After the free Hilton Hotel night giveaway generated so much interest, I’m really enjoying giving away travel items.

This next time I think I’m going to try something a little bit different. I’m going to offer some giveaways on Twietter, and you’ll have to follow @garyleff in order to be eligible. Details to come, follow me now so you don’t miss out!

In March 2008 I posted an offer to sign up for Marriott Rewards with instant gold status. The offer was even around for a few months.

Well, I signed up, and my status was valid through February, 2010. I took advantage of it a bit, but am just not much of a Marriott guy. So my status is about to end… or is it?

Yesterday I received an email offering me a chance to keep it. Through April 1 I have the following option:

Limited-time only! Buy back your Gold status for just 25,000 points – a 15,000-point savings. Use points you already have, or purchase points.

Anyone with status in 2009 can redeem points to keep that status through February, 2001. And Marriott will sell you up to 50,000 points per year for 1.25 cents per point.

I’ve got to think long and hard on this one, I will probably get just enough use out of my Gold status to make this worth it.  Barely.  At least I have a bit more than a month to mull it over.  Should I go for it?

After posting about the incident of a family kicked off a Spirit aircraft after being denied water for the pregnant woman in the party (I blamed the family for flying Spirit in the first place), I heard from Spirit Corporate Communications.

They didn’t defend their record of customer service, or disagree with my points about why it’s silly to fly Spirit if you can possibly avoid it.

But they did dispute that they denied a pregnant woman water. Sort of.

Here is what really happened:

Spirit did not deny water to anyone. Beverages were offered for purchase just as we do on all of our flights. The real story is that Dr. Roslin was escorted off the flight for violating federal law for interfering with a flight crew. He was causing a disturbance and attempted to incite other passengers to the point that another passenger started to cry in fear as a result of his behavior. He made verbal references to terrorism. His continued disturbance caused further delays to the flight. His escalating behavior was a safety risk to the crew and other passengers. His son kicked a Spirit employee in the groin. He had to be removed from the aircraft by law enforcement.

I replied:

Thanks for your note, and no doubt important details are often left out of these kinds of stories.

You don’t help your or Spirit’s credibility, though, with the claim “He made verbal references to terrorism” as though that was somehow relevant. I suppose he’s lucky his pregnant wife wasn’t sent to Guantanamo.

In all seriousness, and I’m happy to post an addendum, you’d have to agree that Spirit could have done a better job upfront to diffuse the situation and not let it reach the point where other passengers are crying in fear and a physical confrontation ensues… like finding a way to get a cup of woter for the pregnant woman enduring a 2-hour tarmac delay?

Spirit did not follow up.

The Hilton free night contest ended yesterday.

There were more than 1300 entries (color me surprised!).

I drew the winner based on random number, as promised, with thanks to Random.org. And thanks, of course, to BoardingArea.com for providing the free Hilton hotel night to give away!

The winning comment came from LAXNRT. Please join me in congratulating LAXNRT!

With the kind of response that I got, look for more giveaways soon…

Research from the Netherlands measured the effect of vacations on happiness. It turns out that people get the most happiness from planning and anticipating their vacations.

Except for the most relaxing of vacations, people aren’t happier when they return from a trip than when they left. Even at the most extreme end of relaxation, the happiness effect wears off after two weeks.

Taking more trips and planning and talking (obsessing?) about them, then, may be the keys to happiness.

I guess that must make travel agents the happiest people on earth! Indeed, perhaps I’m one of the happiest as well.

The Houston Chronicle, umm, chronicles Continental’s push to improve its premium cabin catering. They spoke to me about the efforts, and while I caveated that I’m not a frequent Continental flyer,

HotelCashBack.com is a new blog with hotel deals, they’re currently showing $24.11 per night all-in at Stratosphere in Vegas (yuck!), $50.68 at Sheraton Bungavillas in Puerto Vallarta, $58.40 at Atlantis in Reno including breakfast buffets, and $119.06 at Encore at the Wynn in Vegas.

And to promote themselves, they’re trying to go viral with a modest giveaway:

[W]e are giving away sixty (60) American Airlines vouchers. Just mention our blog on another web site, blog or forum, email us at info@hotelcashback.com to let us know and we will email you a voucher.

Each American Airlines voucher is good for $10 off per ticket purchased on aa.com, up to six tickets, maximum savings of $60!

The Jetiquette Podcast interviews Randy Petersen this week.

There aren’t a whole lot of podcasts I listen to (other than Upgrd.com) and I hadn’t listened to Jetiquette before. It’s a little campy perhaps, but Randy is always worth devoting a few minutes’ listening to. Highly recommended.

I’ll be recording another session, but in the meantime you can listen to this week’s upgrd podcast where we talk about “United Airlines award levels, website issues, and evil StarNet blocking; US Airways award levels and availability; and Continental’s award chart and how they match up with United.”

Give it a listen.

You have just a little over a day left to enter to win a free Hilton hotel night courtesy of BoardingArea.com.

Even Kim Kardashian can spot them.

You need to register and have at least three qualifying activities to earn a 50% bonus on all of your hotel and car partner earning through April 30th.

Regular readers know that I’m not a huge fan of Delta Skymiles. And it’s not the 150% bonus offer that Delta mistakenly offered in November, 2008.

But I am a fan of bonus miles.

This would, for instance, make a 2-day Avis car rental that would otherwise offer 2010 miles especially value (3015 miles!).

Mileage transfers count, so 20,000 Starwood points normally generate 25,000 Delta miles. If you’ve got two other qualifying partner transactions, then a 20,000 Starpoint transfer would yield 37,500 Delta miles.

This isn’t lucrative enough to actually get me to burn my Starwood points, they’re too value and Delta miles aren’t. But if you want to top off towards an award, now’s a great time.

Just remember that you need three transactions to qualify. Right now I’m headed over to my Starwood account, as a Platinum I am able to do a mileage transfer of as little as 1 mile. (I do this often to my lesser used mileage accounts in order to keep them active.) Boom, there’s a partner transaction. And if I come back in a week or so and do it again, that should be another transaction. Because on quick read of the rules it appears as though the same partner/activity can count more than once.

Tony Woodlief brings us the story of a pregnant woman being refused water by Spirit Airlines during a two-hour tarmac delay.

I agree with the standard fare outrage in this story, sometimes you just need water, pregnant woman, blah blah. It’s pretty indecent to refuse the request, even if the flight attendants couldn’t be moving around the cabin a great deal at that time, even if they weren’t in a position to provide water service to everyone. There would have been a reasonable way to handle the issue and this wasn’t it.

The only thing I suppose that’s worth adding here is that a bit of personal responsibility is in order here. The person ejected from the aircraft was the woman’s husband, and he’s the Chief of Obesity Surgery at Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital. No doubt an intelligent man, and in choosing his travel providers I would expect him to be a little more discerning than to choose to fly Spirit. He ought to both know better and be expected to feel that his family deserves better.

The President of the airline declared publicly (while working at US Airways) that he doesn’t value his customers (because in buying tickets at the prices the airline offers to sell them for, they aren’t spending enough money). So it was no surprise to the more than casual observer when as President of Spirit, Ben Baldanza became famous accidentally hitting reply-all when instructing subordinates to tell a complaining customer,

[W]e owe him nothing as far as I’m concerned. Let him tell the world how bad we are. He’s never flown us before anyway and will be back when we save him a penny.

I recognize that not everyone may be aware of Spirit’s corporate culture. And that Spirit, which as far as I’ve seen so far hasn’t commented on this story, might well disavow the outcome. But it appears to me an airline that is focused on lowest possible costs, not investing in service, as a way to offer low fares and attract customers. But in this case at least there really is a difference in travel providers, there is a difference, and I do rather expect a surgeon of this man’s stature to care about who he’s doing business with and make intelligent choices.

Call me sexist, perhaps, for assuming that the surgeon made the decision to buy the tickets (perhaps it was the doctor’s pregnant wife, the critique applies equally), this is a logical leap, but he was taking the lead in aggressively seeking the water — I would have expect him to be equally aggressive prior to the trip in ensuring he was with a travel provider equipped to handle his needs.

Via Frugal Travel Guy, Hertz is offering 1000 bonus United miles for online bookings. They’re also offering triple United miles, “up to 1500!”

Rick described it as, “2500 United Miles Per One Day Hertz Rental???” but I don’t think that’s correct.

It’s a 1000 mile bonus and triple miles, which presumably are triple the standard United mileage offer of

50 Mileage Plus miles per day for all qualifying paid rentals of 1 to 4 days. Earn 500 miles for qualifying rentals of five or more days at any airport and downtown location worldwide.

So a 1-day rental would earn (50 x 3) + 1000 = 1150. And it would take a 5-day rental to earn 2500 miles. Though I’d love to be wrong on this one!

Nonetheless, good if you’re renting from Hertz anyway. But I still prefer the current rich offers from Avis.

Forbes runs a piece on Randy Petersen, where he talks about how he got started giving miles and points advice, about the 17 million miles in his accounts, and why he doesn’t burn them.

I guess when you have 17 million you’re not worried about a little bit of devaluation!

Nicholas Kralev speaks to the head of United Mileage Plus and learns that the initial rollout of United one-way awards have been United metal-only because they started with the website, and the web doesn’t offer the ability to book partners. (I don’t expect that functionality anytime soon; perhaps if United and Continental merge they can keep the Continental site?) But the intention is to roll out one-way awards with partners.

For the time being, United’s one-way “awards,” as well as its new “miles and money awards,” are limited to its own flights for technical reasons — those tickets can only be booked on its Web site, which doesn’t offer access to partner “awards,” Mr. Atkinson said. When phone agents are able to book them — sometime in the summer — partner-carriers will be included, he said.

That’ll be great. One-way awards are quite useful. Think: American miles for Qantas first class to Australia, and United miles for Air New Zealand business class back from Auckland. Or Cathay Pacific first class to Asia, and All Nippon back. I’m looking forward to this.

Kralev notes that United hasn’t decided what to do with stopovers on award tickets yet.

The only downside to American’s new policy, which was introduced in May, was the elimination of stopovers on round-trip “awards” — if you want to visit two cities, you need to book three one-way segments, and that will cost you more miles. Naturally, United customers are wondering what they should expect, but Mileage Plus hasn’t “made a call yet,” Mr. Atkinson said. Currently, phone agents can book stopovers on round trips.

This despite United posting on Flyertalk that they have no plans to take away stopovers.

I take the two comments together to mean they just haven’t come to a conclusion one way or another, or they think they might take away stopovers and if they do they’ll introduce that at the same time as one-way awards on partners. Since they aren’t coming out and saying they won’t take away stopovers, and the United comment on Flyertalk is pretty non-commital about the future, one has to imagine there’s a pretty strong chance that stopovers will go away. Book your stopovers now because visiting two cities on an award requires three one-way awards (and extra miles).

Finally, Kralev notes the positive moves United has made like removing close-in award booking fees, and also that they continue their practice of Starnet blocking.

Apply here. Act right away, because these offers seem to come and go quickly.

It’s an incredible promo, well worth the $75 annual fee for the card.

The way to really leverage it, though, is with British Airways’ family accounts. Say that husband and wife each apply, spend $2,000 on the card, each earn the 100,000 mile bonus (50,000 miles with first purchase, 50,000 more after $2000 in spend).

Then one of the cardholders hits $30,000 in spend in a year and earns a free companion award ticket.

Total miles earned: 240,000 — 200,000 from bonuses and 1.25 miles per dollar on $32,000 in spending.

And you can get (2) award tickets each valued at 240,000. So 480,000 miles in award travel for $32,000 in credit card spend and 2 $75 annual fees.

(Hat tip: Frugal Travel Guy for the new credit card application link.)

TM Travel World reports on a Priority Club glitch. They offered a ‘quiz’ you could take for 100 points. But you could take the quiz over and over, and earn the points each time. With the assistance of a computer script, there were some members who ‘earned’ millions of points.

Apparently Priority Club has frozen the accounts of folks who ‘took advantage’ of the quiz, earning 2 or more bonuses.  They cancelled award reservations that had been booked by those accounts.  And they haven’t been much for notifying affected individuals.

I can sympathize with Priority Club.  They view it as a form of fraud, even if their own IT systems are partly to blame.  Personally I would have just deducted the points they didn’t intend to award.  Perhaps they could have scalated things with the folks who wrote automated scripts to haul in millions of points.  But folks who took the quiz 2 or 3 times, earning an extra 200 or 300 poitns?  Definitely overkill, those folks likely had no idea they were doing anything ‘wrong’ in Priority Club’s eyes.

Of course we’ll see if Priority Club views this as an overreaction, ultimately.  They have every reason not to award extra bonus points.  They should have done a better job with their IT systems from the get go.  And they might deal with the major ‘offenders’ but to deal across the board, as TM Travel World suggests they’re doing, makes no sense at all. 

Someone who legitimately took this a second time, just to take the quiz independent of points earning, shouldn’t be penalized because Priority Club awarded them points a second time when they shouldn’t have.  And folks who just wanted to see if the site was still awarding points, out of a desire to understand the program they’re loyal to, shouldn’t be penalized. 

And at least if Priority Club intends to act in this way — and mind you this is a program with a history of allowing folks to double, triple, and quadruple dip on bonuses for the same hotel stays — they should clearly announce their new policy up front.  They’ve led customers to believe multiple bonuses are ok, they should at least communicate that’s no longer the case if it’s no longer the case, rather than shutting down accounts without warning.

A couple of weeks ago I reported that El Bulli (I wrote a trip report of my dinner there in 2008) would be closing for two years — the 2012 and 2013 seasons — and re-opening in 2014.

Now Ferran Adria, the chef-owner, has decided to close the restaurant permanently, after the 2011 season.

The restaurant and Barcelona workshop combined lose a half a million Euros per year. In fairness, that’s really by choice. The restaurant is said to get 10,000 requests per table. It’s certainly been the most difficult reservation to get in the world. They could easily raise price (my wife and I ate there for about 500 euros all-in, which isn’t unreasonable for a Michelin 3-star and certainly not for arguably the best restaurant in the world). But Adria has long said that he “doesn’t cook for millionaires.”

The restaurant is an expensive proposition, from the ingredients to the staff (there are as many people cooking as there are diners on a given night). But Adria doesn’t raise price because he values that his restaurant is accessible (a relative term no doubt). And with his speaking, consulting, book royalties, and other sources of income he’s been able to afford this indulgence.

But no more, he’ll found an El Bulli cooking academy in place of the restaurant.

Adrià said the academy would be “a place for free thinking and kicking around ideas’’ about food. The El Bulli academy would likely work with many cooking schools around the world and would seek students — perhaps 25 in the first year — who had the highest levels of professional training.

Via Marginal Revolution, research by Lufthansa suggests (article in German) that tomato juice is popular on airplanes because, as Tyler explains,

During a flight, everything tastes quite a bit weaker, as if you had a cold. You might think die deutschen would turn to Sichuan Chili Chicken, but no…Tomatensaft!

And an anonymous commenter adds that it’s popular

Because it’s an excellent source of both vitamin C and vodka?

I find that onboard I frequently order bloody marys in the morning myself.