US Bank has upped the signup bonus on their (proprietary points) FlexPerks card. These are points that are useful for buying you paid airline tickets, not points that transfer to airline miles. In general they won’t get you much value for premium cabin international awards. But it’s a good signup bonus, a fun promotion, and they offer good value in the spend category of charitable donations so that’s a unique feature. Here’s the offer: You get a minimum of 20,000 FlexPerks points after $3500 spend within 4 months Then you get an additional bonus based on how many medals the US wins during the Winter Olympics — each Gold is worth 500, each Silver 250, and each Bronze 100. Results from the last Winter Olympics would have yielded a bonus of 29,550 points so ~…
Monthly Archives
Monthly Archives for February 2014.
You Can Use Your HHonors Award Nights in the Afterlife, or Let Your Family Use Them Here On Earth
Hilton HHonors had a rule against transferring points at death, but in practice allowed it. Now they’ve made their practice official, updating their terms and conditions to make the ability to transfer points to a designee when you pass official. Of course, after last year’s devaluation, it shouldn’t be all that hard to use up every last HHonors point long before you die. Interestingly, last year Delta changed its rules so that miles only expire at death and are no longer transferable. I can’t say that I fully understand the logic of a frequent flyer program’s choice in this regard — I suppose it’s a tradeoff between breakage and encouraging loyalty while a member is alive (to the extent they’re cognizant of a program’s policies), or perhaps these calculations don’t go into a decision to…
What Could Be More Dishonest Than That? Wyndham Cuts The Value of Transfers to Miles in Half With No Notice
Wyndham devalued their points for hotel redemptions last year, but they gave about a month’s notice of it. Sure, they were somewhat disingenuous at the time. They had already implemented a no-notice devaluation, and then rolled some of those back a couple of weeks later with their devaluation announcement, claiming to be reducing rather than raising the cost of award nights. And they didn’t actually share the list of hotels whose points requirements would be changing until basically forced to do it by member outrage. But it was notice. What’s worse is that they’ve now reduced the value of points-to-miles transfers and they implemented it overnight, said sorry it’s already done. Redemption rates have changed as of January 31, 2014. Redeem now starting at 6,000 points. Points used to transfer to airline miles at 8000…
2500 Bonus Points for New Southwest Rapid Rewards Members
Southwest is offering up to 2500 bonus points to new members: 2,000 bonus points for joining 250 bonus points for signing up for their email summary 250 bonus points for signing up for email update (HT: Free Frequent Flyer Miles) You can join the 30,000+ people who see these deals and analysis every day — sign up to receive posts by email (just one e-mail per day) or subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s free. You can also follow me on Twitter for the latest deals. Don’t miss out!
$1450 Roundtrip First Class on Etihad, Colombo – Dallas
Etihad has a fare that allows business or first class travel — roundtrip — originating in Colombo, Sri Lanka and traveling to Dallas Fort Worth and back for ~ US$1450 all-in. The most natural routing that comes up most often and most easily is Colombo – Abu Dhabi – Chicago – Dallas. But the Abu Dhabi – Chicago flight (EY 150/151) doesn’t offer a first class cabin. For first class you’d want to route via New York JFK, Washington Dulles, or Europe (e.g. Paris, Frankfurt). Europe routings would mean flying American’s first class transatlantic. If you can swing a London routing you’d get American’s new 777-300ER in first. Here’s an Orbitz multi-day grid of available fares, searching business class: And here’s a sample itinerary priced on the Etihad website: One-way travel originating in Colombo is…
United Eliminating Its Cleveland Hub
I never understood Cleveland as a hub, even if it was a ‘regional jet hub’ with a handful of Boeing 737 flights thrown in. It’s just not the major business destination you want that can support lots of full fare traffic. Regional jet-to-regional jet connections certainly aren’t that attractive from a flyer’s perspective. And now that United and Continental have merged it is somewhat duplicative of the airline’s massive Chicago O’Hare hub operation. There’s no reason to shuttle traffic through Cleveland on a daily basis when you’re doing the same thing 315 miles away. Nonetheless, when airlines merge they always promise to continue serving all of the cities they currently do, and tell those cities that are hubs that they will remain so. Only it doesn’t work that day. Just ask the folks in Cincinnati…
30,000 Bonus Miles for an Alaska Airlines Visa With No Spending Requirement
Yesterday I wrote about an offer for the Alaska Airlines Visa with 25,000 miles after first purchase and 15,000 more for $10,000 spend within 6 months. So 40,000 miles for $10,000 in spend. Steven commented in another post that there’s also an offer of 30,000 miles without a minimum spend requirement. That offer was first made last summer</a, though the link to it was no longer available. It's good to see it back. The offer is for 25,000 miles on approval (no minimum spending) and 5000 more miles “for being a customer.” There doesn’t appear to be any verification that you need to be a pre-existing customer, that they will do anything like check to see whether you have bank accounts with them already for instance, and I’d bet that anyone — even folks who…
United Offers a Reprieve: Won’t Implement Its Devaluation Until Monday, February 3
Last night reader H. e-mailed that United was extending their old award chart by a few days, not yet implementing their newly devalued award chart pricing until February 3. Matthew is reporting the same thing: the new award chart doesn’t go into effect until Monday. We don’t know what time on Monday but my best guess is the beginning of the business day in Chicago. It’s possible, of course, that it could happen earlier. I can only imagine that they weren’t able to handle the IT and customer service functions related to the change properly and needed all hands on deck when they made the switchover — which in some sense is hard to believe because they announced the change three months ago and have had ample time to prepare, and they’ve certainly made award…
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