FTD now offers 30 Delta miles per dollar, which is new.

Of course, I prefer the ongoing offering of 30 United miles per dollar, as much as United miles frustrate me due to Starnet blocking. Delta miles still worth less…

Lucky reports that United is now offering lounge access to Business Class passengers flying “p.s.” routes between JFK and San Francisco/Los Angeles, as well as to Global Services and 1Ks.

They already provided lounge access (and international first access, no less) to First Class passengers.

It’s about time they ‘enhanced’ the p.s. offering, it’s been so degraded since its introduction, and especially since they still consider it to be ‘special’ and won’t be providing complimentary upgrades to elites flying p.s. next year when they abolish 500-mile e-certificates and confirmed regionals.

Now, if only the Red Carpet Club was a better lounge…

Flyertalk came back online for me on Saturday, much of the world couldn’t access it until Sunday night.  But now… the occasional page will partially come up for me after a long wait, but that’s it.

Best guess — and this is just speculation, I really have no idea — is that all Internet Brands websites have been under a DDOS attack by someone or some group angry at the way they’ve managed the vBulletin software which they acquired in 2007.

This likely has nothing to do with Flyertalk, per se, but is really driving me nuts!

Keep hitting the comments here to express yourself about miles and points in the interim, hopefully it’ll help to keep us all sane while we’re without Flyertalk.

UPDATE: Flyertalk appears back at 9am easern!

Sign up with Entertainment Weekly to receive passes to a Wednesday, December 2 screening of Up in the Air. Available cities are Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.

This is a miraculous discussion, incredibly comprehensive and insightful even if a bit tongue-in-cheek.

On the whole I’m not a fan of buffets, most of the time they’re lowest common denominator, they skimp on quality ingredients to present big ticket items at lowest cost or they’re more about quantity than quality which isn’t usually how I like to eat. But they certainly have thier place, and in some locales like Vegas they’re part of both history and culture.

This bizarre discussion covers the different types of buffets, how to think about buffets, pre-meal preparation, strategy once you’re ready to eat, and post-meal care. Clearly people think about buffets a great deal, certainly a great deal more than I. At least there’s a reminder to be courteous to other diners, perhaps other diners like me not nearly so sophisticated in our approach or appreciation for the grandness of the buffet.

(Via Marginal Revolution.)

Alaska Airlines won the trial phase of a federal lawsuit arguing against buying and selling of award tickets. 

The argument that work (or at least that I find persuasive), I think, is that when consumers join a frequent flyer program they agree to abide by its rules, which include only redeeming or trading milesa according to its sanctioned practices.  That is, consumers agree not to sell awards, so they shouldn’t be allowed to.

The relevant questions are whether consumers actually own the miles in their accounts, or whether the airlines do (an important question as it has implications for taxation as well), and whether an airline can create a monopoly in the sale of its miles as well as a monopoly in aftermarket trading via platforms like Points.com.

But Alaska does make some pretty silly arguments in advancing its claims.

First, they argue that damages are caused because when an award is sold and redeemed, it’s a seat that cannot be redeemed by one of their actual customers and thus they lose the goodwill of that customer who is denied the award they want. But the person selling the award has the points in their account, and the alternative to selling the award ticket is redeeming one for themselves. So while the particular seat getting redeemed may be different, it’s still an award seat redeemed, and someone else potentially turned away. The only way Alaska’s argument here makes any sense is if the person selling the award would otherwise have done nothing with their miles, which isn’t plausible as long as the miles have value — something Alaska must maintain in order to argue that there are damages, in this case in terms of lost goodwill.

Second, they argue that the award sale takes away revenue “that would otherwise go to Alaska Airlines, or to Alaska to (a third-party vendor called) Points.com.”

In the first piece, it’s not plausible that it denies revenue that would have gone to Alaska unless the redemption displaces an Alaska purchased ticket. But why assume that (a) the trip would have otherwise been taken, (b) that it would have been taken via a revenue seat, and (c) that the seat purchase would have been on Alaska rather than on another carrier? This is only plausible on a route where Alaska operates a monopoly or near-monopoly and where the trip itself was of vital importance.

In the second piece, taking revenue from Points.com, this begs the question as Points.com as the trading platform is precisely the aftermarket monopoly which Alaska has granted. If the monopoly is permissable, then trading outside the monopoly is a problem. If the monopoly is impermissable, then trading outside the monopoly is fine. Saying that the monopoly is valuable to Points.com is beside the point. Besides, it’s implausible to assume that an award sale takes revenue away from Points.com, as the sale proceeds precisely because it’s the best and most lucrative option available. If Points.com were a reasonable alternative, there wouldn’t be an opportunity to sell or trade outside of its platform.

Ultimately, I accept the airlines’ rules, buying and selling miles is against their rules and doing so risks the mileage in your account. So far these restrictions have been upheld, as in this case, but little irks me more than claims made which strain credulity — like the magnitude of losses incurred by record labels as a result of online file sharing. And in the end, suing your customers is just not a very good business practice. And relying on the courts to protect your business model isn’t a particularly viable long-run strategy either.

The Global Traveller has flown the Airbus A380 on Qantas, Emirates, and Singapore.  I still haven’t flown it at all.  So he makes me quite jealous when he offers his comparison of the three A380 first class products. And at the same time, I appreciate his bringing the compare and contrast together in one place.

Upshot is that Qantas isn’t a true suite with doors, and is staffed by Qantas crew, but is otherwise an excellent hard product. Emirates is gimmicky as always, but give me the onboard showers gimmick any day! And Singapore is, well, Singapore — they’re almost as good as they think they are!

If you’re curious about the A380, or about the best in first class products, read the whole thing.

The world is saved. That is all.

Nearly all of my hotel stays are with a major chain. I have status, I earn and burn points. It’s rare that I stay outside ‘the system’. That also means I don’t usually experience the very very best luxury properties, most of which also exist outside of the traditional mainstream system. Although they frequently have affiliations, whether Leading Small Hotels of the World, Tablet Hotels, or just participation in American Express Fine Hotels and Resorts or Virtuoso.

But this weekend I needed to be in Richmond, and everything downtown was priced extraordinarily due to the Marathon. I could have stayed on a cheap rate at the Westin, but that was 6 miles from where I needed to be. And with the race traffic was going to be a nightmare.

The Jefferson, though, was priced pretty reasonably at $239. That was odd, considering the Doubletree a couple blocks away was priced for as much with a two-night minimum stay – and I needed just a night.

A quick call to American Express Travel and I had a Fine Hotels and Resorts Booking. Their price was $279, but it came with breakfast, lunch, late checkout, and an upgrade – all of which I’d be taking advantage of.

The hotel is incredibly grand, the staircase is probably its most famous attribute. It’s a beautiful old property, though a little big for my tastes and generally impersonal.

At check-in I was given an executive suite on the third floor. The room was a nice size, separate living room with fireplace, a desk, couch, and flat screen television. The bedroom had another fireplace and flat screen TV. But the best part of the room was the bathroom – separate toilet room, dual sinks, flat screen TV above the tub, and a double-sized shower room with three shower heads (one on each of two opposite walls and one overhead). Toileteries were Molton Brown and they had two complimentary bottles of water in the room.

So far, so good. But started to relax in the room, and I could hear my upstairs neighbors banging around. The ceiling didn’t provide much soundproofing from their foodsteps, and even conversations could be heard on occasion. They weren’t all that loud, but it was anything but peaceful.

Next morning I went downstairs at 6am to bring back coffee to the room. They have a coffee station downstairs in the lobby, and it wasn’t bad. Later I had my complimentary breakfast in TJ’s restaurant. It wasn’t great, wasn’t terrible, but the service was exceptionally slow. My coffee went empty and it was a struggle to get anyone’s attention to refill.

Car came back from valet parking with a ding in the door. I found the nearest manager who called for a security manager, who came down and took the report. To their credit they immediately recognized that the ding appeared to be from a car door opening into mine, was fresh, and they took responsibility. He gave me his card and told me just to send him the bill for repairs and he’d have a check sent. I was geared up for an argument, I fully expected them to claim that they couldn’t possibly have done it or that it might have existed beforehand. But they didn’t, they took it in stride. It’s probably a couple hundred dollars in damage (not that I’m an expert), so not a huge liability for them. Taking immediate ownership truly defused the situation.

Then it was back to TJ’s restaurant for lunch. They serve lunch until 2pm, and I showed up at 1:20pm. They said there would be a 15 minute wait. More than 20 passed, and a manager from elsewhere in the hotel sat us. And we waited, and waited, and waited – for 25 minutes at the table before I flagged down a waitress who was serving adjacent tables, as no one had come by to offer us drinks or anything else since we had been there.

Again there in fairness the waitress was hugely apologetic, and perfectly pleasant throughout our meal. Even then, service was slow and the kitchen sent out my order wrong. I didn’t say anything for fear of waiting longer. When we were finally through the waitress brought us the manager’s card, offered us dessert on the house and a complimentary meal in the future – neither of which we took them up on.

Back to the room to freshen up before leaving the property, and the room key didn’t work. Though we had 4pm checkout, the keys were deactivated. So back down to the desk. While they were replacing my keys I asked whether a 4:30 checkout might be possible, as with the long lunch much of our remaining time had been eaten up and I would prefer not to rush on the way out. They didn’t know what to say, and had to find a manager – who didn’t look up from whatever else he was doing but acknowledged that it would be fine.

All in all this was an almost nice hotel. Most people tried hard, but didn’t execute well. The room itself was lovely, the bathroom phenomenal, but the noise from our neighbors put a damper on that.

The hotel is quite good at service recovery, but I had to experience that part of their service far too often during a simple one-night stay.

In the end, I suspect I might return if I needed to be in Richmond. There just aren’t a ton of other nice downtown properties. But I didn’t walk away feeling as though it came close to warranting its five stars and five diamonds.

Alaska is offering a 30% bonus on purchased miles through the end of the year. It’s not worth going out and buying miles the way it is for the US Airways 100% bonus offer (which applies to transfers as well). But it’s a nice time for an account top-off if you’re close to an award and need a push over the top, or you have enough miles for an international partner business class award and you want first…

Through November 30, Fiji Water is offering 5,000 SkyMiles for signing up for an annual subscription and 10,000 SkyMiles for an annual subscription of 2 cases or more.

Not worth doing for the miles alone, an annual subscription will run around $360.

Two cases for 10,000 miles and cancelling doesn’t quite work for the miles alone — miles post after “approximately 8-12 weeks” so presumably you’d be on the hook for three months of delivery — probably $180 for 10,000 miles and remember these are Delta miles after all.

Still, if you like Fiji Water and would consder ordering it anyway, this is a worthwhile offer. As of this posting I haven’t tested whether the mileage offer is combinable with a percent-off coupon code.

Hit the comments here with whatever’s on your mind.  What are you thinking about?  What questions do you have?

Update: No sooner do I publish this and it looks like Flyertalk is beginning to struggle to come back up.  C’mon, you can do it!!

Scott McCartney writes up the Star Alliance MegaDO.

More than 200 vagabond business travelers, peripatetic frequent-flier-mile addicts and aviation enthusiasts did just that last week. Over four days, they traveled from the U.S. to Germany, Norway and France to meet with executives, pilots and mechanics at four airlines—plus representatives of aircraft manufacturer Airbus. The event, organized by members of FlyerTalk.com, a Web site that caters to frequent fliers, even included chartering a Boeing 757-300 to zip from airline hangar to airline hangar.

Couldn’t make it work myself, but from everyone I’ve talked to it was a ton of fun.

I offered an explanation of Expert Flyer back in June when they were offering a 20% discount on their services.

There are basically two pay services that advanced flyers use. Expert Flyer is one, and is of especially good use for American Airlines flyers looking to upgrade internationally, and for Delta upgrades, for instance and because the site will keep searching for inventory to open up on routes you designate and ping you when it does.

Personally I use the KVS Tool. It lacks award availability for Swiss (which is a drawback for me, but I workaround the problem via the Lufthansa JetFriends program) and it lacks the ExpertFlyer feature of automatically checking for specific inventory on your behalf and emailing you when it becomes available. But it has a broader variety of tools and access to special inventory of more airlines. I find it particular useful in putting together award itineraries, as it provides efficient access to the All Nippon Airways search engine for Star Alliance awards (giving you pretty much everything but Swiss and Air China, the latter of which can be searched for using the KVS Tool’s Apollo access), Oneworld awards via the Qantas and Cathay Pacific award search engines, and Skyteam awards via the Northwest US and Japan sites.

ExpertFlyer works off of a direct computer reservation feed, while KVS tool screen scrapes from various websites, providing convenient access to a wide variety of information.

If you do consider an Expert Flyer subscription, you’ll probably want to take advantage of their free 5 day trial first before committing, especially as the discount is valid far enough into the future that if you sign up in early July you can do the trial and then at the end take advantage of the discount if you do find the tool valuable.

Now this month they’re offering 15% with promo code YAPTANOV per this Flyertalk thread.

So if you were considering signing up or need to renew, this may be the time.

Update: Expert Flyer ,a href=”http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/12807057-post11.html” target=_blank>saw that the promo code was posted on Flyertalk and pulled it. Understandable that they weren’t getting the valid marketing test they were after.

Plenty of folks have had the British Airways co-branded Visa from Chase in the past. I did myself, the signup bonus was great when I was looking to top off for an award. But it didn’t used to be a good card for spending, and I cancelled it years ago.

Now that they’re offering an extremely compelling value proposition –

Yesterday US Airways announced big changes to their award chart going into effect January 6.

They say they’re moving from two award levels to four, in fact that’s wrong they’re moving from three to four.

Currently awards on US Airways flights come at the off-peak, regular, and last seat availability pricing. The new system will retain off-peak and regular pricing and split last seat availability into “medium” and “high” pricing.

Whether last seat availability comes at the medium or high price is a function of dates rather than flight loads, so they aren’t exactly following the Delta model. They say there “will be approximately 14 days a year when it’s not possible to book award travel at any level” for each region. (Blackout dates are here. Elite members will no longer be exempt from blackout dates.)

Award pricing is determined for each direction of a trip, it will be possible to combine low and high awards, averaging the pricing between the two.

My read is that there are a few changes to the mileage price of ‘regular’ awards, but that the biggest change is to the ‘rule-buster’ style awards that offer last seat availability.

For the traditional standard or low award level, business class to Europe goes up from 80,000 to 100,000 miles (still competitive with United and Continental). And their “high” level without capacity controls goes to an eye-popping 350,000 miles. Middle East doesn’t change. North American to South America in coach goes up 10,000 miles (20%), but doesn’t change in business class. Both North American to Carribean and to Hawaii in coach goes up 5,000 miles, no change in first.

Off-peak awards are new to South America. From the FAQ, “Off-peak awards are available from North America to Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean September 1 – 30; to South America May 1- 31 and October 1 – 31; and to Europe January 15 – February 28.” These are US Airways metal awards only and at a lower price than low. This isn’t a new category, of course, despite what the website and press release claim.

There is always an open question as to whether they will they reduce availability in the ‘low’ bucket compared to current saver offerings.

The question is whether any of this actually matters. I don’t redeem US Airways miles for US Airways flights, I redeem them for Star Alliance partner awards in premium classes. There hasn’t been any change yet announced to Star Alliance awards. Normally I would have expected there to be no change in those — after all, there’s only one bucket that US Airways has access to for those awards, it’s the capacity-controlled ‘low’ bucket. And US Airways says that medium and high awards have no capacity controls. Those clearly can’t apply to Star Alliance awards.

But the press release was a bit scary when it said “With GoAwards, our frequent flyers will be able to book more travel when they want to more than 1,000 destinations in 171 countries on US Airways or our Star Alliance partners.”

That seemed to suggest the change would apply to partner awards! But I read it as claiming the (mostly bad) changes will make it easier to redeem on US Airways for an extortionate number of miles, which means that the overall ease of booking awards across US Airways and its partners is greater, even though there’s no change to bookings with their partners.

Of course, I fully expect a change to the Star Alliance award chart — they’ll certainly update their partner award pricing so that it isn’t cheaper to book Star Alliance partners than US Airways flights for the same itinerary. (Oddly enough, Air Canada Aeroplan never resolved this — it is often cheaper to book Star Alliance awards than Air Canada awards, and Aeroplan only imposes fuel surcharges on Air Canada awards, not awards on their partners.)

And it’s possible that they will make draconian changes to their partner awards as well. But for now this change really just appears to be a gutting of awards on their own metal. If that’s the case it’ll be much ado about nothing for me at least, because I’m not interested in those awads to begin with.

We’ll know more over the coming days.

Last month I detailed the significant award chart devaluation that’s coming to Hilton HHonors in January. I noted how strange a time for it this is, since room rates are at historic lows and hotels have been on the whole empty. Prices are lower than a year ago, not higher. And hotel chains have been doing all they can to woo customers, not gut their loyalty drivers.

Nicholas Kralev details the changes as well in his “On the Fly” column for the Washington Times (Kralev is one of the very best travel columnists in the country, by which I mean his stories are generally accurate and in-the-know rather than made up fluff).

The upshot?

Beginning in January, you will need about 25 percent more points on average to book a free night at a Hilton chain hotel, including Conrad, Doubletree and Embassy Suites. That is the combined effect of increased redemption requirements and raised “award” categories of many properties.

I’ve been trying to find a reasonable explanation for that move, both from the company and some of its elite Diamond members, since the changes were announced somewhat quietly late last month. I’m still searching for it.

According to this Flyertalk thread, Continental isn’t fully linked up with Singapore Airlines yet. In order to book award tickets they have to do a ‘long sell’ where they manually request award availability. And it seems like more often than not, that availability is coming back confirmed.

Long-time readers of this blog know that Star Alliance members can look up award availability by signing up for an All Nippon Airways account and using their award search page. That gets you all except Air China, Shanghai Airlines, and Swiss.

It seems that Continental is somehow managing to confirm awards that the ANA website suggests are not otherwise being made available to Star Alliance members for redemption. I haven’t tested this myself, but one hypothesis might be that Singapore — which offers expanded award availability to its own members — could be confirming award inventory out of that larger pool of awards for Continental at this time.

One counter to that hypothesis, though, is that it seems some members are even redeeming for first class on Singapore’s 77W aircraft — their new long-haul first class, that as a matter of policy they usually do not make available to their partners, and even do not make available to their own members except at greatly inflated mileage pricing.

So if you have Continental miles, and have ever considered premium class awards to Asia, now appears to be the time to pounce.

This Flyertalk thread points out that HotelClub and Orbitz both should be offering 5th night free (pay 4, get 1) but instead of pricing the Hotel Pineta Palace at pay 1, get 4 free.  The promo is valid through March 31. For the first set of nights I checked that made the rate $17/night.

What’s more, promo code afforb40 may knock an additional $40 off the stay, bringing average room night cost down to about $9 (depending on the rate for the first night). Just choose expand your search options when first arriving at Orbitz, enter hotel name contains ‘Pineta’ to go straight to the property and enter code in the promo box. The discount should appear in the ‘total cost’ summary once you select the hotel!

Here are the TripAdvisor reviews. The place looks perfectly decent. It’s not centrally located but probably a good value for money place to begin with, even without this ‘special offer’.

Folks on Flyertalk have had success making back-to-back reservations for 10 days (pay 2, get 8 nghts free) as well.

Though prepaid, it looks like if you cancel you are entitled to some of your money back. The cancellation policy is:

Cancellations or changes made within 1 day prior to 12:01 AM local hotel time on the day of arrival are subject to a $54.95 charge.

So if you cancel you’re out $60. But you get the difference between that and the first night’s charge back.

Via Upgrade: Travel Better, Avis is readying the IT infrastructure to implement rental car no show fees at some point in the future.

Avis has asked that computer reservation systems be ready by December. They want all systems able to take credit card information on rental car reservations so that they can charge no show fees. If only their own website was imposing a no show penalty, they’d lose bookings to other channels which increases costs. If the refused to allow other booking channels to reserve their cars because those channels didn’t impose fees, they’d lose bookings and thus revenue. So they need all channels ready prior to launch of this initiative.

In all likelihood the policy they’ll try to roll out is a 24-hour cancellation policy, with specified charge for failing to cancel by that time.