cost, anyway.

And in fact, it sure looks like executives stayed away — $58,000 (30%) of the hotel room charges were for attrition, meaning that they had committed to many more participants than ultimately actually attended.

Now, sure, $25,000 at the spa and salon and $7000 for golf doesn’t look good. I’ll give critics that. And $8,000 in room service, lobby lounge, and tavern was probably unnecessary.

But the event itself was a foregone conclusion, many did stay away, and AIG wouldn’t have really saved much by cancelling the whole thing once they were going under and getting bailed out. It’s too bad the media doesn’t understand hotel contracts or for that matter how to read a master bill (.pdf)

I got an email over the weekend about the Virgin American co-branded American Express products from Bank of America. They’re tempting, to a certain degree.

I blogged the cards when they were introduced in June. 1.5 miles per dollar on all spend is intriguing, but not all that desirable for me. (There are also some nice perks towards elite status as well, so this card may be indispensable for the regular Virgin flyer.)

Their award charts are expensive, for awards beyond Heathrow in particular, and their fuel surcharges are noxious.

Personally I prefer redeeming ANA miles for Virgin flights (transferred into ANA from American Express Membership Rewards):

• Washington-Dulles-Heathrow in Upper Class is 90,000 Virgin miles or 68,000 ANA miles, and ANA charges about half the taxes that Virgin does on the same ticket (so a couple hundred dollar savings).

• New York-JFK-Heathrow is only 63,000 ANA miles…

Now, Virgin’s program is still where I credit all of my Avis rentals unless there’s a special promo like Delta’s 9,999 bonus miles per rental offered back in July. I get my 1000 Virgin miles per rental even on one-day rentals and even on the lowest discounted rates. Of course Hertz rentals I credit to bmi.

Bank of America also offers an Asiana co-branded American Express that I desperately want to like, since it earns 2 miles per dollar spent on all purchases and Asiana is a Star Alliance carrier. But it suffers from the defect of Asiana’s redemption chart — awards are just incredibly pricey, 2 miles in many cases really are like 1 in other programs.

So, alas, I don’t make use of either the Virgin Atlantic or the Asiana card, although either could be just the thing for certain folks.

The old days of 5000 mile awards for interisland roundtrips are going away October 15th. Redemptions on IslandAir go up to 5000 miles each way. The same holds for new partner Hawaiian Airlines.

It’s not surprising, really, as that’s a fairly standard price across other carriers for such awards and also because the price of interisland travel has risen somewhat since Aloha’s bankruptcy and closure. But sad nonetheless.

The previous best offer that I was aware of for a Hilton American Express was ‘up to 52,500 points’ as a signup bonus: 10,000 bonus points at first purchase, 2,500 bonus points for each of your first four Hilton stays charged to the card, 30,000 bonus points for spending $1,500 on the card within 3 months of approval, and 2,500 bonus points for adding a free additional cardholder to the account.

Now they’ve upped the ante a bit more with basically the same offer but an extra 10,000 Hilton points with first purchase, for a total of 20,000, bringing the total signup offer to ‘up to 62,500 points’.