Category Archives: Uncategorized

One of the more popular posts I wrote this year was about the best non-first class way to fly across the country… although, let’s be honest: most of us try to avoid flying transcon in any seat that doesn’t convert to a bed. For whatever reason, the transcon product I’ve most wanted to try is American Airlines’ first class seat on their special A321. It’s a pretty cool plane in any cabin, since it only carries around 100 people (as opposed to over 180 on a normal A321) in a very premium-heavy configuration.

First class is especially cool, with a 1-1 configuration that features the only narrow-body example of a reverse herringbone seat. (The business class cabin also looks pretty nice – it consists of 5 rows of B/E Super Diamond seats in a 2-2 layout, same as you’d find on United and Delta’s 757s.)

The thing is, most reviews of AA’s transcon first class are mixed, since the food and service aren’t actually that good. Plus, despite only having two seats per row, the width of the A321 cabin requires the use of a narrower seat than you’d get on a 777. I already know that I don’t particularly love this seat, having flown something fairly similar on Delta’s A330. And I’m on record not liking most things about American Airlines to begin with, although I’ve been flying them more and more lately (mostly due to the fact that they’re the usually the cheapest option in first class between ORD and SFO).

On the other hand, everyone raves about JetBlue’s Mint suites, which are also in a 1-1 configuration but include sliding doors and significantly more personal space. Plus JetBlue’s catering and in-flight service is as good as you’re going to find on a US airline, so I’m unlikely to enjoy AA’s first class any more than my Mint flight from earlier this year. So I guess what I’m wondering is, why am I still so excited that I’ll get to fly it next year?

To be honest, if I had the choice, I would have saved 35,000 miles (across two tickets) and booked business instead. However, like United and Delta, American is incredibly stingy with award space on this route. I actually think they’re a little better than the other two, but that’s not saying much. The other problem is that when they do release space, it’s almost always on the 7AM flight, which just doesn’t interest me. Given the general lack of availability, imagine my surprise when I was booking the second half of our MXP-JFK-SFO itinerary next year, and the day I wanted to fly matched up with the only first class saver seats for the entire month. Even better, I was able to grab an afternoon flight, which is rarer still.

Although I’d rather not splash out 50,000 miles per ticket (well, less after the 7.5% credit card rebate) for a transcon flight, it seemed like an especially nice note on which to end our trip, and I didn’t really have a ton of options anyway. Now I get to indulge my excitement for a flight that will probably be somewhat of a letdown, but I’m still really looking forward to it.

Here’s my preliminary comparison of this flight with JetBlue Mint (keeping in mind that I’ve only flown one of the two):

• I think the lounge is going to make a big difference. Even if JetBlue is demonstrably better in flight, if you look at the entire trip from airport to airport, American looks pretty good by comparison. Leaving JFK, your only lounge option on JetBlue is the execrable Airspace lounge, which is honestly shittier than the terminal itself. On the other hand, American offers private check-in, the nicest lounge in their network, and a private sit-down restaurant. That ain’t nothing.
• I liked the JetBlue seat, but I didn’t love it. I think people care way too much about the door, which honestly isn’t that cool. It doesn’t go up very high, which means that it mostly offers privacy against people crawling down the aisle on their hands and knees. If you’re standing up, you’re gonna see over the door.
• I’m quite sure the service and food will be a letdown, since I’ve found American crews generally to be the least friendly, and the service on my Mint flight was as good as everyone says it is.
• I don’t know which seat I’m going to prefer in the end. I’ve spent a total of 18 hours in the JetBlue seat model (also used on Swiss, Brussels, Austrian, and a bunch of others), and as spacious as it is, the seat is very coffin-like in bed mode, and the footwell is super narrow. I think this aspect of it may end up being a wash.
• Finally, I’m excited to try a new in-flight product, and American’s new lounge will be a nice bonus. I have a hunch that JetBlue is better overall, and it’s worth noting that JetBlue is also much less expensive. Still, as I mentioned in the title, I’m irrationally excited about this flight on American. I can’t wait to be let down!

Am I the only one who gets irrationally excited about certain planes or seats? I’m curious if anyone else has any planes or seats they’re irrationally excited to fly.

In general, I consider IHG points to be worth around a half a cent, although there are times when you can get significantly more than that. So far, the most value I’ve been able to wring was around a full cent at the Intercontinental Amsterdam (50,000 points vs ~$500 in cash), although that’s a pretty high daily rate for that hotel. While I was happy to get a good value for my points, had I been staying on another weekend, it would have been much closer to the 1/2 cent average.

However, as part of planning this trip to Italy next year, I stumbled on a new IHG hotel in Milan – the Indigo Corso Monforte. I don’t have any prior experience with Indigo hotels, but they always look pretty nice from the pictures, if not as luxurious as some Intercontinental properties. Part of me wondered if IHG was going to roll Indigo into Kimpton, since both brands are positioned in the boutique niche, but I guess if IHG is continuing to open Indigos, it means that they’re going to keep them separate for the time being. (I also get the sense that Indigo offers more limited service than Kimpton, although I’ve never stayed at a Kimpton either.)

Because the Indigo Milan isn’t actually open yet, I don’t know how nice it actually is, but the pictures online look very promising. This immediately jumped out as a great candidate for my annual free night from the IHG credit card, but then I noticed that it’s also a fantastic value on points.

From the limited searches I did, the cash price is between $300 and $450, depending on the season. However, award nights are available for 30,000 points, which (for IHG), is about as good as it gets outside of an elusive award night at the Intercontinental Bora Bora or something.

If you’re talking about Milan on a points and miles blog, you pretty much have to mention the Park Hyatt Milan, which is usually described as the absolute best hotel in the world (just like every other Park Hyatt in Europe or Asia). And while it looks pretty damn elegant, the pictures I’ve seen still have that classic “monks chanting in a cloister” aura that I get from a lot of Parks Hyatt (including the two I’ve stayed in). Anyway, my point in bringing it up is that I’d much rather save my Chase points for flights (instead of transferring 60k to Hyatt) and stay at the Indigo using points I got through maximizing IHG’s Accelerate promotions. Especially when the value per point difference between IHG and Hyatt is so small.

This is why I like IHG so much as a program. While Hyatt and SPG are undeniably the best hotel points to hold, unless you’re road warrioring and earning your top-tier status along with a boatload of points through actual stays, it’s tough to build up much of a balance. (Sure Hyatt points are easy to earn via Chase, but I’m presuming that you have other uses for those Chase points besides just transferring them to Hyatt.) In contrast, I earned over 100k IHG points last year just through a couple work trips and one personal trip, thanks to IHG’s generous promotions.

While the points themselves are usually not worth very much, IHG still has some really good opportunities for value if you look hard enough (or if you get lucky like I did and simply find one at a hotel in a city you’re already visiting). How about my loyal reader(s)? Have you found any amazing IHG redemption values? And does anyone have any plans to visit the new Indigo in Milan?

In the past few weeks, I’ve been focusing much more heavily on the “burn” side of the “earn and burn” mantra. Part of that involved cashing out the remainder of my Hilton Honors balance on a couple nights at Hilton’s new Curio property in Rome, which looks really nice. It isn’t cheap (76,000 – 80,000 points per night), but I think between the nights I booked on points plus a free weekend night from Amex’s forthcoming Aspire card and a gift card I have laying around, I can cobble together a four night stay.

The problem is that I ended up moving the trip back a week for various reasons, so I needed to change my Hilton award booking. Anyone who has tried to do this before will probably know where I’m going with this, because it seems to be a recurring problem: Despite verifying that the new dates I wanted to book had standard rooms available, the calendar showed only premium rooms when I went in to change my reservation.

This isn’t the first time I’ve run into Hilton playing games with availability – I dealt with the same thing when I booked an award stay at the Waldorf Astoria Amsterdam, and the dates I wanted suddenly had no more standard rooms available right at the exact moment I tried to book. It’s the award booking equivalent of Schrödinger’s cat paradox, in which availability both exists or doesn’t exist at the same time, depending on whether you’re trying to book that particular day. Just as Schrödinger was trying to find the exact moment when a superposition of two states becomes one state or the other, booking a Hilton award stay can become a maddening exercise in determining exactly when the availability that you found ceases to exist.

(I also get annoyed by Hilton’s hybrid revenue/chart-based award structure, which makes it impossible to predict the cost of an award stay until you try to book it. Hilton must have seen how much people hated Delta’s “enhancements” to Sky Miles and realized that they should do the same thing.)

Anyway, not being able to change the reservation, I just went ahead and canceled it, figuring I’d be able to re-book it later. However, when I went in to rebook, the hotel didn’t have any availability over the three-week period I was trying to book… and keep in mind that just hours earlier, it showed availability on every day.

It’s as if me canceling an award stay at this hotel shut off availability on every other day in order to prevent me from rebooking. I tried different browsers and everything, but every time I logged into my account and searched that hotel, I found the same thing. Then it occurred to me that I should try going into incognito mode first and searching again before logging in. Lo and behold, standard availability gushed forth, and I was even able to see it after logging in to book the dates I wanted.

I even found the room for cheaper than it was originally (76k per night instead of 80k). That brings me to another point: it’s usually a good idea to keep an eye on your Hilton award stays to see if the cost has come down as you get closer to the actual dates. However, if you do go to cancel and rebook, there’s a good chance your account will be locked out of rebooking at that hotel again, so definitely keep the incognito trick in mind. I don’t know if it’s just a quirk of how Hilton’s booking engine searches inventory, or if it’s something Hilton does on purpose to discourage people from monkeying around with their existing reservations. Either way, it’s annoying.

Oh well. At least I was able to figure out a workaround in the end, so I could book the dates I wanted… although there’s probably a 0% chance that there will be any additional availability around the days I booked when I get around to redeeming my free weekend night next month when I get the Aspire card.

I’ve always liked Aeroplan. Maybe it’s the very reasonable transatlantic award rates, or the fact that the French person who says “Aeroplan” when you call their customer service number pronounces it “Ahh-yey-roh-plohn.” But this week they really tried to do their best to outdo another round of stealth Delta devaluations en route to becoming the most hated loyalty program out there.

I’m not going to write about the ongoing saga with SWISS first class (go get ’em Matthew), which is some major, major bullshit. I was bummed that I missed out on booking the SWISS first class space when it was available, but given that I would have canceled an existing ticket had I done so, I’m now glad that I didn’t get that chance.

No, this post is about the really annoying experience with them yesterday and today when booking an award flight for Justine to fly back home to New Zealand in January. Miraculously, I found business class space on United in both directions. United has actually been pretty good about opening premium space on this route, and now that it’s on a 777-300, you even get to enjoy Polaris seats. The problem is that the space in both directions comes in waves that are usually a few weeks apart, so it’s really hard to book round-trip unless you plan to stay for 3-4 weeks. My normal plan is to book one way in business and for Justine to suffer miserably in economy on the other leg because she prefers flying direct above all else (I know, it’s ridiculous, but opposites attract, I guess).

So it was unusual to find space in both directions a week apart, and I wanted to lock down the ticket ASAP. I’ve never had an issue with Aeroplan showing phantom space before, so imagine my surprise when I went to book the itinerary and got this shit instead:

I got the same error across multiple days, despite the award showing as bookable on both Aeroplan and United’s sites. And I had already transferred over Amex points, so I was especially pissed. After a bunch of messing around, I realized that it had to do with the ultimate destination – the bustling metropolis of New Plymouth, NZ (NPL). I went ahead and booked SFO-AKL so as to not lose out on the United space, figuring I’d call the next day to add on the other part of the itinerary. (Despite being a program that issues tickets all over the world, Aeroplan’s call center is closed for 7 hours a day. Hope you never need to reach them during irrops overseas!)

So I called in today, and to their credit, I got someone on the first ring. At first she was pretty helpful, and we had some banter about how lucky I was to find round-trip business class space on this route. She happily said she could add the NPL connection, but that it would be a $200 change fee to do so. This is when I got annoyed, since it was their shitty website that wouldn’t let me book it in advance. I explained this, and she said, “I’m sorry, but as soon as you book the ticket, you’re responsible for any changes.”

I thought my response that I would have booked all the way to NPL if the website hadn’t thrown errors at me was pretty reasonable, but then she really made my blood boil when she pointedly said, “WELL THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE CALLED US WHEN YOU WERE TRYING TO BOOK.”

“I DID BUT YOUR CALL CENTER IS CLOSED FOR 1/3 OF THE DAY!!!!!!!”

I didn’t actually yell, since I’m pretty good at keeping my cool with customer service people. (It’s not like yelling at anyone ever accomplished anything.) But in my mind, I was screaming at the top of my lungs. She cut me off at that point, telling me that she had tried booking all three daily flights between AKL and NPL in both directions and all of them had no space. Yes, in the span of 10 seconds, she was able to try all six flights, and none of them had space. Fastest. agent. ever. (Although she was probably telling the truth, as I would soon find out.)

“Then why is the space still showing up on Aeroplan?” She said it was because there’s usually a lag between Air New Zealand’s system and Aeroplan’s, so sometimes space shows up after it has already been booked through other channels. End of call, which was frustrating, but not too bad, since paid flights between AKL and NPL are really inexpensive. Despite NPL being tiny, you even get a choice between Air New Zealand and Jetstar, and the competition keeps prices way down.

Here’s the thing: despite Aeroplan being annoying to deal with between the phantom award space and the irritating experience with their call center, this does seem to be an Air New Zealand issue. However, it looks like a systemic problem that has nothing to do with “real time availability” or whatever. Searching the calendar between AKL and NPL shows multiple saver seats every day:

However, trying to book the flight through United yields the same result. (Yes, I transferred points from my Chase account in order to test this, because I care SO MUCH about providing useful information on this blog.)

It definitely isn’t a day-to-day thing, with space on specific dates dropping off the calendar and not updating right away on other Star Alliance booking engines. You can’t book the flight on any day – I tried various dates out into mid-February, and every one led to the same error. Something fishy is going on with Air NZ, and I don’t know how widespread it is. I thought maybe it had something to do with the regional subsidiary that Air NZ contracts with on that route, but I also tried AKL-Christchurch (which is an actual Air New Zealand mainline flight), and I got the same error.

While I don’t mind transferring in 1000 points to top up my United account enough to try to make 8000-mile dummy bookings, I don’t really want to transfer over 40,000 points to experiment with booking transpacific flights (not that Air NZ releases much award space anyway). But something is going on at least with domestic NZ flights, and it’s causing other Star Alliance booking engines to show gobs of availability in multiple cabins, none of which is actually bookable.

Well, this started as a gripe about Aeroplan, but I guess my beef is more with Air New Zealand than anyone else. Aeroplan just needs to open their call center for 24-hours and I’d leave them alone. Oh, and honor those SWISS tickets, you dicks.

A while back I wrote a post about how much I like Amex’s new habit of offering increased referral bonuses on many of their cards. If you’re over counting your credit inquiries, it’s a good way to wring some extra bonus points out of Amex cards you’ve had before by trading referrals with your partner in crime. (Assuming you have a partner in crime and aren’t a lonely used-up husk of a person.) In general, Amex referrals aren’t a good deal for the referee, since the bonuses are often less than you can find through incognito trickery — although that obviously doesn’t matter if the referee has had the card before.

Happily, Amex’s Delta card has a nice offer going right now, assuming the person you’re referring isn’t targeted for the 75k sign-up bonus right now. Here are the deets:

10k for you, 60k plus a $50 statement credit for them. This offer matches the previous “HIGHEST EVER” bonus on this card, and as long as your referee can’t get the 75k bonus, your referral still represents a great deal. (The public offer for this card right now is 35k plus $50.)

One word of caution: unlike the targeted 75k offer, the referral offer does carry the once-per-lifetime language. And while 60k is the HIGHEST EVER non-targeted bonus for right now, it’s pretty likely that there will be even higher bonuses in the future. So just make sure your friend knows that they might miss out on more miles down the road, unless they get a targeted offer of their own someday (and the circle of life continues).

If you’d like to support this blog and are interested in 60,000 SkyMiles (and understand that this may disqualify you from higher bonuses in the future), here is my referral link. If you want to check whether you’re targeted for the 75k bonus first, do it here.

 

One Mile at a Time had an article today about Air Canada’s new ultra-exclusive business class lounge, which notably only lets you in if you’re on a paid ticket. In the comments section, there’s a reasonable debate about whether or not this is okay. The argument for it is that they have major space constraints for the new lounge, so they need to severely limit guests in a way that consistently manages travelers’ expectations. On the other hand, it introduces a dangerous precedent of segmenting the travel experience between award travel and paid travel.

I could see other airlines taking this further, and devaluing from the product side (the in-flight experience) rather than the currency side (the price of flights in mileage). Maybe an award ticket gets you a seat, but you get served economy food, and you don’t get an amenity kit. Or maybe you don’t get to choose your seat in advance so the best seats can stay open for paid tickets. In a sense, this is reasonable – the cost of business class in miles relative to economy class is way out of sync with the cost in dollars, and it doesn’t really make intuitive sense why business class should be so affordable if you use points. (Of course, that disparity is the entire backbone of the points/miles hobby – if it were to go away, I’m pretty sure we’d all switch to cash-back cards.)

Correct me if my history is wrong, but miles were originally a way for airlines to reward loyal flyers. It makes sense at that point to offer business class at 2x the price of economy as a way to reward someone who has flown 2x the distance with your airline with a special incentive. But now, with most miles earned from credit cards and shopping portals (doesn’t it seem weird that you can earn more United miles buying a pair of pants from Banana Republic than you do flying from San Francisco to Chicago???), that disparity doesn’t fuel loyalty. Instead, it fuels people like me (and you, and you, and you) figuring out ways to game the system in order to rack up enough miles to fly up front.

Having said all that, I sure as fuck hope airlines don’t start devaluing the premium experience or bringing the cost in miles more in line with the cost in cash. (What am I saying – they’ve already started. What I meant is that I hope they don’t continue all that fast.) For the time being, it’s still possible to unlock amazing luxury travel experiences by investing time figuring out loyalty programs and credit card strategies rather than money.

And that’s the crux of it – I spend hours doing this, and while it’s my hobby and I enjoy those hours, it’s still time I’ll never get back. Really wealthy people can buy time by hiring assistants, chartering jets, taking helicopters across the city, etc. I can’t buy time like they can, but I can invest the time I have in improving my travel experiences.

One delectable side effect of this ability is that some rich people really hate that I’m able to rub shoulders with them when I’ve merely invested my time rather than my money. I’ve seen this sentiment a lot in blog comments and at various times on FlyerTalk, but this comment on One Mile at a Time really distills it down to its petulant, douchey essence:

Oh my god, it’s soooo good. The “Sorry” without punctuation at the end – like he’s so NOT sorry he can’t even be bothered to add punctuation to the end of his comment. The “bizo” lounge – a derisive name for a lounge that’s beneath him (or a typo because he’s too rich to spell check). And he calls it “mixing,” which pretty much means he’s racist too, since no one who isn’t racist ever talks about one group of people “mixing” with anyone else. Maybe he’s just a troll, but having spent my teenage years working at a country club, I can assure you that plenty of people actually think like this. And I just absolutely LOVE that the idea of having to share a first class cabin with the likes of me is ruining this guy’s trip.

Also, how does he know which passengers are on award tickets? Is there some smell that middle class people give off that’s undetectable except to people who earn seven figures per annum? It also cuts to the core of wealthy entitlement, insofar as he thinks that his wealth should separate him from those who are less wealthy, even though there’s no reason why this should be the case. There are only so many seats in a first class cabin – why should he give a shit who is in each one? It’s not like they’re adding seats to business class in order to make the experience less exclusive. With a finite supply, the limiting factor is intrinsic. It would be totally unnecessary to further limit it to those who can pay with cash only – the sole reason why someone would want this is if they believe that wealth supersedes character, and that belief automatically makes you a piece of shit.

So, in conclusion, fuck this guy, but also let’s thank this guy for reminding us all that in addition to enjoying premium travel despite our middle-class incomes, we’re also ruining some shitbag’s day. Talk about a side benefit!

There are two types of people: those who yearn to someday fly in Emirates first class, and those who can’t wait to tell you that it’s overrated, that the seats are actually pretty narrow, and that ________’s first class is like way WAY better. I’m happy to report that in late 2018, I will transition from the first group to the second, and I can’t wait to be disappointed by the experience when it doesn’t live up to the insanely high expectations I’m coming in with. As a method of visualization, here’s what I think I’ll look like flying in Emirates first class:

Let me back up for a minute… I’ve been lusting after Emirates first class since well before I got into points and miles. Their marketing is really persuasive, and I bought it hook, line, and sinker. Nowadays I know that there are other airlines who offer you more space, better food, better ground services, and all that jazz. Emirates still has that special something that has always made it the very top aspirational redemption for me, and I’m pretty sure this is true for a lot of people.

I remember years ago reading an article about how you could spend $800 or so to fly Emirates first class (specifically the A380, or as it’s now known, The Emirates Showermobile) between Bangkok and somewhere else in Asia… it was only a 3 hour flight, but the writer had me convinced that someday I would be in Bangkok for some reason, and that I would finally get a taste of the good life, if only for a few hours before I crammed myself back into economy for the transpacific flight back home.

And even after I got into miles, there were a few things working against me ever redeeming for a flight on Emirates. First, Alaska devalued partner award redemptions on Emirates, so it no longer made any sense to even consider using my Mileage Plan miles this way. The next best option seems to be Japan Airlines, but they only partner with SPG. If I had a six-figure SPG balance, I’m sure this would have been in the cards, but I’ve never been anywhere close to that. Finally, Justine and I haven’t had the Middle East on our radar as a potential vacation destination, so it didn’t seem very likely that we’d ever need to fly on Emirates anyway.

I had been aware that Emirates has a couple fifth-freedom flights between the US and Europe, but I always just assumed that availability was really bad. Plus, without anywhere near enough SPG points or Alaska miles, I figured I’d never be able to afford one of their awards anyway. I even forgot that Emirates Skywards is an Amex transfer partner, because the conventional wisdom is that it’s a shitty program that you should never use.

However, as I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago, the winds have changed after I realized that: a) Justine has always wanted to go to Italy, and we could fly home from Italy on Emirates (Milan to JFK), and b) the cost of the award through Skywards isn’t actually that bad. It’s 85,000 points, which is the same as American Airlines would charge you to fly from London to JFK on British Airways in first class, or what Delta would charge to fly from Paris to JFK on Air France in business class. Emirates does levy fuel surcharges, but they’re not terrible – around $300 per ticket, which is less than BA and on par with Air France.

It’s not an exceptional deal by any means – Lufthansa first class all the way to San Francisco would only be 70,000 Amex points via Aeroplan, although fuel surcharges would be a little more. In terms of pure points (not factoring in fuel surcharges), that has to be the best deal in transatlantic redemptions. However, if we want to compare apples to apples, we could use additional Amex points to cover the cash difference in fuel surcharges between the two (around $200), which at the 1.25cpp rate I get from my Charles Schwab Amex works out to 16,000 points (making Emirates and Lufthansa almost the same).

Plus, while Lufthansa first class is one of my must-try products, I don’t think it will come anywhere close to Emirates in terms of enjoyment. In all the premium cabin flights I’ve taken so far, once the first meal is over, the novelty wears off pretty quickly, and even though the cabin is really nice, I’m still bored and ready to be done with the flight. At least on Emirates I’ll have a bar to go to, a shower to take, an in-seat minibar to play with, and as much food as I could possibly eat. Cheers!

Another benefit of booking directly through Emirates is that they don’t offer chauffeur service to passengers booked on partner award tickets. While it’s not something I’d pay for on its own, it will be really nice to get picked up from wherever we are in Milan and taken to the airport, rather than having to deal with the train like common folk. The one small disappointment is that I won’t get to experience Dubai’s A380 terminal and first class lounge/concourse in all its glory… MXP does have a perfectly nice looking Emirates lounge for business and first passengers, although it certainly won’t be in the same league as the cavernous spaces provided for high rollers in Dubai.

Also, I’m really impressed with Emirates’ service so far. Here’s why: in my excitement to book the ticket, I forgot to enter Justine’s maiden name, which is what is on her New Zealand passport. (Since her green card has her married name, that’s the name I use for domestic tickets.) I called to change it, figuring I’d have to pay a change fee or something, but then I realized that the award I booked was a full-flex ticket that could be changed or refunded for free. (And this may actually come in handy, since I found out today that hotel availability around the dates I had planned to travel actually isn’t that good.) However, I couldn’t change the name online, so I called in. I got a helpful rep almost immediately, and when he couldn’t change it either, he put me on hold to try to sort it out. I ended up being on hold for around 30 minutes, but when he came back, he said that after talking to multiple supervisors, he was able to make the change. I was impressed that he was willing to put in so much effort to fix what I admitted was my mistake all along.

So, bottom line is that I’m really excited about this flight… the only part that’s killing me is that I’m dying to tell Justine all about it, even though this trip is supposed to be a surprise. It’s been hard keeping my trap shut (and no, she never reads this blog, so this doesn’t count as letting the cat out of the shower suite), but hopefully the surprise will be well worth it in the end.

In general, I try to stay out of the business of ragging on other points and miles blogs. There are a handful of blogs that I actively hate (and, to be honest, sometimes hate-read), but I don’t go out of my way to talk about them. In general, the bigger the blog, the trendier it is to hate it. I don’t necessarily agree – two of my favorite blogs are also two of the biggest around (One Mile at a Time and View from the Wing). With The Points Guy, I have a love/hate relationship. I don’t think you can deny that TPG himself is an engaging personality who is great at what he does. I enjoy his Instagram stories and Facebook live videos, even if they’re a little “lifestyles of the rich and famous” for me. I realize he has to make money (and if it’s money you’re into, check out the Bank of America Premium Rewards card, which can earn you $500 cash back if you spend $3000 in 3 months!), but I do get annoyed that he pitches himself as the premier resource on all things points and miles while steering people to bonuses that are lower than other publicly available offers.

Maybe I’m in a bad mood today because I spent last night dealing with major work drama that erupted right as I was getting ready to close up shop for the week, but TPG’s “Points & Miles guide to Rome” really bugged me this morning. There’s nothing specifically offensive about the post – it’s a perfectly fine surface examination of traveling to Rome, although it continues the trend of the blog purporting to give you amazing advice and instead giving you very little besides links to credit cards. And the problem isn’t the links to credit cards on their own — it’s the quality of the content around those links.

One passage in particular sent my “Jordan irrationally gets angry about innocuous things” meter into the red:

Alitalia, a SkyTeam partner, has a hub at Rome’s main airport, Fiumicino (FCO), though it recently filed for bankruptcy. Despite rumors that Ryanair would purchase the airline, it seems things are still up in the air for Alitalia. It’s currently business as usual, with flights operating from US getaways like New York (JFK), Miami (MIA) and Boston (BOS), but you may want to avoid booking anything too far in the future. TPG Editor-at-Large Zach Honig recently flew Alitalia without any issues, but it may still be best to consider a Delta flight from Atlanta (ATL) or New York (JFK) instead if you want to fly SkyTeam.

American Airlines offers nonstop flights from Charlotte (CLT), Chicago O’Hare (ORD), Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW), New York (JFK) and Philadelphia (PHL). If you have a stash of AAdvantage miles, try to find a MileSAAver Off Peak economy award for 22,500 AA miles or 57,500 in business one-way.

Another option is Star Alliance. United flies nonstop to Rome from Newark (EWR) and Washington Dulles (IAD). Try searching for a saver award, which costs 30,000 MileagePlus miles in economy or 60,000 in business one-way.

Why would this advice make me mad? It’s all true, after all, and there isn’t a single credit card pitch. Well, it’s the instruction to “try to find” a saver award on one of American or United’s direct flights to Rome. Here are a list of things you may want to try instead, since you’d have a better chance of success: getting a good pair of rocket boots and running there yourself, convincing a Southwest pilot to divert to Rome instead of Tulsa, commissioning Elon Musk to build you a watercar that you can drive over the ocean, etc. Because I’m annoyed and hell-bent on proving my point, I decided to count the days where United shows saver premium cabin saver availability on their EWR-FCO flight. If you can plan a trip in the next week, you’re in luck – there’s a seat on 11/25 and on 11/30. After that, there are ZERO saver awards between 12/1 and the end of the calendar.

Searching IAD-FCO, the availability is so bad that some months the calendar don’t show a single saver award seat in any cabin, so it defaults away from the “Show non-stop flights only” option. You get a momentary spike of hope that United is actually opening saver award space on multiple days, only to realize that all the space is on Star Alliance partners via their hubs. Just like the EWR flight, aside from a few days in November, it’s a big fat goose egg for the rest of the calendar. (United will show you a handful of days in December with nonstop saver seats, but don’t worry, it’s phantom availability.)

American is a little better, because there are more options. I didn’t search the every route, but from what I could find, there are a handful of days every couple months with saver seats out of the ex-US Airways hubs. Don’t get me wrong, there are still months-long dry spells without any saver seats in any cabin. Oh, and what about Delta? Well, you better have a shitload of Sky Miles, since saver seats out of Detroit and Atlanta are similarly scarce. Because Delta has so many award pricing levels, that could maybe work in your favor if you’re okay spending 86,000 or 110,000 miles on a one-way Delta One award. Even those awards are hard to find during some periods, though, and there are long stretches where no awards dip below 225,000.

Bottom line, if you looked at the above guide to getting to Rome on points and then set out to book a trip, you’d never get to Rome. (Also, “look for saver seats on the three main airline alliances” is the most generic award booking advice you could possibly give.)

I’ve been researching this a lot lately, since I’m actually in the process of planning a trip to Rome right now. So, please allow me to augment the advice on TPG with some tidbits from my personal experience.

1. Don’t count on finding saver awards on United, American, or Delta. Duh. While I’d obviously prefer to connect in the US and then arrive in Rome after a longhaul flight, it’s looking like this won’t be possible unless I can be extremely flexible about when to go (and I have a small window for this trip, so there goes that plan).
2. Like any European destination, the best option is to identify European gateways that are easy to get to and then to connect through them. To minimize the overall trip time time, ideally you’d want something closer to Rome (like Zurich instead of Dublin, for instance). For me on the West Coast, the top candidates are Madrid (SFO-MAD on Iberia using American, although availability isn’t great) or Zurich (SFO-ZRH on Swiss using Aeroplan – and while availability has been good in the past, it’s pretty bad right now).
3. In the European gateway game, there are fall-back options that often have good-to-great availability, such as British Airways (bad seat, long connection in LHR, insane fuel surcharges) and Air France/KLM (potentially bad seat, long-ish connection in CDG or AMS, considerable but not insulting fuel surcharges through FlyingBlue).
4. Don’t forget about Norwegian. (This seems like a missed opportunity for TPG… why not mention Norwegian’s direct flight from Oakland and use it as an excuse to pimp the BofA Premium Rewards card as a means to cover the cost?) Anyway, they offer a direct flight from a convenient airport that’s usually cheap both in economy and premium economy. As I mentioned in my Charles Schwab post, you can even use Amex points to get one of these flights for around the same cost as a saver seat on a normal airline.
5. Finally, as is so often the case, Turkish has great availability from the US, as long as you aren’t put off by the idea of transiting Istanbul. (And given Rome’s geographic position, the connecting flight from IST is pretty short.) Due to the political situation there, I’d be nervous about incorporating it into my trip plan, but I’m kind of a nervous nellie that way.

On the hotel side, I have to wonder how naming a single hotel from SPG, IHG, and Marriott constitutes a points and miles guide. (This seems like another missed opportunity for TPG given that they currently have an exclusive offer on the Amex Surpass Hilton for 125,000 points and the Waldorf Astoria in Rome was recently named one of the best hotels in Rome by Condé Nast Traveler.) I don’t know how much to add here, except that you should probably search all the hotel chains and find a hotel that fits your overall points strategy, whether that’s specific to one chain or spread across all of them. I mean, sure the St. Regis sounds amazing, but given how hard SPG points are to earn, it seems like most people would have a hard time coughing up 20k per night unless they were only going for a day or two.

Because of the luxury hotel options available (assuming you want to stay in a luxury hotel in the first place), Rome looks like a good market to leverage a credit card sign-up bonus or anniversary night. To wit: Hilton is coming out with the new Aspire card in January, and you automatically get a free night when you open the card, plus whatever the sign-up bonus is. You also get a $250 credit to use at any Hilton Resort, and the Waldorf in Rome counts as a Hilton Resort. Right there, that’s 1 1/2 free nights (depending on the price of the room when you book). There’s also a really promising-looking Hilton Curio property right in the center of Rome, which is where I’m planning to stay on our trip. I figure that I can make a pretty good stay for myself between whatever free nights I can leverage from the Aspire Card, the points I currently have, and the Diamond status I’ll pick up when I get the new Amex. Of course, this is only one option, and if you’ve been paying attention to your hotel strategy all along, you will have plenty of options in Rome (unless you’re solely focused on Hyatt, in which case you should to in Milan instead).

Has anyone else been to Rome? Do you have anything to add that I should consider when I’m planning my own trip? Do you also let yourself go down rabbit holes of frustration and irrational anger on holidays where you’re supposed to be thankful for everything you have?

Sky Miles are probably the worst of the Big Three airlines’ miles to collect. Sure United and American aren’t so great themselves, but Delta devalues Sky Miles so often and so suddenly that it’s entirely conceivable that they’ll be completely worthless in a matter of months. As I’ve written about before, one of my bigger strategic errors was applying for two Delta cards in July of ’16, since I had no use for the miles. In general, I usually say just to apply for cards regardless of whether you have an immediate need for the miles (since you never know when you’ll need a bunch of whoever’s miles), but it’s a little trickier with Amex, given that you can only get each bonus once.

To wit: I felt pretty good about myself after pulling in 110,000 miles across the two cards, but I felt less good when business class saver awards increased from 62,500 to 70,000 miles shortly thereafter… and even less good when partner awards went up to 85,000 miles. And then the kicker: the “highest ever!!!!” bonuses that I applied for were both increased by 10,000 miles the following summer.

As a result, I haven’t really paid much attention to Delta’s credit cards, since I’m sitting on a six figure balance that’s rapidly devaluing, and I don’t have an immediate use for any additional miles. If the past trend repeats, we’ll soon see 80k and 90k offers as the points continue to be worth less and less, and so I’m in no hurry to use up my once-per-lifetime bonuses just to pad my existing stash of Sky Miles.

Today, however, my mailbox surprised me with a rare example of what’s quickly becoming the churning equivalent of finding a $1000 bill on the ground: an Amex targeted offer with no once-per-lifetime language. Justine got one of these earlier this year for the Premier Rewards Gold, not even a year after she canceled that same card. It almost seems too good to be true, and so I read the terms and conditions ten times before I decided to apply. (I also pulled up the T&Cs online and did a ctrl+F for “have or have had” and various permutations.)

When there’s no lifetime language, the decision calculus is entirely different. The offer is time-limited, and it may never come back. I was lucky enough to be targeted, and I’m almost never targeted for Amex offers anymore. I don’t want to tempt fate by ignoring it and being all like, “Eh, I’m just like so over Sky Miles, you know?” Plus, the offer is fantastic: 75,000 miles after $3000 in spending (50k after $2000 in three months and 25k after an additional $1000 in six months), waived annual fee, AND a $50 credit toward a Delta purchase in the first three months. The only kicker is Amex’s new anti-churning language, promising a visit from the death squad if I cancel the card within 12 months.

(As an aside, I’m curious about how they enforce this, especially when my MO with Amex is to cancel the card after my annual fee is billed, which usually happens around 13 months after I open the card. I may keep this card open for a second year and eat the $95 just to play it super-safe… after all, I’d certainly buy 75,000 Sky Miles for $150 (that’s the $95 annual fee plus some cash back thrown in as the opportunity cost for spending $3000 on this shitty card.))

The timing here is great too – I just finished the spend on my Charles Schwab Platinum card, and I have around six weeks before the new Hilton cards come out. I was all excited to go back to my normal spending patters, maximizing all my category bonuses and whatnot, but I guess I’ll be in Delta-land for the time being.

One other note: I was given the choice between a personal and a business version of this card. Since I’ve held the personal version in the past, it occurred to me to play it safe and get the business version. See, that way I’d be guaranteed to get the bonus, even if I missed some once-per-lifetime clause hidden somewhere in the terms. In the end, I decided to stay with the personal version, since this way I won’t be disqualified from future special offers on the business version that do have the once-per-lifetime restriction, whereas I was already disqualified from those offers on the personal card.

Lastly, shout out to the design team that put this mailer together. I’m a sucker for any sort of paper engineering (pop up books, fancy cut-outs, screw-post binding, etc), and so the pop-up 3D photograph was very much appreciated. I keep getting offers from Chase’s United cards that I can’t take advantage of, and those are always boring and flat. At least Delta is putting some effort into their physical marketing materials! (Don’t forget, I’m a bookbinder in my spare time, so I really do care about this stuff to an insane degree.)

The other night, I wrote a very profane rant about Flying Blue’s devaluation, mostly taking issue with the infuriating rhetorical gymnastics required to pitch it as a positive change. About 10 minutes after posting it, I realized it may have gone too far, so I pulled it down. I think people who subscribe to the blog over email were able to read it, and maybe RSS subscribers as well. Let that be a lesson to you – subscribers get access to stuff that briefly passes through my self-censorship filter before getting caught in my better judgment filter.

However, in the course of writing the post, I made some graphics to reinforce my point, and I thought they were pretty good… so I’m just going to post them here with minimal comment.

Here’s one of the new marketing banners for JOON (Air France’s laughably ham-fisted airline for millennials):

Here’s a screen shot from Flying Blue’s new website that basically gaslights you into believing that the brown log they just left on your doorstep is a chocolate bar:

And finally, I tried to improve on their “Flying Blue Reinvented” graphic, since I didn’t think it sufficiently expressed how insanely frustrating the rollout of the new program has been.

I think I can let this go for now, until they actually unveil the redemption scheme under the new program (it’s so fucking “more clear” that they don’t even tell you how fucking much their shitty fucking awards are going to fucking cost)… okay I’m getting worked up again, so I should sign off. Yay Photoshop!