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| Fairmont Le Chateau Frontenac, Quebec City from our visit here in Sept 2011 |
As a reminder, no buzz posts on Sunday. But please check tomorrow for a contest! TBB will never give away luggage tags or drink coupons, you have my word on it! 🙂
Yesterday Friday was one of those very bad days in the miles/points world. While the Delta “bombshell” and the new AA logo were digested (not too well!), we had repeated back stabbings (aka devaluations) from Starwood AND Priority Club! Expect devaluations in this hobby but sometimes they happen so close together that it really…hurts! All is not lost however, hold on for the positive news: “American Cruise Lines revamped loyalty program” and added extra perks, woohoo!
MVP POST OF THE DAY
Readers know I am a bit anti credit card debt, shoot…I am just anti debt period! My father always said “Never pay the bank interest, have the banks pay you instead!” It stuck with me forever; it is amazing how much our money habits are formed while growing up! A few days ago I posted a link in the Oddz & Endz section about young people and credit card debt. It struck a cord with blogger Do It For the Points who wrote “Young People and the Chains of Credit Card Debt“. I think this happens a lot more often than we care to sit and think about. Especially the bloggers pushing credit card links do not think about this stuff at all, the greater good! I wish there were more warning signs that giving some people credit cards with certain minimum spends is like giving them a rope to hang themselves. And the pain that is inflicted is REAL. Many of you will say “I don’t care, I am responsible with my money and credit”. I understand, I am with you. BUT the fact is people get hurt falling into this addictive hobby and their despair DOES affect others, it may be your coworker or, heaven forbid, your relative or (oh my god) spouse (this will likely not end well!!)  And please don’t get me started about bailouts and things of that sort! That is why I cringe seeing bloggers bombard their readers indiscriminately with repeated pitches to get even more credit cards! Anyways, this is a subject dear to my heart as I see evidence of the despair very often in my professional life, it is NOT a pretty sight! Off my soap box now.
BEST OF MILES/POINTS
Ok, Starwood devalued the Cash & Points, points go up by 25% across the board and cash goes up anywhere from 17% to 25%. Ouch. Loyalty Lobby has some nice tables & analysis on this. View from the Wing‘s Gary Leff also had an interesting, a bit more upbeat, take on the Starwood changes.
Loyalty Traveler wrote “California is Big Loser in new Priority Club Rewards“. Louder ouch! Sometimes in this hobby I feel like we are under fierce carpet bombing!!
Loyalty Lobby prepared a list of all the Priority Club properties and their respective 2012 and 2013 Point Requirements. Wow, great job! Looks like major metropolitan cities took a pounding! Members have until March 18 to book at lower award levels!
I asked a few days ago about having a Current Quarterly Hotel Bonus page. Frequent Flyer Bonuses delivered. I like it, especially the dates! How about making a permanent button or tab on the top of your page & maintain it so we can bookmark it so we don’t have to click around to find what promos are valid when we have a stay coming up! The KEY is to keep it concise, just give us the latest main promos & links only to smaller promos. I think including Red Lion and Voila is not necessary. Keep it simple! And make it easy to find this on top of your page.Thanks!
An excellent post by new blogger Travel Bug Diary “Financing Travel with Frequent Flier Miles“. Maybe this should be required reading for all newbies getting infected with this virus before they hurt themselves with plastic! I like the warning in red font!  Travel bloggers writing about frequent flier credit cards receive a commission (reportedly $50-$250) for each application initiated through their site. Most “top 5 credit cards” lists are biased. [ I agree:-) I think it is approved application, no?]And I chuckled with the disclosure at the end: “I’m random nut on the internet and not a financial adviser. Only you know what’s best for your wallet.” [ I could rewrite this about me and say “I am a nut on the internet, happen to be a financial adviser and let me tell you it is another thing to know what is best for someone’s wallet and a whole different subject to act accordingly, lol!]
There has been a lot written about the Delta changes yesterday. For a great analysis please read Wandering Aramean‘s “Delta ties elite status to spend” blog post. (Seth is traveling somewhere in Slovakia right now and getting pummeled with snow and still found the time to provide his always interesting airline commentary!). There are some big shooters commenting there and one (Oliver2002) reveals *Alliance is already working on a related move for more than 6 months! Like I said, the flood gates have opened folks! Redeem your aspirational awards. It’s all downhill from here, no smiley!
AA is matching Delta Diamonds to Executive Platinum status (HT: Darren at Frequently Flying)
Frequent Miler thinking out loud about “Cash to miles” tradeoff decisions. Maybe it is time for me to have a cash back card, I just never bothered with them as the mileage credit cards merry go round keeps me busy enough! And thanks for treating your readers with respect & protecting our eye sockets from a senseless number of affiliate links in our faces! [Full disclosure: I accepted a free meal voucher at Culvers from Frequent Miler who received it from a kind reader. Thank you to both. I enjoyed the meal and the conversation. I told FM “I will not think twice to get you into my Not So Best Of category”. No blogger is above my wrath, NO ONE…so behave, lol]
Funniest comment about the new American livery I read at Cranky Flier, LOVE it:
“Colgan had sex with CSA and Cubana on a Greyhound bus in the same weekend and got pregnant. We know Colgan is the mother but we can’t tell who the father is. Nor do we care because the baby is still ugly either way.”
Some useful info about TSA PreCheck at Hack My Trip. I learned some new things there!
Kathy at Will Run for Miles goes off on a leisure Delta flyer rant against the changes announced yesterday. Kathy, I am sorry but Delta does not care about you, only about your wallet. Either get a Delta amex card, waste $25k on it for miles you can probably not use easily or open your wallet and pay for Delta tickets (no partners!) to earn more miles you can not use easily. And for what? Silver or Gold? Not worth it imho. Do what you say in your last sentence, that is what I am doing! Hey Delta, Bite me!
Very interesting piece about loyalty programs by Nancy Trejos of USA Today “Travelers get stingier with their loyalty“. Hmm, not looking good out there. Quotes such as “There’s been a real erosion in loyalty…” and “The world has changed…What worked 20 years ago, 15 years ago, five years ago isn’t going to work now.” should make us all wonder where this game is going!
BEST OF TRAVEL
Miles to the Wild wrote “Ecotourism through the ages“. Very nice general summary with specific destination suggestions by age group.
Johnny Jet has a touching story on how American Airlines treats US military veterans. Very well done AA!
USA Today’s Barbara Delollis is THE hotel guru. She wrote “AAA’s Five Diamond hotels for 2013“. Very informative, especially the hotels that lost the rating!
This is a public service announcement: “Friends Don’t Let Friends Fly Spirit” from Justin Does…Come to think of it, I won’t be surprised if these guys come out with a promo about Manti Teo’s girlfriend, it’s been a while!
NOT SO BEST OF
Miles Momma leads with a sensational headline in all caps “FREE TRAVEL MONEY FROM CAPITAL ONE – $300 CHECKING BONUS” and then promptly goes on to push the crappy Capital One credit cards. Shaking my head so uncontrollably that it may fly off!
ODDZ & ENDZ
“Come to think of it, I won’t be surprised if these guys come out with a promo about Manti Teo’s girlfriend, it’s been a while!”
They did that 2 days ago! Now they’ve moved on to a Lance Armstrong fare sale …
Looks like Gary is in your good graces again.
I’m bummed about the SPG cash & points devaluation. Without cash & points, my frugality forces me to book 5 night stays.
@ Amol: They did? I missed it…If I was a Marketing major I would love to intern at Spirit, lol
@PatMike: Gary takes pride in what he does, his material lately is top notch! Yeah, the cash & point devaluation is a major bummer I agree!
Hi TBB, thanks for the shout-out! Yeah, it’s been quite a hectic day trying to keep up with all the hotel point devaluations. Us eco-travelers came off relatively unscathed (looks like it’s the city properties that got hammered) which I blogged about today but the SPG deval on C&P hurt a bit since we are stopping in Maui enroute to Australia and the Maui properties don’t release C&P until a few weeks before. I’ll probably have to Priceline it.
Thanks for writing and commenting. I am really switching my travel focus overall in 2013! I will aim to be a free agent, screw Elite status for domestic trips & burn miles for domestic coach and international first/business and burn points for hotel stays or Priceline.
@ Amol, how do you get your url as a hyperlink? I have a Gravatar and a Disqus profile which work on other blogs but neither seems to work here. If I put my url in I get this message: URL contains illegal characters
OK that time it worked! Please disregard above comment!
Hi TBB, Thanks for featuring us today. Both of us over at Do It For The Points intially struggled with debt as something that you could and should eventually pay off, but not something that we would do right away. But when both of us started this hobby I think it actually helped us finally take hold of our finances. We realized that yeah that awesome trip will be loads of fun, but if you make the min. spend and then just let it sit accruing 22% interest every month it makes the value nothing.
Anyone can get into this hobby and do it well, but you should always have your goal and be able to make the spend. Especially for the two of us over at DIFTP as we both just graduated from grad school in the past few years and those student loans are constantly knocking.
On another note…now that we’ve made it on the MVP post of the day we plan to strive to make it into every other section of the blog so that we can say we hit for the TBB “Cycle”. 🙂
Thanks for sharing your story, I am sure my readers were benefited too. Even if it was just one it was very worthy to read the point of view you offered!
This charge it credit card culture and ridiculous signing bonuses is only common here in the US, no other country allows this! It is great for us who benefit of course. But not so for folks who are not disciplined with their money habits and there is A LOT of them here; so many in fact that the banks keep doing it! I keep saying I am going to do a separate blog post about REAL warnings before you jump into this hobby…but have no time, too busy with my own life and reviewing travel blogs, lol.
I would love to see you more in my Best Of category. It would hurt me if you make it into my Not so Best Of category…but please never take anything personal like some other people. My aim is to nudge everyone to step up their game and improve this space! I have noticed an improvement in overall practices of other bloggers and that is a noble achievement, at least in my book.
Thanks again.
Thanks for the mention. I think my next blog post will be called “help me burn my skypesos”.
Last night I sat down to see if I can find a low level Delta award for my conference in San Diego. The calendar showed low level in BOTH days, I almost had a heart attack!! Outbound flight was perfect and inbound was…four flights only available with departures times between 6 and 8 am (this one landing in DTW late at night!). No, thank you, I will keep my Southwest award that cost me 20k points and $5.
One trip I want to do is fly Business Class to Sydney with V Australia out of LAX. The hardest thing is finding low level award from DTW to LAX:-)
It’s a pretty sad state in the world of Skypesos that the thing that is holding up a business class redemption to Aurstralia is a domestic flight out of a Delta hub
Getting to Australia in Business? Piece of cake
Getting to LAX from a Delta hub? Surely you jest
Yep it sure is and I will likely burn some other miles to get me to/from LAX or burn more than 25k (which I have refused to do out of principle)…but I need to clean up anyway this year…#developing
Hey George, Thanks for the mention and the suggestions!
As suggested I have added a sidebar “Frequently Updated Posts” which has a direct link to the pages that I go back and update.
I will probably remove the Red Lion link but may keep Voila as the summary is getting a lot a traffic from a European frequent flyer forum and that is where Voila has a bigger presence.
Ok, got it. It is bookmarked. Next time I have a stay coming up I will go there & scan the promos & dates (wish the darn hotels did not mess us up with the different dates all the time!). Every time this happens I surf around to some different blogs and drill down to find the promo details & registration page and (most importantly) the applicable promo dates!
Thanks for the kind words and for reading/commenting on my blog!
Did you know TPG pulls in ~400K in income, through pushing credit card links?! (see comment on his post today). Time for you to get in the game!
I noticed that, nothing goes by TBB, emphasis on the last B as in Buzz:-)
In defense of the Capital One Venture card, I got one awhile back when they did the first 100,000 “mile” signup bonus match. I signed up just for the bonus, used lots of the cash back, but then realized I had a bunch of foreign travel — well, this was my only 0% foreign currency conversion card and it worked great. I also had great success with some disputes due to a shady merchant, and Cap One really laid the smack down and the situation was resolved in my favor — and finally, while I haven’t been using my Venture card lately, I did have about $500 in credit on my card between a refunded ticket and some unused points — so I requested “reimbursement” for a bunch of travel expenses totaling about $500, and then used one of their no-fee convenience checks (not zero interest, but it didn’t matter since I just made the amount equal the credit balance on my account.) So although I am busy maximizing category bonuses and Bluebird as much as possible, I feel as though the Venture was a great card while I was using it. U.S. based customer service (that always seemed to see issues my way without any convincing) didn’t hurt, either.
I got in the Venture card for the 100k bonus. Ditto for wife. With some spend we fully paid for a Carnival cruise for 4 to Western Caribbean and I mean FULLY! I enjoyed the card, I enjoyed the simplicity of the earning structure and I really liked the customer service on the phone and online. We canceled the card after cashing in. I thought about keeping it and felt is not worth it. I was hoping to do it again when they did the 100k promo again but they did not allow us to get the promo again.
I am hoping Capital One gives Chase a run for our cc wallets but I just do not see it happening in the near future.
Thanks for reading & commenting here!
Hey Travelbuzz,
Just wanted to stop by with a delayed thank you for the shout out (sorry it didn’t come earlier – I was busy burning my points on the in Key West). You made my morning on Saturday! I saw your shout out in my google reading while waiting on the security line at EWR. First and only time I got through the security line in cheerful mood. Also, you doubled my traffic! One more shout out from you, and my visitor numbers will be in the triple digits 🙂
You are very welcome! TBB reviews travel blogs and features the best and worst. Woulld love to see more of you here…in the Best category of course;-)