I traveled just over 144k miles this year, approximately 125k of which were revenue flights:

I wound up with four redemptions:

• 2 nights at the Westin Ka’anapali Ocean Resort Villas as part of Starwood’s Free Resort Nights promotion.
• 1 upgrade from coach to p.s. business class on a redeye (20k UA miles)
• New York to Sydney to Auckland to Los Angeles to New York in business class from Aeroplan (76k Amex Membership Reward points)
• A trip to Asia (via Europe) in business class for early 2012 from Aeroplan (50k Amex Membership Reward points)

I earned miles and points from a number of sources:

• United/Continental had 102.5k EQM (mostly from flying, a bit from UA spending) or about 205k redeemable miles from flying.  I earned the 50k signup bonus on both the United Mileage Plus Select Visa Signature card and the Continental One Pass Plus card.  I picked up another 25k Mileage Plus miles from rental cars (until the end of August, 1k per rental from Hertz) and spending on my credit cards.
• American had about 35k EQM from flying (or 70k redeemable miles).
• US Airways Grand Slam yielded about 119k redeemable miles for about $400 in marginal spend.
• I earned 30k SPG points from the Starwood Amex signup bonus (for $4.5k in spending over 3 months).  I picked up another 12k SPG points from 10 revenue stays (including Foursquare/Facebook check-in bonuses) and credit card spending.
• I earned 55k Club Carlson points (50k bonus, 5k for the stay itself) for staying in a US Radisson Hotel by New Years.
• I earned 75k Membership Reward points for the Amex Premier Rewards Gold card and 50k for the Amex Platinum card for $1k in spending in 3 months for each card.
• I’m well on my way to 50k Chase Ultimate Reward points from my Chase Sapphire card (for $3k in spend over 3 months).
• I picked up 40k Alaska Airlines miles from the Bank of America Alaska Airlines Visa Signature card after my first purchase.
• I earned about 10.2k in Hyatt Gold Passport points from 5 revenue stays.

To give perspective on my ability to meet credit card spending thresholds, I spent approximately $22k on credit cards.  My total spend on flights occurring in 2011 (inclusive of StarMegaDo3) was $8367.49 for revenue flights and $431.27 for award flights.  I spent $2703.62 on hotels (19 stays and 23 nights) and $1727.10 on rental cars (inclusive of insurance, but not gasoline, for 19 rentals, 34 rental days).

Earlier this year, the TSA announced prescreening programs for the respective elites and known travelers on American and Delta itineraries departing from DFW, MIA, and ATL.   Continental is now taking signups for their own program that they are “working with the TSA to provide…to customers…in the upcoming months.”

I’m a bit late to the party today, but I found the resubtitled version of the introduction done by Jeff Smisek, President and CEO of United, to be hilarious.

(Hat tip: Frequently Flying)

Amtrak sent out an email informing Guest Rewards members that its partnership with Continental Airlines OnePass is ending December 31, 2011:

While the Continental® OnePass® program will formally end in December, we’re happy to inform you that a new Amtrak Guest Rewards® partnership with the United MileagePlus® program is in the works. In the meantime, here’s what the changes mean for you as an Amtrak Guest Rewards member: •  December 31, 2011 is the last day that Amtrak Guest Rewards members will be able to convert Continental OnePass miles to Amtrak Guest Rewards points •  Members may convert OnePass miles to Amtrak Guest Rewards points in increments of 5,000 miles for 5,000 points •  To convert your miles, contact the OnePass service center. Eligible members* may convert Amtrak Guest Rewards points to OnePass miles at through December 31, 2011. Transfer of points and miles will not be a benefit of the new partnership with United MileagePlus. As always, thank you for your continued loyalty.

The Wandering Aramean points out that this asks more questions than it answers for other partnerships.  AGR Insider on FlyerTalk says a partnership with United MileagePlus is in the works.

Last month, I managed to get an invite on FlyerTalk to United Airline’s Fleet Week events at its SFO maintenance base.

United had four of its planes out for display: An A320 used for the plane pull, its A320 in United’s retrolivery, a Boeing 737 in Continental’s retrolivery, and an internationally configured Boeing 777.

Additionally, the Blue Angels were based on the nearby ramp for during their participation in the Fleet Week activities.

N456UA, a United A320, was used for a human-powered plane pull.

United had both of its retrolivery-bearing planes.  I had flown on N475UA, an A320 from Chicago to New York LaGuardia the previous week:

The Continental Boeing 737 in its Blue Skyways livery was nearby.  I was on this plane for StarMegaDo3.

The cockpit door was open; but when I went through,we couldn’t stop to sit down.

Keeping with the retro theme, a restored service truck was positioned nearby as well.

Additionally, N783UA, an internationally configured Boeing 777 was on hand for walkthroughs.

Earlier in the day, the emergency slide was opened up.

One of the massive hangers for United’s 747’s was open, albeit sans 747:

Slightly removed from the rest of the action was the engine maintenance building with a number of jet engines on display in various states of disassembly, including a jet configured in a testing pit:

I arrived at the airport with enough time to visit the Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounge in the US-side of Montreal Airport.

In addition to seating, the lounge had a small snack area and self-serve bar.

Our charter aircraft was parked at YUL overnight and had to be towed to our gate.  Conveniently, it went past the lounge.

At the gate:

For the trip from Chicago to Montreal to Denver, StarMegaDo3 was on a chartered Continental 737.  Continental assigned us its 737 in its retrolivery:

My legroom on this flight gave me a reminder to be thankful for my exit rows, economy plus seating, and first class upgrades:

Participants packed into the United Red Carpet Clubs to kill time while waiting for our flight:

The Hyatt in Montreal left a bit to be desired:

Even with 160 Diamond members running amok, I was disappointed that I wound up on the 5th floor (out of approximately 15).  With the exception of its RFID-operated doorlocks, the hotel disappointingly showed its age despite having the highest room rate amongst the three StarMegaDo3 Hyatts (189 CAD/nt base).

Air Canada held a reception at the near by Westin in Montreal, gifting each of us with a Air Canada 777 model:

I attended StarMegaDo3 last week.  To position myself for the start of its North American portion in Chicago, I trekked from from New York via Honolulu and Kahului.  Plotted with gcmap, my routing looks like:

I’ve been voluntarily denied boarding (VDB) four times this year on United, netting me a total of $1,800 in United travel vouchers.  Earlier in the year, I also turned down a $400 offer because the reroute involved a layover at ORD in the middle of a blizzard.  I’ve been offered two bumps with Continental, one at $400 to fly the next day and one at $250 to miss Penn & Teller.  Meanwhile, American’s never sought volunteers on any of my flights (although I’m 3 for 3 on same day standbys to earlier flights, possibly causing myself to miss out an unlikely chance of being bumped).

Apparently, my anecdotal data points can be confirmed with statistics; United’s VDB rate is bit over twice that of Continental or American.

I got an email this afternoon from Continental, advertising an auction for a 32GB iPad 2 and a Callaway Golf RAZR Hawk Driver.  Uninterested in either product (if I was, I would have bought one already), I ignored it.  Seth at The Wandering Aramean points out the senselessness of it:  The bid’s currently at 187,000 miles for a product which retails at $599, delivering a whopping 0.32 cents of value per mile.

While I wouldn’t personally bid that much, these auctions take a liability of United/Continental’s books.  A small part of me hopes that this might encourage the airline to sweep hundreds of thousands of miles away through cheap redemptions rather than jack up the award chart or slash award availability.  Of course, it’s possible we could experience the worst of all possible worlds, one in which bidding 187k miles on an iPad 2 is actually a good redemption value.

Yesterday’s rumored changes have turned into a 36 page long thread (as of this writing) on FlyerTalk.  The lack of a complete denial by United’s representative on FlyerTalk isn’t helping.  A few other bloggers have written on the topic as well.

First, for some perspective, it’s worth considering my travel on United/Continental this year.  I’m attending StarMegaDo3, which is going to net 4720 EQM for $750, but since there’s a bit more to the program than earning a few EQM.  (If I were after the EQM, I’d fly a few transcons for that much.  Booking my DEN-LAX-JFK trip home from it came out to 3337 EQM for $77.55, or 2.32CPM.)  As a result, I’m willing to drop those segments and fares from my statistics.  Year to date, I’ve paid United and Continental a total of $3,692.66.  As a result, I’ve booked and flown 70,887 EQM, in addition to still holding $200 in travel vouchers.  This brings my average CPM to 4.93, after a few recent splurges for summer travel and a trip to Hawaii.  I don’t hop on airplanes for the sole sake of earning airline miles and travel almost exclusively on Friday/Sunday evenings, so spending 5cpm is acceptable to me.

At this rate, I fully expect to make the 1K tier by achieving 100k EQM for no more than $5k in cash spending.

According to the rumor, UA’s tacking on a mandatory revenue requirement to its elite tiers as well.   To qualify for the top tier, “Premier Diamond,” I’d need to spend $8k, which would be easily obtained by dropping my flying on AA (which, in light of this instability with UA Mileage Plus, isn’t going to happen) or counting my spent travel vouchers ($1.8k).   To defend the cents per mile target, I’d have to fly 160k miles, which is feasible for the time being.  It leaves me wondering what might happen in the future when higher revenues are desired or I spend slightly less with the airline.

The changes partition would-be UA fliers into a few groups.

There’s the whales who happily and consistently pay for full fare tickets, especially those buying tickets in premium cabins.  For those with significant spending with the airline, UA’s already taking “care” of them via the Global Services program.  For those making more one-off purchases, the loyalty program does little to build UA’s competitive advantage.  For the passenger consistently purchasing, say, international first class tickets, an upgrade certificate offers no added value and the miles little-to-none.  Service and product attract these passengers.

UA also has mixed-fare fliers who travel on their own dime for personal travel and have paid business travel as well.  While the shift adds significant priority to full fare tickets, a hypothetical mixed-fare traveler may buy revenue tickets for a family vacation.  The two-faced nature of treating passengers as their fare for the day of travel does little to build long-term loyalty.

Then there’s the bottom feeders found on FlyerTalk who seek to minimize their spending while maximizing the miles returned, parlaying them into valuable first class tickets.  While my tickets might frequently fail to cover United’s costs according to their published per seat-mile statistics, the seats could have gone empty.  The marginal cost of transporting me is close to that of printing a boarding pass, possibly serving a meal in first class, and providing me with some miles which I will redeem for future travel.  When a flight is oversold, I’m much closer to a real liability to the airline as involuntary bumps must be paid in hard currency rather than the travel voucher scrip that I readily accept for minor inconvenience to cut costs.

Standing around in a revenue management office hoping for the whales to fly to keep the airline profitable does not seem sustainable in the long term.  OpenSkies is an exclusively business class airline that has survived for several years, but it its flights from Paris Orly to Newark and Washington don’t have to connect to a substantial domestic network.  While increased fares would cull the ranks of the mileage running crowd, it drives away general members who would just as well fly Southwest for less impairing the route network further.

Meanwhile, access to Economy Plus, redeemable mileage bonuses, and checked bag allowances are being cut for lower tier elites, there’s little reason to hit the $2k/4k/6k spending requirements for these tiers.

Unlike my previous trip to Las Vegas, I had a slightly more direct trip to Nevada.  Originally, I was booked on the last flight of the night (CO1534) for which my upgrade had cleared 48 hours out.  Having checked on the inventory evening before and the day of to estimate my likelihood of scoring a bump.  (As the last flight of the night with no hope of connecting as well, it would have been rather inconvenient, but a substantial travel voucher could have made up for it.)  Both Co1534 and the proceeding flight, CO885, were rather empty.  For the earlier flight, first class was booked at 17 with a capacity of 24.

Once my train got to New Jersey, I called Continental and same-day confirmed changed to CO885.  Overall, my call time consisted of entering my OnePass number into my phone, telling the agent what I wanted, and waiting about 30 seconds for my United-ticketed flight to be re-ticketed on Continental stock on the new flight.  In contrast to the 45 minutes I spent with my last Las Vegas-related SDC, I was pleased.

My upgrade cleared to seat 6A.

Our predeparture snack consisted of a drink and prepackaged almonds

The vegetarian dinner choice was cheese lasagna with an optional mushroom soup (which I passed on).

The desert was an apple-topped cake.

On my DEN-SJC flight operated by United, the salt and pepper came in two small plastic pouches in a black United paper sheath.  While the Tulip is supposed to be endangered, it evidently lives on in the first class cabin of Continental’s planes (at least for the time being).

Someone at work was looking to get to Europe later this summer and asked my advice for how I find cheap fares.  I pointed out ITA in addition to my paid ExpertFlyer account.  A quick search later turned up an Air France -marketed, Delta-operated flight that was significantly below the prices they had seen elsewhere.

They went ahead with booking, but overlooked that it was a Delta-operated rather than Air France-operated flight.  Coincidentally, The Cranky Flier had a piece about the downsides of codeshares for passengers.  I’m not that thrilled by them either.  As United and Continental merge, I’m frequently placing bookings from one carrier operated by the other.  Even as flight numbers shift around, the two haven’t been brought in line with each other.  UA1 is a flight from Sao Paulo to Houston right now and CO1 is a flight from Houston to Guam via Honolulu.

I was originally scheduled to leave Las Vegas Sunday morning. United and Continental recently aligned their same-day confirmed flight change policies, so I rescheduled my LAS-LAX-ORD-EWR segments into a single LAS-EWR redeye operated by Continental.

Based on this single data point, same-day confirmed flight changes with Continental are a pain. My inquiries in IAH for standby on the earlier flight and adding my name to the volunteer list on my scheduled flight messed up my reservation, requiring me to wait on hold while the elite desk fixed it and updated my itinerary.

McCarran International Airport offers visitors a few aviation related sights land-side. The Cessna 172 “Hacienda” hangs over the baggage claim area. I stopped to take a photo on my way to the security checkpoint for the D concourse.

Last night’s redeye was on a Boeing 737-924ER.

My upgrade to first class cleared at the gate. Taking off from runway 25R, I had to wait a bit for my left-side window seat to come into view of the Las Vegas Strip at night.

On my way to Las Vegas, I had a stop at IAH to switch over to a 757-300 scheduled to depart at 5:35PM.

My flight from PHL got in a bit early so I had time to leisurely enjoy the sprawling amalgamation of terminals to check on the 3:45PM departure to Las Vegas. While the gate agent there acknowledged my original flight would likely be oversold, she couldn’t process me as a volunteer thereby entitled to even the slightest compensation nor could I obtain anything better than a middle seat somewhere in the back of the plane. I declined and headed over to my original flight’s gate, now delayed to a 6:38PM departure due to a late arriving aircraft:

Unsurprisingly, once the podium was staffed, they sought out volunteers. Unlike United which generally offers a flat $400 in travel vouchers, Continental was offering $250 and a ticket for the 9:00PM departure. I’m seeing Penn & Teller tonight, so I was hoping for something a bit higher to convince me to miss the show and give up my first class seat.

This flight had a full vegetarian dinner available: Cheese ravoli with marinara, salad, and minestrone soup.

The meal was rounded out by blueberry cheesecake.

Just under two weeks ago, I was looking around to figure out what I would be doing memorial day weekend. A few friends from college were going to be driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas for the weekend and I decided it would be fun to join them.

When I was booking my trip, the only inexpensive way of getting there from the New York area was out of Philadelphia marketed by Continental (but oddly not United). Since then, there was a brief, now-gone sale out of NYC to LAS on most major carriers earlier this week. I had never flown in or out of PHL and figured it would be a good learning experience to familiarize myself with how easily I could get from midtown Manhattan to catch a flight. While today I had the leisure of departing at 12:30PM on a Saturday, it’s helpful to know the route before trying this on a Friday evening.

For the more gory technical details: I booked into a “K” fare on my outbound trip and an “L” fare on my inbound segments. Both had provided the routing PHL-WAS/PHL/EWR/CLT/CLE/CHI-HOU/DEN/CHI-SFO/LAX-LAS. Today, I’m traveling to Las Vegas via Houston. Tomorrow, I’m returning via LAX, ORD, and EWR, then using the Continental-sold Amtrak code share to get to Philadelphia.

For my first segment, I’m on a Continental 737-800. My upgrades to first class cleared 72 hours prior to departure for all five of my flight segments.

While not entirely obvious from the angle of the photo, there’s about 10 inches of room between my knee and the seat in front of me.

Since I was only flying out of PHL, I couldn’t get a full vegetarian lunch on this flight. Between a choice of a chicken sandwich and a chicken salad that the flight attendents could simply skip adding the chicken, I went with the salad.