In addition to working with a nice roll-aboard, I like to have the occasional throwaway bag as well. The kind I tend to pick up for $20 in Southeast Asia.

I hate to check bags but occasionally I want to overpack on the outbound portion of a trip, maybe bring a bunch of liquids with me or gifts, and I don’t want to bother bringing checking the bag on the way home, so a bag I feel comfortable just leaving behind.

Ebags is running an extra 20% off sale through June 21. Combined with free shipping, this makes it easy to pick up a throwaway bag as well, something as cheap as $32 all-in.

And of course it’s even less expensive than that because you can pick up 8% cash back via eBates or 10% via Fatwallet.

It’s a good sale on other mid-range bags as well, nothing all that interesting for me (I’m increasingly particular about my luggage) but I did pick up one of those $30 net cost carryons that I’ll probably leave behind somewhere in the next year. (Boy, if that statement wasn’t flame-bait for the comments, I don’t know what would be… let ‘er rip.)

Hotwire provides credits towards future bookings with each purchase and they call those credits Hotdollars, and though I’m not all that frequent a customer of theirs my account also says that I have access to Hotwire Express. It’s apparently not too exclusive a service but does provide more personalized service and flexibility from real customer service folks and not just auto-responses. They never told me I had access to it, I just noticed it on my account when I started poking around this morning looking for more information on the Hotdollars program.

Apparently the Hotdollars program has existed for at least a five years and somehow I never noticed it.

For the longest time I hadn’t even created a Hotwire account, I just booked as a guest, what a mistake — I’ve been racking up HotDollars on purchases made for others in addition to cashback.

The nice thing here is that you can double dip — earn for example 2% cashback as a rebate going through a shopping portal and earn the Hotwire Hotdollars directly at the same time.

In fairness to me (!) there’s not a lot of detail on the Hotwire website. They don’t even tell you the earning rate, if I weren’t so lazy I’d dump my bookings into a spreadsheet and compare it to my Hotdollars and decipher it. But I haven’t had my second cup of coffee yet.

Ebates offers a 2% rebate on Hotwire purchases, and a $5 bonus with your first transaction. (I use Ebates as my rebate program on Hotwire purchases and for Expedia, since Fatwallet only offers a flat $3 per air reservation with the latter. And disclosure, using my link to sign up for Ebates gets us each the $5 bonus, so there’s something in it for me, not enough to taint my perception but I don’t like these things under the radar.)

You start at Ebates, use their link for Hotwire, and will get the 2% on purchases. And then Hotwire will give you their credit towards future purchases based on your spend. That makes it all the more useful, especially when booking for others and redeeming for yourself…

And of course I use BetterBidding.com to decipher what hotels Hotwire is offering via their opaque booking service. Hotwire tells you the amenities and quality level of a hotel that’s in a specific geographic zone, and BetterBidding’s hotel lists will help you decipher the identity of the property, removing some of he opaque elements to the booking.

Hotwire is also a pretty good option for rental cars, albeit prepaid and you don’t get to use upgrade coupons or mileage offers. I’ll frequently see weekday airport rates in major cities that are quite high through normal channels, but much lower on Hotwire. You don’t find out which rental agency it is until you’ve booked, but on a booking this this who cares since it’s a major on-airport agency in any case. Not always an amazing deal, but definitely one for the arsenal in addition to the new AutoSlash site.

Now, Priceline often gets somewhat better prices than Hotwire. In my experience the same hotels and rental agencies offer the same pricing to the two services more or less but Hotwire adds its own markup. So on rental cars I can often do about 10% better on Priceline, or at least I can try and if I fail I can go back to Hotwire, but the difference is rarely worth it to me. Hotwire gives me more buying information up front, and my time is worth something. (On the whole I still often do even better with Priceline on hotels, but check Hotwire to determine a ‘worst case’ pricing as part of my research.)

For my own hotel bookings I rarely use Hotwire and Priceline, I’m less price sensitive and am interested in earning hotel bonuses (I mean, who can beat Free Hyatt Nighs double dipped with big American Airlines bonuses?) and status benefits like upgrades and lounge access. But most of the people I know may not have status and are most interested in price, and perhaps on an airport overnight I might be as well. I book for others, can get a cash rebate and Hotdollars, so I’m helpful to others and at the same time who says travel agent commissions don’t exist anymore at least on a do it yourself basis!

Delta is targeting travel originating from a few cities, the ones I’m aware of are: St. Louis, Raleigh, Pittsburgh, and Nashville.

You can test out other cities with the following URL:

http://delta.com/XXXbonus
(replacing XXX with the airport code you wish to try)

Many additional cities have been tried over at Flyertalk without additional success.

Registration can be done separately for each city’s promotion, and each roundtrip originating in that city will earn double elite qualifying miles and bonus miles as follows:

Cranky Flier points out the absurdity of Delta’s one-way awards. Delta doesn’t offer one-way awards for less than the roundtrip price, they just price the award as a roundtrip at double the mileage cost of the segment you choose.

So if only ‘medium’ awards are available for a simple domestic one-way flight, that’s 20,000 miles one-way so 40,000 miles roundtrip. And the one-way domestic segment is 40,000 miles.

Note that if only high is available, then the one-way would be 60,000 miles. Now, a one-way award with last seat availability in domestic coach on United or American would be 25,000 miles. See the difference?

But as Cranky points out, if you needed last seat availability on Delta (60,000 miles for a one-way) you’d just book last seat availability outbound, and pick a random return flight that was available at the ‘low’ (i.e. “standard” or “normal”) level and it would price as 30,000 (outbound) + 12,500 (return) = 42,500.. for a savings of 17,500 miles. Still more than American or United (duh) but much less expensive.

Now that United and American offer one-way awards, one would think that Delta would need to offer them (at half the roundtrip pricing) as well. But then you’d think they’d need to offer reasonable access to premium cabin international award seats, too, and y’all know how that has worked out…

One more reason why Skypesos are worth so much less than other currencies.

I woke up this morning to some disturbing news. The All Nippon Airways website award search page is the killer app for searching out Star Alliance awards. The site displays award inventory for all Star Alliance members, and is easy to use (more or less).

Sometime overnight (here in the US, presumably sometime in the morning over in Japan!) the website introduced a new restriction:

The Partner Flight Award search function is not available for passengers who do not have any mileage balance.

Makes sense, Star Alliance members the world over were using the ANA site to find their award space and then calling their home programs to book awards. Either ANA got tired of having their system resources used by folks who are only nominally members of their program, or other member airlines pressured them to restrict access. I don’t know which, but it’s not surprising other than that I rather expected this to happen quite a long time ago.

That said, as soon as I looked into it I wasn’t too concerned.

Take that, Domino’s!

Alaska is increasing their first checked bag fee, but continuing to exempt all elites and reducing the fees on checked bags beyond the first one. What’s more, they’re improving their Baggage Service Guarantee.

Since July, 2009 they’ve offered 2000 miles (or a $20 discount on a future flight, who would choose that?) if checked bags aren’t delivered within 25 minutes of a flight parking at the gate. They now guarantee checked baggage delivery within 20 minutes.

Several thoughts about the improved baggage guarantee:

1) If they’re going to charge for checked bags, this makes it go down easier.

2) It’s really impressive that they can get baggage working so smoothly as to promise this. It shows a real commitment to deliver results, something that’s hard to imagine most major carriers doing.

3) Hey, if bags were delivered more quickly (and actually showed up after the flight on which I traveled) I might be more inclined to check a bag occasionally!

4) It’s a good thing for Alaska that they no longer serve Washington-Dulles…

Update: Sneaky. After waiting on hold for Alaska’s partner award desk, playing an announcement for the old policy, I’ve realized that while the time guaranteed for baggage delivery has been improved, the compensation for late baggage has been reduced! The old policy was 2500 miles or a $25 certificate for future travel. So fewer miles/less money, but also quicker delivery. All-in-all quite fair, and something only Alaska does, but I didn’t initially realize they were reducing the compensation…

Air Canada Aeroplan is offering cumulative mileage bonuses based on segments flown through the end of the year. Registration required.

Register and then the number of segments you fly within North American on Air Canada through December 31 earn the following cumulative bonuses:

I’ve written about this before — last month even — but it bears repeating. I had a conversation yesterday with someone who reads this blog regularly, who has seen me write about earning cash back or miles from online shopping including for booking travel online, basically free money or miles in your pocket for the purchases you’re going to make anyway. He knew about these posts and yet still wasn’t doing it.

See for instance The Broad Array of Travel Sites Offering Cashback via Ebates and Purchasing Airline Tickets for Others, Getting Something Back for Yourself.

Three things here:

I don’t mean this to ‘brag’ but just to share my genuine joy and excitement with all of my regular readers.

American has been unique among airline programs in offering lifetime status for earning miles from any source,. So whereas United and Delta have offered lifetime status for millions of flight miles, American has offered lifetime status for millions of miles including those earned from credit cards, transfers in from other programs, really just any partners they have.

I even earned American miles on my British Airways first class flight from London to Toronto (shh…), those are most of the qualifying miles in my statement snapshot below, and then I sent a note to AAdvantage because I was disappointed in the flight service received during the British Airways strike, and they deposited a bunch of miles as an apology. Those miles counted towards my lifetime status.
I’m not a regular American Airlines flyer. I’ve probably flown less than 20,000 actual paid butt-in-seat miles on American in the past 20 years.

I am not a regular American flyer, so why do I care about American status? Certainly having status will make it more likely that I fly American in the future. And who knows how circumstances change, locking in lifetime status is a benefit and I wanted it now in case the rules changed. I have many, many years to enjoy it (as long as American doesn’t renege on the offer, and as long as they stay around!).

I’ve earned almost all of my miles from partners, I’ve always found American to be one of the easiest programs in which to earn miles without flying. I’ve even earned close to 10% of my lifetime miles from my checking account.

Status takes a little while to roll over after reaching a million mile threshold. But like at the Gold levvel I’ll receive a new membership card, presumably luggage tags, and a gift of upgrades.

At 1 million miles you achieve lifetime gold status, and (for North American members) 8 500-mile upgrade certificates or (for international members) 4 confirmed at booking international upgrade cetificates.

At 2 million miles you achieve lifetime platinum status, and 4 confirmed at booking international upgrade cetificates.

I was very tempted for a long time to just get my quest over with, to transfer in a bunch of Starwood points. I resisted that temptation, I didn’t actually need the status earlier rather than later, and since I made it without doing so I’m glad I resisted the urge. But I would have been beating myself up monstrously if I had passed up on the chance and hadn’t made the transfer and then American changed the rules for lifetime status qualification.

The thinking over at the Traveling Better forums is that American will – at some point – change the way they calculate lifetime status. It could be that they stop counting miles from all sources towards that status. Whether that means coutning all miles earned to date from any source and only flight miles going forward, or counting only flight miles when calculating million miler status in the future, no one knows. Or it could even mean just increasing the number of miles required from any source for lifetime status. But the bottom-line is a sense that American feels there are now too many people earning lifetime status, that it’s too easy to do. And it probably is.

How soon will something happen? Nobody knows, changes have been speculated on for a long time, years even. I asked Randy Petersen about this over dinner in April, since I was pretty darn close to the 2 million mile threshold and thus it was on my mind. He felt confident that they wouldn’t make the change in 2010, that it just wasn’t high enough up in the priorities to make the IT investments necessary for the change. He told me not to make a points transfer, that I would be fine, and indeed he was right (though I didn’t think I’d make it within just a couple of months of that conversation).

I have to think that Randy is right, that the change won’t happen in the next few months, but I also have to agree with JonNYC‘s advice at Traveling Better — that I wouldn’t transfer tons of points over to American with the goal of getting closer to lifetime status (rather than crossing a status threshold now) on the belief that it will just make it quicker to get there in the future. Someone who does that could wind up with a bunch of American miles (rather than another currency which they might otherwise prefer) and find that those miles didn’t actually help them towards lifetime status.

At the same time, if a promo like the current bonus for transferring in hotel points helps you cross a million miler threshold now, it might be a good idea to go for it! (And remember that the ability to transfer from Marriott to American ends on June 30.)

100,000 Air Canada Aeroplan miles will buy a roundtrip first class award from, say, San Francisco to Zurich or Frankfurt connecting on to Italy.

Or it will buy four blenders or ten LCD toasters!

Then there’s the 19,500 mile sunglasses. Or 24,000 miles for towels. Did I mention, though, that when you redeem that first class award to Europe, they have towels in Lufthansa’s First Class Terminal .. and you don’t have to redeem extra miles for them?

Wendy Perrin writes about her lunch with Randy Petersen in the Conde Nast cafeteria.

Having enjoyed lunch with Wendy there myself, I’m curious to hear how the pad thai was (I picked sushi), but I’m not sure I agree with all of the advice and predictions that Randy offered.

Wendy points out that Continental miles haven’t in practice been expiring (despite a policy that would allow the program to deactivate dormant accounts), whereas United expires miles after 18 months of account inactivity. Radny sees this as a huge issue:

Randy’s #1 piece of advice to the heads of the new combined program is: Do NOT impose an expiration date on Continental miles!

Those are a lot of expiring miles that United will never have to redeem, it’s a lot of money, and I can’t imagine that a combined program won’t see the value in that for their bottom-lines. Perhaps it does erode the loyalty of infrequent customers, but as a very engaged member I find it really easy to keep accounts active and if that revenue funds the program improvements that are really necessary during the integration (no more Starnet blocking!) then I’m comfortable with the combined entity following United’s lead.

Randy says you can earn miles paying your mortgage from a Capital One bank account, and of course Capital One doesn’t charge foreign currency transaction fees with their credit card. Those are two perfectly valid reasons to engage Capital One. But it’s still worth underscoring that you shouldn’t use Capital One for anything else. A little advice is dangerous, and it’s important to remember that those points and that savings is worthwhile compared to alternatives in those very limited cases, but for everything else almost any major program’s airline mileage will be more valuable (even Delta’s… barely).

Wendy is considering the changes to the Continental credit card lineup and what they mean for her card of choice:

There’s a brand-new Continental Onepass Plus credit card ($85/year) from Chase that is not nearly as expensive as the Continental Presidential Plus MasterCard ($395/year) I currently carry. The main difference? The Presidential Plus card provides airport club access, while the Onepass Plus card does not. I’m scrutinizing the differences at this very moment to determine which better suits my needs.

Except, here’s the thing. The “Onepass Plus” card isn’t really a new card. It’s the same thing as the existing World Mastercard, plus an annual 10,000 mile bonus for spending $25,000 on the card. Continental has made elites who carry any Continental credit card eligible for upgrades on award tickets. But that’s not really part of the ‘new vs. old card’ question. And the unique selling propositions for the more expensive Presidential Plus Mastercard remain the same — Continental lounge membership, earning elite qualifying miles from spend, elites earn an extra 25% mileage bonus on flights, Avis Presidents Club status and Hyatt Platinum.

I do much agree with Randy on the value of one-way awards. I miss the ability to have stopovers on American Airlines awards (they now only permit stopovers at a North American gateway on international awards), but with American you also have their distance-based oneworld awards that’ll often work as a nice substitute. United’s one-way awards are way behind in value, but they’re still new. United needs to permit booking one-way awards by phone in addition to online, and to permit booking partner flights on one-way awards. Until then they’re of limited use (in part because of how stingy United has been with award availability this year).

Sounds like it was a fun lunch!

The United website’s award search capability has added a new tab, in addition to saver and standard awards there’s now a tab you can click for Star Alliance awards.

So far they’re only loading Continental and US Airways inventory, not the rest of their Star partners, but it’s a start.

Star Alliance Awards

Star Alliance® Awards give you the flexibility to fly on any of our Star Alliance airline partners for the price of a Saver Award. Currently, only Continental and US Airways flights be booked on united.com. If you are looking to fly on any other Star Alliance airline partner, please call 800-United-1 to book your award. Seats are limited and may not be available on all flights.

This is hugely significant on several levels.

First, one-way awards. The challenge booking one-way awards on the phone has been IT-related, presumably that’s coming but bringing Star Alliance inventory to the website brings one-way awards on partners that much closer.

Second, Starnet blocking. Either the increased transparency will be the beginning of the end for blocking (when you can book an award with merger-to-be partner Continental but not with United, and you can compare online, how sustainable is that?). Of course, the only carriers online are Continental and US Airways and I’ve never seen United block either one. So this is little help yet, but it’s promising if they can add more partners quickly.

Third, award planning. As long as United engages in blocking hte availability of partner award inventory (something no other Star Alliance airline does), the most frustating thing about putting together awards is that you cannot simply rely on the seats being offered by partners but only on United’s reservations agents, who have mixed levels of proficiency and creativity in finding award seats. At a minimum this will help members know which partner seats United will actually allow to be booked.

Blocking was at an absolute minimum at the beginning of May, but recent reports are that it’s back in spades. Anything that reduces the frustration in finding award availability through Mileage Plus is welcome, but more welcome would just be allowing members to book the award seats that parners offer, the way you can with Continental or US Airways or Air Canada Aeroplan.

Mostly, though, any modest improvement in United’s “.bomb” website is a more than welcome treat!

American is offering a 25% bonus on converting hotel points into up to 20,000 miles and a 35% bonus for transactions converting hotel points into more than 20,000 miles.

40,000 Starwood points, for instance, become 67,500 American miles under this promotion. (Just don’t covert more than 60,000 Starwood points per day in order to maximize your bonus. You can’t get more than 99,999 American miles posted by Starwood in a day, and converting 80,000 Starpoints would generate 100,000.)

American’s promotion email calls this an “Unprecedented Offer” .. I’d hardly call it unprecedented when US Airways is offering a 50% bonus on hotel point transfers, and Delta once offered a 150% bonus. So it’s definitely precedented. But still it seems worthwhile if you have a strong need for American miles.

Offer expires June 30, 2010, and bonus miles will be posted within 7 business days after converted miles post to American.

Heather Poole pioneered the laviator idea, taking photos of yourself in airplane lavatories.

About a week ago, Flying with Fish posted laviator photos of himself.

I thought I’d continue the meme, from onboard Cathay Pacific First Class:

What could be trashier than taking a picture of yourself in the lavatory? Except here I am, in a first class lavatory. Oh, sweet irony!

Thai Airways is offering a 50% discount when redeeming awards on Thai international flights for 2 or 3 passengers for bookings made between July 29 and August 12 and travel through October 31.

Award travel is valid for member self and an Award Nominee, or 2 Award Nominees, and both must travel together on the same departing flight and in the same class of service. Return travel can be separate.

(Via TM Travel World.)

US Airways is offering free silver status for 90 days.

• Registration required by August 15.
  
• Must purchase a non-refundable ticket at usairways.com for travel only on US Airways/US Airways Express and only for travel in the United States.
  
• Ticket purchase required by August 15 for travel beginning by September 15.
  
• Status will take up to 7 days to be reflected in your account after purchasing a ticket.
  
• Members who were elite members in 2009 or who have had complimentary or trial US Airways elite status within the past two years aren’t eligible.

US Airways Silver status is of course also Star Alliance Silver, which gets you a free checked baggage allowance.

(Via One Mile at a Time)

Vietnam Airlines has joined Skyteam, and Wandering Aramean (sbm12 on Flyertalk) notes that they publish their award inventory publicly in global distribution systems like Worldspan and Apollo. And most importantly that partners are booking business class awards into what’s traditionally thought of as a discounte dbusiness class inventory.

If indeed Skyteam partners like Delta are booking business class awards on Vietnam Airlines from the J bucket as it appears, and they allow members to book whatever seats that “VN” releases into J inventory, Vietnam Airliens’ addition to Skyteam is huge.

Vietnam Airlines flies to Frankfurt and Paris, providing a great redemption opportunity from Europe to South Asia and beyond. They have decent North-South routes as well. If you can find a seat to Asia, most of the time you get then get where you’re going within Asia.

Now, I’m not actually sure I want to fly Vietnam Airlines long-haul, they’re perfectly fine for popping around South Asia but their business class isn’t exactly true lie-flat. Still, when you’re working with miles from a Skyteam carrier you can’t be too picky!

sbm12 points to a .pdf file on the Vietnam Airlines website which shows the award booking classes for all Skyteam airlines. And he’s developed on his website some tools to search for award space on several of these carriers, including Vietnam Airlines, Czech, China Southern, and Kenya.

Anything that makes Skypesos more valuable I’m in favor of..

TMTravelWorld notes that there have been some recent discussions about US Airways Dividend Miles investigating fraudulent account activity and freezing accounts that are under investigation.

This is something that both United and American have been known to do aggressively, but not something that US Airways was much known for until several months ago. And whenever something ‘new’ like this pops up, there’s much consternation, not to mention folks posting on Flyertalk with (what I’d speculate to be) less than all of the facts disclosed.

It seems like a good time to review the kinds of activity that most frequently draw the scrutiny of fraud departments of mileage programs. While not an exhaustive list, these are some of the biggest factors:

United’s single-class TED operation is no more, but its lesson shouldn’t be forgotten — and don’t underestimate the ability to forget, as it wasn’t United’s first foray into the low cost carrier subsidiary market (though Ted was a worse idea – Shuttle by United at least offered a first class cabin and with complimentary upgrades for 1Ks years before United introduced that feature for elites program-wide).

CrankFlier interviews Swiss CEO Harry Hohmeister, and Hohmeister makes the point that you cannot have a successful international premium class operation without premium connecting flight offerings.

Cranky: And what about the premium cabin?
Harry: It’s very much under pressure, so we have to rethink it. But, business class has an important value with hub connecting itineraries. You can’t fly someone in business class from San Francisco to Zurich in business class and then within Europe in coach.

Cranky: United did that when they had Ted
Harry: Maybe not a good idea
Cranky: Yeah, well it’s gone now fortunately. You could fly over the Pond in business class and then you’d have to fly coach for the 4+ hours to Las Vegas on Ted.
Harry: [Shakes his head]

It’s worse even than that — once United stopped providing its Economy Plus product to patner elites and full fare passengers, a paid international first class passenger who wasn’t also a United elite would be asked to buy up to Economy Plus for domestic Ted segments subject to availability at check-in.

Ted will not be missed, let’s just hope that United (and other onlooking carriers) can remember its lessons.

The Upgrd Podcast is back after a several weeks’ hiatus and there’s a full cohort of panelists (including yours truly).

We discuss the Continental – United merger, Continental’s new initiative of upgrades on award tickets for co-branded credit card holders, we debate the merits of the various New York airports and I advance the notion that US Airways is the Star Alliance’s designated consolidator for premium class inventory. (The fact that this got the biggest chorus of laughs in the half hour show suggests just what sort of a group this is…!)