Starwood is giving away NCAA Championship basketball tickets to Platinum members at precisely noon eastern on Friday. Shouldn’t have told you that, less chance for me to score the tickets…

American Express has upped the mileage ante on its co-branded Delta American Express Gold cards: no fee the first year, 30,000 miles after first purchase (no minimum spend requirement), and up to 5,000 more bonus miles for adding additional cardholders (2500 miles per card, also no fee, add a family member and don’t even give them the card, then cancel once the bonus miles post).

This offer is good on both the personal and small business versions of the card, and since we’re all freelancers in some dimension these days I’ve never had any problems applying for and receiving small business mileage cards.

The upshot is 70,000 free Delta miles.

Of course, American Express is pretty good at tracking whether they’ve ever given you a signup bonus in the past, and they say (and this mirrors my experience) that they’ll only give you the incremental bonus beyond what they’ve given you in the past for the card. However, some people get lucky. And of course this rule applies to those who have had the very same card type before. Different American Express cards, even different co-branded Delta cards, shouldn’t count against you in obtaining the signup bonus.

US Airways has a $134+tax fare each way between Washington National airport and Fort Lauderdale. Decent enough fare during normal times, it prices out at about $309 roundtrip. But this is a first class fare. (And this morning it was pricing out about $50 less!)

West Palm Beach is available for $399 roundtrip all-in.  Compare this to American’s discounted “KUP” fare, DC to Miami of about $900 roundtrip.

First class for the price of advance purchase coach, the fare won’t last long for sure. It’s an “A” fare which is discounted/restricted first class so it’s non-refundable and carries a $150 change fee.  Fare basis is AA7UPN.

I don’t usually talk about planning award travel ten months off, but I happened to notice today that there are tons of dates in January, 2010 available where All Nippon Airways is offering two first class award seats, Chicago – Tokyo.

I didn’t check the reverse, or other gateways (New York-JFK, Los Angeles, San Francisco… sadly ANA is pulling first class from Washington-Dulles in July, and first class award seats departing Japan have been harder to secure in the recent past) but if you’re having difficulty getting back my suggestion is to search first class awards on Asiana — Seoul – JFK, Seoul – Chicago, and the ubiquitously available Seoul – Los Angeles (this is certainly the most available transpacific flight in first class for an award, offering seats nearly every day of the year except for the batch of dates that Asiana treats as a blackout or requires additional points for redemption by members of its own program).

Now, you may not actually want to spend time in Japan in January! But Chicago – Tokyo is a wonderful transpacific flight, and from there you can connect of course to just about anywhere in Asia.

Ten months forward of course there are risks to your itinerary of several iterations of schedule changes, and so any time you book particularly far in advance you do need to check on your itinerary as it develops. But it’s worth booking far out to secure one of the best premium cabins that there is currently in the sky.

I’d also expect award seats to open up nicely as schedules roll forward, that February and March 2010 might be equally good for ANA first class redemptions. Once April hits things have tended to tighten up in the past because it becomes higher season for travel to Japan.

Sure, ANA has been running their ‘new’ first class for several years. It’s not a ‘suite’ on an A380, and their onboard entertainment is limited to say the least. But their seat in incredibly spacious and functional, and in my humble opinion they offer the best meal service of any airline. They have a nice caviar (and Krug..) service and their snack menu for between-meals easily outdoes what almost any carrier offers for main meals.

And Asiana’s new first class is not too shabby, either. You currently risk having your aircraft swapped for the one remaining old-style 747 without suites or video on demand, but the risk is low.

And once in Asia availability onward in first class tends to be fairly good, such as Asiana to Shanghai, Thai Airways between Bangkok and Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong (Tokyo has been harder of late), and if you’re looking for a single seat only then Singapore Airlines and most desitnations for which they offer three-cabin regional service. (Business class availability to most destinations is of course ubiquitous, but I try to avoid it as much as possible!)

Now, for those members of United’s Mileage Plus program just because a seat is available doesn’t mean that you can book it. United does block award inventory being offered by its partners, preventing members from redeeming for seats. They have a budget allocated for each quarter to each partner and they may start out a quarter blocking heavily to prevent running up against their budget, in which case if they overshoot and are way under budget they’ll relax the constraints at the end of a quarter. Or they may find themselves running up against their budget towards the end of a quarter and imposing severe limits on redemption, the classic case being when they won’t let members redeem a single seat between say Frankfurt and Berlin on Lufthansa when Lufthansa is making award seats available on every flight.

I haven’t called up United to see whether what level of blocking is currently in place on their various Asian partners. If you can’t find seats now, try again in early April.

But if you’re redeeming say US Airways miles or Air Canada Aeroplan points then this might be a wonderful time to book that January, 2010 Asia trip, securing All Nippon Airways first class.

Or if you have American Express points, a transfer to Air Canada happens in real-time. Aeroplan requires just 120,000 miles for first class awards from North America to Asia. They allow two stopovers or a stopover and an open jaw. And they even permit crossing both the Atlantic and the Pacific (subject to maximum permitted mileage for a city pair) without bumping up the mileage required. So if you can’t find ANA for the return flight, and don’t fancy Asiana, you may be able to come back on Swiss or Lufthansa or even Singapore’s Frankfurt-JFK flight.

Different customers get different mileage offers, and Chris Elliott thinks it’s discriminatory.

Which is rather silly. Different members with very similar profiles will get different offers precisely because their profiles are similar. It’s called “split testing.” You want to know what offer gets the strongest response. And in order to do that you need to compare people with similar profiles, and vary only the offer.

Perhaps you get the same response giving 1500 vs 3000 miles, in which case you want to give out fewer miles. Perhaps 3000 miles seems ‘too good to be true’ and people ignore the offer. Or perhaps there are even more offers out there, say a 10,000 mile offer. Maybe 1500 isn’t enough to get a response but the response rate is virtually identical for all offers above 3000.

The marketing gurus analyze the data and figure out how to better craft their campaigns.

But if the members being marketed to had different profiles, you didn’t know whether it was the varying offer driving different behavior, or the different characteristics of the recipients.
Or some people see gender discimination, I suppose.

bmi Diamond Club is increasing the cost of first class award redemptions by 25% effective May 1.

In addition to charging 2.5 times the miles (instead of double) for first class compared to coach, whether for an all-miles or a cash and points award, they are also imposing a 10,000 mile surcharge each way for Lufthansa First Class.

It’s not 100% clear whether this applies to both all-miles itineraries or to cash and points itineraries as well. If the latter that would actually be an improvement, because currently cash and points awards cannot include Lufthansa First Class.

My assumption is that there’s too much availability in Lufthansa first, the it’s especially convenient for British-based bmi flyers, and that the first class redemptions on cash and points were just bleeding bmi’s bottom-line and so they closed off those redemptions. A 10,000-mile surcharge on those awards each way would at least mean bringing back Lufthansa first class redemptions on cash and points!

But it’s not as though the quality of Lufthansa First Class is 20,000 miles roundtrip better than other Star Alliance first class products, in fact other than Air China and the US-based airlines it’s probably towards the bottom of the pack among those carriers offering first class service.

The move to increase the number of miles for first class awards isn’t surprising, this program has just been too generous for too long, and the truly modest premium for first class awards made them too easy to redeem. Now business class awards will represent a better value for many.

The nice thing is that at least the change has been announced with a couple of months’ notice, so folks can get their redemptions in before the change.