Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Chris

For my trip to Washington D.C. last month, I took to hotel hopping, both to get the best prices and to maximize my stay amenities. As I had taken a late evening train down from New York, I arrived at the hotel just after midnight. Interestingly, the front desk commented that I was the last Diamond to arrive for the evening, but even with a number of rooms available for sale online, this didn’t translate into an upgraded room.

The layout of the hotel left something to be desired.  In the morning, I ventured out of my room in search of the Regency Club to have breakfast.  From the elevator bank that I took to my room in the evening, the top two floors were marked but inaccessible.  As I was wandering around, I found a housekeeper, whose only suggestion for where the lounge might be directed me to the exercise center on a different floor.  Only after discovering a second elevator bank with access to the top floors was I able to get to the Regency Club just before breakfast ended.

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Sheraton Kauai Resort

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Chris

For my stay of 4 days/3 nights in Kauai, I booked the Sheraton Kauai Resort.  A bit more than a month out from arrival, I came across a $309/nt base rate (plus taxes/resort fee) for Labor Day weekend.

As I wasn’t entirely thrilled by a $300+/nt rate, I continued to explore my options with Expedia periodically, eventually stumbling upon a $225/nt rate for the Sheraton offered by Expedia.  Starwood offers a fairly generous best rate guarantee, requiring a booking only after a claim is approved.  I took the 10% discount (over 2k SPG points), which brought my nightly rate down to $202/nt.

Overall, my room wasn’t anything extraordinary compared to a normal Sheraton property.  As of late, I’ve taken an appreciation for the fresh feel of Westins (at least amongst Starwood properties).

My trip intersected with the Kauai Marathon, making getting in and out from the property a bit more difficult in the morning one day.  I chose to eat at the hotel’s restaurant, finding the $25 breakfast buffet to be disappointing (and leaving me appreciating the Hyatt Place I had just stayed at).

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American Airlines Admirals Club Honolulu

Posted on October 22, 2012 by Chris

Having built too much padding into my schedule for getting to the airport, I had quite a bit of time to kill.  Luckily, I had my Priority Pass card on me (making use of it for the second time since I got my Platinium Amex), so I was able to stop by the Americal Airlines Admirals Club/Japan Airlines Sakura Lounge.

As a joint lounge with JAL, the lounge had a comparatively off-beat food selection from an ordinary Admirals Club.

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Hyatt Place Waikiki Beach

Posted on October 21, 2012 by Chris

For my trip to Hawaii this past Labor Day weekend, I flew to Kauai by my now traditional route: Honolulu.   While the Sheraton Princess Kaiulani looked “good” at $189/nt plus resort fees for a flexible rate compared to other hotels, the Hyatt Place Waikiki dropped its nightly rates to $139/nt with no resort fee three days before my departure.  As the hotel was limited to valet parking, I parked at the Ewa Hotel Waikiki next door.

The open-air lobby is the first I’ve seen at a Hyatt Place.

As a Hyatt Diamond member, my basic city view room was upgraded to a high floor, partial ocean view room.  Considering the location of the hotel relative to other buildings, I doubt there was much room for improvement.

Breakfast was served at a covered buffet.  The open seating area lent itself, however, to attracting a variety of birds looking for handouts, the signs discouraging feeding the birds notwithstanding.

Overall, I was quite pleased with my stay, but it seems rare that the nightly rate of the Hyatt Place falls below the other Starwood properties in the area, particularly when cash and points rates are considered.

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United Alters the Deal

Posted on October 8, 2012 by Chris

United has altered the terms of its unadvertised promotion (at least in the United States) for credit card spending between August and October.

It looks like my British Airways and Alaska Airlines (offering 3 points per dollar on gas/groceries/drug stores/restaurants until the end of the year)  cards can get some attention instead.

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5k United Bonus

Posted on October 6, 2012 by Chris

United is currently offering a 5k mileage bonus for spending $1k between August 1st and October 31st, including spending from prior to registration.  Given that these sorts of promotions ought to encourage marginal spending, the lack of advertising for it (I saw it on View from the Wing who saw it on Milepoint) defies common sense.

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Does the BA Visa companion pass have any value?

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Chris

Yesterday, I wrote about upgrading with British Airways Avios as a cheaper way to fly Club World.  Ultimately, the fuel surcharge jump from World Traveler Plus to Club World offset most of the savings, but it still wound up being a reasonable plan for the traveler who absolutely desires to fly BA Club World.

Nonetheless, the BA fuel surcharge structure set me to thinking:  If fuel surcharges between business and first class are the same, could the BA companion pass finally have a sensible use?

One of the features of the Chase-issued, British Airways Visa is that it earns a companion ticket after $30k of spending in a single calendar year.  There are a number of restrictions to it (to paraphrase):

  • The companion ticket is only applicable on award tickets.
  • The award tickets must be issued by BA and operated entirely by BA.
  • The main cardholder must be a traveler on the itinerary in its entirety.
  • Taxes and fees for the companion are still due.

The last restriction is a bit onerous, but it’s worth looking at some sample bookings for next Saturday, October 13th, New York to London one-way in three-cabin first class.  (Despite advertising claims to the contrary, United’s BusinessFirst is not three-cabin first class.)

American shows some availability on both AA and BA metal.

The taxes and fees for the AA-operated flight are $2.50.

Flying BA adds $345.20 in fees to this award.

In comparison, the same flight booked via British Airways costs 60k Avios (instead of 62.5k AAdvantage miles), but has slightly taxes and fees of $437.70:

This gives us three options to London for two in first class:

  • AA booked and AA operated: 125k AAdvantage miles and $5.00
  • AA booked and BA operated: 125k AAdvantage miles and $695.40
  • BA booked with the companion ticket: 60k Avios and $875.40.

While I’m not thrilled by the taxes and fees on BA-operated awards, paying $180 to trade 60k Avios for 125k AAdvantage miles feels reasonable (if the travel would have happened on BA anyways).  The deal is a bit less sweet when comparing between AA booked/operated and BA booked/operated itineraries.  Assuming a generous value of 1 Avios to 1 AAdvantage mile, buying 65k AA miles for $870.40 might be a reasonable deal (1.33cpm) if I didn’t already have 393k of them already and wasn’t earning more at a comparable rate by flying.

Whether due to a massive amount of capacity or steep fuel surcharges, BA at least tends to have premium cabin availability when American (on its own metal) or even the entirety of Star Alliance does not.  For this particular date, United has no premium cabin availability on its nonstops from Newark and mid-October is hardly a peak travel season.  If flying BA makes or breaks the trip, the companion ticket is useful; if BA can be avoided, I might lean towards experiencing the first world problem of flying American Airlines three-cabin first class.

For the time being, I suspect that I’ll continue to book cheap revenue tickets and upgrade for simple trips to Europe.  For a mere $6 beyond the cost of the BA companion ticket-based itinerary, I was able to fly myself and a friend to Europe and back last month in AA business class for most of the journey.  It’s not quite BA First, but the savings will mean I’ll survive, particularly after the new lie-flat business class starts flying next month.

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Premium Cabin Mileage Bonuses

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Chris

American and British Airways recently kicked off  a promotion for roundtrip travel in premium cabins/near-full fare economy between the U.S. and Europe, September 25th, 2012 through January 31st, 2013.  The promotion has tiers according to the number of trips taken:

  • First roundtrip: 15k AAdvantage miles (or Avios)
  • Second roundtrip:  35k AAdvantage miles (or Avios)
  • Third and subsequent roundtrips: 50k AAdvantage miles (or Avios)

While I normally don’t dwell upon paid business class (or even full-fare coach), American’s terms include British Airways World Traveler Plus fares booked into W, E, and T.  Since I received my BA visa from Chase, I’ve been wondering what I would do with the Avios I’ve been accumulating.

British Airways offers a rather sane route for international upgrades.  Upgrades with Avios are available to the next cabin of service if there is award availability for that cabin.  (This might be less than ideal in its own way, but it feels far more straightforward than looking through United.com for “R” inventory to confirm upgrades at booking.)

Since BA considers its premium economy product (World Traveler Plus) a separate cabin between its coach product (World Traveler) and its long-haul business class product (Club World), one has to purchase a premium economy ticket to upgrade to business class.  The base Avios for JFK-LHR is 20k, so the cost to upgrade (in terms of Avios outlayed) is 10k in each direction.

I’ve been looking to fly BA Club World for some time, but I haven’t quite begun to tolerate the rather steep fuel surcharges levied by BA (for nearly all of its awards) or by AA (for BA-operated awards).  To put this into perspective, consider a simple roundtrip between New York and London in business class the MLK weekend this upcoming January.  As a baseline, I’ll lookup the cost of booking this trip as an award with American.

There’s a bit of BA-operated award availability that weekend:

Great.  50k miles each way makes 100k roundtrip… but that range of $2.50 to $700.00 in “Taxes and Carrier-Imposed Fees” is rather ominous.

If it sounds ominous, it probably is ominous.  The total cost of this award is 100k AAdvantage miles and $972.60.  Booking as an outright award with British Airways is similarly grim, 80k Avios and $1151.25:

Now that we have BA flights with business class award space available, we can price a premium economy itinerary with ITA to get a feel for the cost of upgrading a revenue trip.  Since AA showed availability on only the BA flights out of Newark (and not JFK), we can request only those flights from ITA:

As BA186 and BA189 fly only between Newark and London Heathrow, ITA is offering us a single itinerary:

Clicking through on the price offers a detailed fare breakdown:

With a price in mind, we can now go book via BA’s website, booking a flight with cash and upgrading with Avios.  As expected BA186 and BA189 are available.

Clicking through yields a bit higher of a price (due to increased fuel surcharges levied by BA on business class tickets):


In the price breakdown, there’s a small button to see the full details of where our money is going.  The discrepancy is entirely attributable to the $370 increase in fuel surcharges.

Chase has been offering 10% off BA-operated itineraries booked via BA.com for its US-based cardholders.  This discount ends at the end of the year for outbound travel occuring in 2012, so it is unfortunately not applicable to this particular trip.  Nonetheless, as this trip is booked into a “T” fare bucket, it does qualify for the promotion that I began this post with.

This particular trip costs 20k Avios points and $1751.25, but it earns miles on the itinerary (approximately 7.6k with class-of-service bonus) and under the US-Europe roundtrip promotion (15k for the first roundtrip).  Recall, the net costs of an AA award operated by BA were 100k AAdvantage miles and $972.60.  Factoring in the opportunity cost, there is a tradeoff of 122.6k AAdvantage miles for $778.65 and 20k Avios points.  Even under the most optimistic of valuations for Avios (1:1 with AA), booking BA-operated flights with AA offers a platry 0.76cpm valuation.

Other possible routes to London in Club World include waiting for a business class fare sale ($2012 roundtrip, as we saw this summer) or booking a much more sanely priced, AA-operated award.  For my sample dates of travel, only AA First Class was available on the outbound flight, bringing the total for the roundtrip to 112.5k AAdvantage miles and $286.70.

 

Delta has unveiled a similar promotion for flights between the the U.S. and London in business class/near-full fare economy.  Since I don’t collect Skypesos, I haven’t spent much time thinking about how to make efficient use of it.

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Cheap Star Alliance Status

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Chris

View from the Wing notes that Aegean is offering 2000 status miles for signing up for an account.  Rather crucially, Aegean has an extremely low bar for Star Alliance Silver status (4k status miles), which offers a free checked bag on United and US Airways.  For the time being, Aegean offers “lifetime” (for the lifetime of the program’s generosity) status.  FlyerTalk has a crash course thread for additional information.

While US-based fliers are used to fares which earn at least 1 mile per mile flown, Aegean credits discount United coach fares (W, S, T, L, K) at 50% (or in the case of United’s recently added N fare, potentially 0%).  All US Airways revenue fare classes (that I’m aware of) credit at 100%.

For the traveler without status (and any forgone elite redeemable mile bonuses), crediting a cheap US Airways transcontinental flight to Aegean can be a cheap way of obtaining free baggage allowances in the future.  Based on the current US Airways share miles promotion, the opportunity cost of 2k miles is $22.70 (if the transaction fee is amortized over 50k miles).

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Share US Airways Miles

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Chris

US Airways is offering a 100% transfer bonus when sharing up to 50k miles between accounts during the month of October.  With the $30 processing fee, a 50k transfer prices at $567.50 or 1.135 cents per net mile.  While it isn’t quite as good as Grand Slam last year (approximately 0.34cpm), this promotion requires far less attention and effort to benefit from.  As noted in the promotion terms, “accounts less than 12 days old are not permitted to Buy, Share or Gift miles,” leaving two weeks to open an account to participate.

To make the value of these miles a bit more tangible, it’s worth consulting the US Airways award chart.

While I still haven’t put the miles I earned from Grand Slam to good use as I promised (since I took two revenue and one award trip to Europe in the meantime), I’m oddly tempted to top-up my account a bit.

US Airways is also running a (targeted) 100% bonus promotion for buying miles this month. as well

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