I was searching for the recipe for the Cathay Pacific cocktail, Pacific Sunrise, and finally found it!  For those of you who have tried it, and those of you who haven’t, here it is:

The winning cocktail – Pacific Sunrise – was created by Hau Wai Ma, Bar Captain at the famous Hong Kong Jockey Club. It is a decadent and tasty blend of Champagne and Drambuie, garnished with the zest of lemon and orange peel. …

Pacific Sunrise
½ oz. Drambuie
Champagne
4 pieces each of lemon and orange zest
Pour the Drambuie in a champagne flute. Top up with champagne and garnish with the lemon and orange zest.

Pay with an American Express card by November 25 for travel between November 1 and December 15, 2009 or from January 11 to February 10, 2010 on Air Canada flights from the U.S. to Canada and promo code 4CKJFR91 will generate a 10% discount.

Elite Travel Gal is turning 40. (She doesn’t look it!) Her take on luxury hotels is worth following, and I read her infrequent posts and follow her on Twitter (@EliteTravelGal).

She’s raising money for breast cancer research, and is about $800 away from her goal that she’s trying to hit on her birthday.

Generously, Small Luxury Hotels of the World is donating a 5-night hotel stay to reward on of the folks that contribute to her birthday fundraiser.

It’s both what strikes me as a good cause and a generous offer. Now, I haven’t run the numbers, but on a net present value basis the prize may even be worth the donation! That’s not the reason to give, of course. If you decide to help Stacy out, that would be a meaningful gesture.

Thanks for your contributions, Stacy, and happy birthday!

If you book a premium economy or business class flight on bmi with American Express by January 15 you can receive complimentary silver status. If you are already Silver or Gold with Diamond Club you’ll receive 10,000 qualifying miles.

The terms and conditions are a bit odd, they say you have to ‘book’ rather than fly (can you refund?) the ticket. They don’t say when travel needs to be complete by. And they say the status miles for existing elites comes after registering for the promotion rather than after travel.

Oh well, it’s Diamond Club, and I love them for the looseness of their rules more often than not.

I book a lot of award travel and I much love doing it. But since I’ve started offering it as a service I’ve had a whole bunch more people to do it for, and that means that I’m getting more even more experience and seeing real-time what’s going on in award and revenue management across a whole variety of ariliens.

(Plus it helps when people like Wendy Perrin say such kind things about my service — seriously I don’t think I’ve ever been called anything quite like “the answer to many a Condé Nast Traveler reader’s prayers” before.)

Booking award travel for myself I’ve had a chance to see first hand just how erratic award availability on Cathay Pacific can be. It changes day by day, and as you approach departure of a given flight it can even change hour by hour. I’ve watched flights open up in first class, while not a single seat gets sold but the next day that seat is gone and a business seat pops up. And this week I had the fortune of finding first class seats on Hong Kong – Manila – Hong Kong segments after equipment changes in their schedule meant that the flights I had been booked on changed to two class. I checked each morning diligently and nothing, and then all of a sudden first class on that route was wide open on most days all month surriounding my trip.

If you book far enough in advance and can either keep your routing and carrier the same, or you have the benefit of a top tier elite status that lets you make changes to your reservation without a fee (or you’re willing to pay a change fee…!) then you can have most any award you want. If you keep checking and have just a little bit of flexibility, first class cabins rarely completely sell out and so award inventory more likely than not becomes availability at some point before your travels.

That’s not comforting. It’s not “book it and forget it.” But diligence usually pays off in my experience.

Recently I helped someone book a first class award trip to New Zealand (US-Australia flights in United ifrst and trans-tasman in New Zealand business). The outbound DC – Los Angeles flight was only available in business, it was a 3-cabin Boeing 777. I kept checking daily as part of my morning coffee regimen, and a first class seat just wouldn’t open up. Even the day before departure there were still 5 available seats in first, finally one seat available as an upgrade, but not as an award. Now the available upgrade seat one day out meant that there wasn’t even anyone in business trying to upgrade. It sure looked like those seats would be filed by United employees. Finally, the morning of the flight (and not even first thing in the a.m. — sometime around 8 am or 9 am) one lone first class award seat opened, and we grabbed it. Then there were foiur first class seats open, and not a one available even as an upgrade. There’s United revenue management, protecting the employee class cabin from riff raff who pay for business and might want an upgrade to first!

This morning I had the pleasure of booking a couple of business class seats non-stop to Paris on Delta. The only trick involved was that miles were coming from a Delta account for one seat, and an Alaska account for the other. The passengers really wanted first class, but you can’t use Delta (or Alaska) miles for first class on Air France, one of the options they suggested. They also had Amex points, and hoped to use those, but even general members of the Air France program can’t redeem for international first class awards. You have to be a Gold member to do so. What a shame.

Booking the Delta flight online was easy with Delta miles, it was amazing how much Atlanta-Paris availability there was. I still sneer at Skyteam, but today Delta came through. The interesting thing was booking with Alaska. Fortunately their website now has the functionality to book partner awards such as on Delta online, which saved the day. Initially, for reasons unique to the folks I was booking for, I called Alaska. They told me there was nothing available on Delta that day, but offered a connection trhough Chicago on American. I hung up and called the partner desk back. They told me that the Delta flight I wanted wasn’t available for a business award, but the other Delta flight that day was. Stranger still! In the end I booked the flights I was looking for online, but I don’t understand the problems that the Alaska partner desk was facing. I’ll need to dig into that some more.

Jared Blank thinks that in my excitement over Continental’s entry into Star Alliance that I’m too hard on Skyteam.

He agrees that Star will be better for Continental Onepass members in terms of “first class options, lounge access and choice of carriers ”

And he agrees with some of the limitations of Skyteam

Was it the best alliance out there? No. Did they have a large array of world class carriers associated? No. Did Continental and Delta have miserable – truly miserable – reward availability, especially in business? Yes.

But he defends Air France, KLM, and Alitalia business class availability. And his priorities were “quick trips to Latin America, or a long weekend in Europe.”

But I think the defense of Skyteam here is a bit of a straw man.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to redeem for business class transatlantic, though I do find it much easier to do so with Star than with Skyteam. Air France and KLM availability aren’t terrible, but Lufthansa and Swiss availability are in my experience better. And have you ever tried to redeem miles for more than one person in business class to Asia on the same flights? It’s relatively easy with Star, an incredible challenge with Skyteam.

Jared liked the Skyteam Latin America route network, but in fairness much of this was provided by Continental which is obviously retained by the move to Star. Sure, perhaps the loss of partner Aeromexico is a blow for the pure Latin America flyer, but those people are better off with oneworld to begin with.

Folks used their Continental miles before, they just have many more and better options to do so now. The world is much much better for Onepass members.

I make mistakes, too. Read what I have to say, but make sure I really mean what I said. I don’t proofread very well, so I imagine it’s possible that I could make a similar mistake some day. If I do, I apologize in advance.

I was reading the FrequentFlier.com emal newsletter and came across what seemed like an interesting offer. Continental will sell you 50% bonus miles — up to 17,500 for $175 (or a 30% bonus up to 12,500 for $125). You have to max out your flying under the offer in order to be paying only a penny a point for the miles. For someone who is going to hit the flying targets anyway it’s probably worth it. It wouldn’t have been when Continental was a member of Skyteam, but their miles really are now worth clearly more than the penny apiece price of the offer.

But was really interesting was this statement in the FrequentFlier.com newsletter:

The miles do count toward elite status.

Wowsers. $175 for 50% bonus elite qualifying miles, that sounds great. But wait. I went over to the offer and read the terms and conditions:

Mileage bonuses and enrollment bonus does not qualify toward OnePass Elite status.

(Emphasis mine.)

Always read the fine print for yourself.

Scott McCartney reproduces David Letterman’s Top 10 Excuses for the Northwest pilots who got distracted and missed Minneapolis… what caused this, you ask?

10. Bunch of fat guys seated on the right side of the plane made us vector east.
9. We get paid by the hour.
8. Mapquest always takes you the long way, am I right, people?
7. Tired of that show-off Sullenberger getting all the attention.
6. You try steering one of those airplanes after eight or nine cocktails.
5. Wanted to catch the end of the in-flight movie.
4. Activating autopilot and making occasional P.A. announcements is exhausting.
3. According to our map, we only missed our target by half an inch.
2. For a change, we decided to send luggage to the right city and lose the passengers.
1. Thought we saw balloon boy.

Continental is a Star Alliance member now, and they’re promoting the news on Twitter with a sweepstakes. You just need to follow @Continental and tweet something with the hashtag #StarTreatment to enter. You can do this up to 5 times a day through November 3rd for more entries to with 2 business class tickets to any Continental destination or one of two $1000 Continental Vacations gift cards.

The big news of course is Star Alliance lounge access, and earn and burn in the Star Alliance. Especially burn. Continental was miserable for redemption as part of Skyteam, but now members have access to the wonders of the Star Alliance — including first class products, something Continental itself doesn’t offer.

A real kudos to the Continental IT team, they’ve made redemptions on United Airlines, US Airways, Air Canada, SAS Scandinavian, TAP Portugal, LOT Polish Airlines, EgyptAir, Air China, and Blue1 possible online. And they also offer inter-island add-ons operated by Hawaiian Airlines and Island Air as well. This is something that’s not even in the IT chute over at United, as far as I understand, and I don’t think it’ll be available at US Airways any time soon either. (I’d love to see Singapore, ANA, Asiana, Lufthansa, Turkish, and Thai a part of this. A man can dream…)

SWISS and Shanghai Airlines are not yet redeemable, although Swiss is supposed to be available come next month.

As part of the changeover to Star Alliance, the Continental – Qantas partnership ends December 17. No big loss, they already killed the value in it when they increased the price of a first class award from 135,000 miles to 285,000 miles. (It was that massive change, among others, that led me to assume the Continental chart would be expensive for Star Alliance awards. So I was truly pleased to be wrong.)

This is a good week for the frequent flyer world.

CrankFlier attended the ARAC Frequent Flyer Mega Event, asked for blog reader feedback on what he should tell the program folks, and then posted a wrapup of his presentation.

He said that offers don’t need to be simple and easy, but the value proposition needs to make sense to the customer.

[L]ast minute award bookings fees..may make sense in the context of revenue management, but from a pure customer perspective, they can’t really be justified. The disconnect is the problem there.

(Emphasis mine.)

Cranky suggested that customers want to feel valued, both for their current revenue contribution and for their lifetime value.

And he offered up honesty and integrity, that the airlines make the rules. Customers will work with whatever game is offered as long as the programs shoot straight and play fair. And in making the point he quoted extensively from a comment I made to his post, so I’ll quote it liberally here as well:

Honesty, Transparency, Integrity.

Those sound old fashioned, but I’m serious. Bear with me.

Don’t talk about ‘enhancements’ that are really devaluations. Your customers resent being lied to.

(Oh, and don’t ACTUALLY lie, either. Don’t promise something like the ability to redeem award seats on your partner airlines and then when a partner is offering an award seat don’t refuse to let your customer book it. And don’t tell your customer that the airline “isn’t offering the seat.” And don’t tell the customer that the partner airline doesn’t even fly the route on that day. I’m talking to you, United. 100% seriously.)

Offer a clear value proposition and STICK TO IT.

I disagree with @Chris who says no devaluations. Just be clear about what you are doing and give PLENTY of notice. So that there’s a clear connection between an offer, customer behavior, and a reward. When you offer benefits, customers fly to earn those benefits, and you change the rules of the game just as they’re about to experience those benefits… #FAIL … seriously. So declare by the end of February, 2010, say, what the 2011 program will look like. And stick to it.

In this same light, I agree with @Chris, though, that there is good online social media communication from a couple of companies like Starwood. Engage your customer, honestly and transpanretly. With a strong customer service presence and not a marketing, PR, or spin shop.

Tell the truth. Declare it openly, warts and all. And then deliver on your declarations. And your customers will love you for it.

He reports that the discussion focused on

examples of lying about something being done to “enhance the customer experience”

Indeed.

Reader Robert writes:

Hilton Amex talked me into upgrading from Hilton Amex Plat to “Surpass” mostly because of Gold status; it’s $75/yr + ~ 15k bonus miles?; I have Plat Amex and Plat Intercontinental (ambassador); I almost never stay w/Hilton. Should I back out? and just ask for a match?

Should I use US Air winter discount (60k ea) for Envoy to CDG from BOS for my mom & me just to burn? we ea have ~65k dividend mi or is there something better? (membership rewards, CO, Delta, AA)

So here’s my rather rambling reply, a bit off-the-cuff and unedited.

The value in the Hilton Surpass card is $40k in spend gets you Diamond (top tier) status with Hilton. If you can put $40k in spend on the card, it’s great. Otherwise not worth a ton. Although the signup bonus is usually 40k Hilton points and that has to be worth double the annual fee (plus additional bonus points for Hilton stays in the first 18 months). So may be worth keeping the card for a year. By the way the gold status only lasts a year, you only keep gold if you spend $20k on the card.

The best cards now are
* Starwood Amex, because Starwood points are the most flexible, I expect a new card and new offers by the second quarter of next year
* British Airways Visa from Chase, 1.25 miles per dollar and when you spend $30k on the card in a year you get a certificate good for 2-for-1 award redemption
* the new Amex Premier card first year free, 15k amex points at signup, earns 3 miles per dollar on airline tickets and 2 on groceries
* Asiana American Express from Bank of America, 2 miles per dollar so $40k in spend gets you business class from the east coast of the US to Europe with up to 4 stopovers in addition to your destination (using the distance based chart and traveling less than 10k miles)

Europe in business for 60k is a good deal. Of course that means you have to fly US Airways. I’d rather get up to 120k in the account and fly first class to north asia (including all of china and hong kong)… e.g. ANA ORD-NRT in F, continuing on somewhere… includes a stopvoer as well…

By the way, the ANA distance-based chart is a good one, 63k Amex points -> All Nippon Airways gets you Virgin Upper Class JFK-LHR roundtrip.

Still, I like my Amex points transferred to Air Canada Aeroplan (but wait until you need them, the transfer is instantaneous). 120k gets you US to South Asia via the atlantic, the pacific, or both, and 2 stopovers are permitted…. eg JFK-IST- (stopover) – BKK in Turkish First (suites with doors), BKK-HKG in Thai First for the first class spa (stopover), HKG-IST in Turkish first, IST-FRA in business, then Frankfurt back the US on Lufthansa for a visit to the First Class Terminal….

How would you reply?

This week only United is offering a 20% discount on awards between the 48 contiguous United States and Canada and Europe or the Middle East.

Book by October 31, 2009 for travel between January 10, 2010 and March 15, 2010 to or from Amsterdam (AMS), Brussels (BRU), Frankfurt (FRA), Geneva (GVA), London (LHR), Moscow (DME), Munich (MUC), Paris (CDG), Rome (FCO), Zurich (ZRH), Kuwait (KWI) and the United Arab Emirates (DXB). United metal only, no Star Alliance or other partner flights.

I admit, I didn’t think they were bringing this one back. It used to be, perhaps before 5 years ago, that every year there would be a 100% bonus on transfers from Diners Club to British Airways.

And then they reduced the bonus to 50%, but they brought it back every year. It was usually a summer bonus. And this year summer came and went, and no word. I thought it was the end of the line for this lucrative bonus, and said so on Flyertalk. They’ve been slowly killing the card for awhile now, losing partners and taking away benefits, and you can’t even apply for a new Diners Club card these days.

So I was pleasantly surprise to read the news today that the bonus is back (or is about to come back..): a 50% bonus on transfers between November 1 and January 31.

Transfers aren’t instant with Diners Club, but the bonus is lucrative enough for many to be worthwhile.

Meanwhile they’re also offering a bonus of ‘up to 35%’ on transfers to Delta between October 15, 2009 and January 15, 2010. No bonus for transfers less than 10,000 points. A 15% bonus transferring between 10,000 and 19,999 points. It’s 25% between 20,000 and 29,999. And 35% for transfers of 30,000 points or more.

To my mind, seriously not worthwhile to give up the flexibility of Diners Club points to get a bonus with Delta, with Skymiles the most difficult to use in exchange for reasonable value of any North American mileage program.

There have been published kudos and media coverage for my award booking service.

So I’ve decided to set up a simple page: BookYourAward.com — to lay out the specifics.

Please drop me a line if I can ever help plan your award, gary -at- bookyouraward.com.

Continental exited Skyteam last night.  Or as I prefer to think about it, they were liberated.

That’s because on Tuesday they join the Star Alliance.

Continental has always been known to be stingy in offering award inventory. And this was a huge deal, because their partners were known to be the stingiest as well. Skyteam award inventory isn’t nearly as generous as Star or oneworld counterparts. Just try booking more than one business class seat at the same time on the same flights between the U.S. and Asia.

Going forward I still expect Continental to manage its own award inventory in a similar way. After all, Continental offers relatively small international premium cabins and employs a strategy to actually sell those seats (at a discount) rather than offering them for redemption. Continental is also known to hold back their premium class award inventory, it often seems to become available much closer to departure than with their counterparts.

But now it doesn’t matter. Continental offers a decent domestic product (though I’ll still take United for economy plus, service issues aside legroom matters more to me in coach, I do find their crews to be generally good and food better up front). Now you can fly Continental, credit miles to Continental, and redeem those miles on Star Alliance partners.

Whereas there didn’t used to be premium international redemption options for first class on many airlines (Qantas being an exception, but early last year they increased the price of US-Autralia Qantas First Class awards from 135,000 miles to 285,000), now there’s a myriad of international premium class options like ANA, Asiana, Lufthansa, Swiss, Thai…

Their new award chart is pretty good and they made several other positive changes in advance of joining Star: offering full elite qualifying credit on discount airfares, and eliminating Saturday night stay requirements on award tickets.

Indeed, Continental has been liberated, or at least Onepass members have had their miles liberated.

I’ve neglected my American Airlines account too much lately. I haven’t earned much there over the psat several months, there have been too many great promos elsewhere and I feel like I’m ‘wasting’ credit card spend putting miles into that account.

Don’t get me wrong, American Airlines miles are useful! I have an upcoming award trip in Cathay First…

But I’m really a much bigger fan of Star Alliance than oneworld, mostly for the larger number of carriers offering an international first class product (and in that regard, I don’t even think American’s own product really counts).

But it’s probably been a bit of a mistake. I’m a lifetime Gold elite member with American, because theirs is the only program offering lifetime status based on miles earned in an account from any source.

One million miles yields lifetime gold, and they give domestic members of their program 8 electronic 500-mile upgrade certificates and international members 4 confirmed systemwide upgrades.

I’m sitting around 1.7 million lifetime American miles, and 2 million means lifetime Platinum status (and 4 systemwide upgrades regardless of membership address).

But for years the feature of the program where all miles count towards lifetime status has been rumored to be on the way out. I haven’t heard much of those rumors lately, but they’re always in the back of my mind. I could see myself at 1.9 million miles lifetime when American makes the switch and begins counting only flight miles. And then I would — heaven forbid — actually have to start flying American regularly in order to earn elite status. Hah!

The other night I dreamt I had made it, though. And since it was a dream it got to be better than the real thing. They deposited 12 sysemwide upgrades (“eVIPs”) in my account by mistake. And I went on a tear to use them up before they caught the mistake. That was a great dream!

Sadly I awoke to find out I still only had those same 1.7 million lifetime American Airlines miles. I hadn’t been earning miles in my sleep. I did apply for another American Airlines Mastercard this morning, however. And I’ve been mulling parking a bit of extra cash over at BankDirect…

I’ve written about Hilton’s plan to devaluae their points here and here. Come mid-January many properties will require 25% more points, bizarre in a world where hotels are getting killed, rates are down and so is occupancy.

One Mile at a Time‘s comments, “I have about 300,000 Hilton points I need to burn, so I guess it’s time to start thinking about where I want to go.”

This got me thinking, how will I change my behavior as a result of Hilton’s gutting the value of my HHonors stash?

The thing is that I’ve always found HHonors points to be situationally useful, especially for redemeptions in small cities on personal travel when I don’t want to come out of pocket. Or other pedestrian travels where the hotel is a place to sleep, rather than the point of the trip, and I’m hoarding my other points for something special.

But in terms of planning a trip around burning HHonors points?

The Conrads in Asia are generally good, but even status will only get you so far there, the HHonors porgrams doesn’t include suites as an upgrade-by-right and you can’t spend extra points for suites to make the trip really special, either. The Conrad Maldives, Bora Bora Nui and Hilton Moorea are certainly extremely worthy resort properties. But again, no shot at accessing the best rooms without substantial cash co-pays.

Honestly — and perhaps I’m being myopic — there isn’t any Hilton property that I want to ‘plan a trip around’. I’ll tilt more towards burning HHonors points instead of an alternate currency through mid-January, of course. But on the whole I am likely to more or less ‘eat’ the devaluation — and be less likely to pursue accrual going forward (though Hilton was already a bit on the back burner, though a favorite for e-Rewards deposits).

Are there any Hilton properties I’m missing, that are truly special, where I should plan a redemption trip before the big thud on January 15?

Yesterday I posted a 4000 mile signup offer for bmi’s Diamond Club.

It turns out there’s actually a 5000 mile signup offer — so even better! Especially because that’s enough to redeem the lowest cash and points mileage award, just for creating an account. Although do be aware that they’ll only let you redeem signup bonus miles for yourself if you have no other miles in your account.

(Hat tip to Flyertalk’s abcx)

Through January 31, bmi is offering 4000 miles for joining its frequent flyer program.

And bmi miles stretch pretty far, since they offer one way awards and a cash and points option.

They’re especially generous with earning miles on premium class fares, and still offer minimum miles for those short hop flights. So a non-elite United flyer going Los Angeles – Las Vegas would earn 600 miles by crediting the flight to bmi rather than 236 miles crediting the flight to United.

New clip of Up in the Air released:

“I don’t spend a nickel if I can help it unless it somehow profits my mileage account.”

“Well we all need a hobby.”