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One of my earliest posts on this blog was a two-part screed about how much I hated a flight on American Airlines. I was stuck in a seat without a window due to an equipment swap, and the lack of a recession in the wall where the window would normally be made it a very uncomfortable flight. (I never knew previously how much I depend on that cutout for shoulder room.) The plane had AA’s worn-out navy blue cloth seats, and they were hot and itchy in addition to being generally uncomfortable. All in all, it was one of the most uncomfortable flights I have ever taken, and I have avoided American since then.

However, I just took a trip to Chicago this past weekend, and American had the lowest first-class fares from SFO, so I decided to try them again. After all, how bad could they be in first? At least I wouldn’t have to worry about being scrunched into a corner or something like that. Here are my impressions as an American Airlines outsider:

Planes & Seats:

My flight out was on a 737-800 that had the gray leather first class seats – not super comfortable, but about on par with Delta. I was in the bulkhead row and was pleasantly surprised with the legroom. On the way back, I was on a new-looking A321 that had the same seats, although these were more comfortable and also had surprisingly large seatback screens. Honestly, if all American flights were on these A321s, I’d fly them all the time. I was really impressed with the comfort, the quality of the IFE, and the plane overall. I really do love seatback screens – it’s the same reason I like Delta’s 737-900s, even though the legroom is a little tight. It looks like the great majority of AA’s flights out of SFO are on 737s, though, and I certainly wouldn’t go out of my way to fly those (although I wouldn’t go out of my way to avoid them, either).

The one thing that really sucked, however, was that my outbound flight had one working bathroom (in the back of the plane). That meant that the aisle in the last 10 or so rows was packed with people waiting to use it for almost the entire flight. I know you can’t judge an entire airline for one shoddy plane and that this was probably just bad luck, but it was still annoying and didn’t speak very well of American’s fleet upkeep.

Food:

Okay, you’re gonna laugh – the food on both flights was great. Seriously! This comes back to my theory about how plane food should be simple and hard to fuck up above all else – I’d rather have some sort of stew with rice than a quinoa and leek salad with fricasséed watercress that sounds fancy but tastes mushy. On the flight out, I had steelcut oatmeal for breakfast, served with dried fruit and nuts and a little cup of brown sugar. It was great. I just wanted a breakfast I didn’t have to choke down, and some simple oatmeal and fixins beats just about anything else. Plus, there was a fruit plate with some decent stuff on there, and fresh too (kiwi, strawberry, blackberry, and… wait for it… raspberry). On the way back, since the flight left after 8:00PM, there was a snack service instead of dinner. I had the hummus platter (again – it’s really hard to fuck up hummus), and I even got two different types of hummus, one of which had paprika sprinkled on. The little flatbreads that came with it were nice as well. For all their reputation lately for serving disgusting swill, I came away plenty satisfied with both meals.

It’s in between the meals that AA suffers, though. On the flight out, the flight attendant passed through with a cheapo bag of snack mix, which had me wishing for a real snack basket like you’d see on Virgin or Delta. On the flight back, there was no service besides the mid-flight snack, although I’m sure I could have asked for a snack-mix packet if I really wanted one.

Service: 

Service was fine on both flights, but not exceptional. The flight attendant working first class on the way back seemed to enjoy her job, but the other flight attendants on the plane had scowls the entire time. I wish they’d hand out water bottles during boarding if they aren’t going to serve drinks, but I realize flight attendants don’t get paid until the doors close, so it’s not really fair of me to expect anything. Still… United, Delta, Alaska, and Virgin all reliably provide service during boarding.

One other thing:

I’m including this part somewhat tongue-in-cheek, since I know that flight routing is mostly the decision of air traffic control, but check this out… There was all kinds of weather in the midwest yesterday, and I had been worried all day about having a rough flight home. It’s good for me to go through turbulence, since it helps me build up my confidence that I can do it with having a panic attack, but I still don’t look forward to it. This flight delivered on the promise, with the first 90 minutes being pretty bumpy, while some sections here and there were really bumpy. The flight attendants were strapped in the entire time, and the captain gave periodic announcements to let us know how much longer it would be before we cleared the weather. I figured it was just the reality of flying across the midwest in thunderstorm season, and I did about as well as I could do. So that’s good. But still… here’s our route, courtesy of FlightAware.com:

At least we didn’t have to go through much of the yellow or the red, given how bumpy just the green parts were. However, here’s the route of a United flight that left 20 minutes later:

What the fuck, American??? Why do United flyers get to sail through smooth air while you drive us straight through a storm system? I guess the whole “friendly skies” thing really does mean something.

(Again, I realize that American didn’t fly through the weather just for fun and that there’s probably a good reason they didn’t go around. I’m still jealous, though, since as good of an exercise as it was to sit through over an hour of rough air, I was pretty tired and would have preferred to relax!)

Final thoughts:

I guess the takeaway is that the big three are all more or less alike when it comes to in-flight experience. In my recent experience, Delta has better service and snacks, but American has better meals (wow, there’s a sentence I thought I’d never type). United’s seats are more comfortable, but at at least on some planes, American has best-in-class IFE, while Delta’s setup on the 737-900 is pretty good as well. If you take Virgin out of the equation, I think the American A321 would my top choice for a non-transcon first class flight. I bet you don’t agree with me, and I bet you’re going to point that out in the comments.

While there are a number of business class products I’d be really excited to try, I’m not all that picky about business class seats in general. For the most part, they’ll get you where you’re going in a less crowded cabin, give you tons of legroom, and most likely provide a flat bed or something that approximates one pretty closely. Even something like United’s execrable 8-across business class configuration doesn’t seem so horrible if you’re flying with a companion and can snag two of the seats next to the window. Obviously if I were planning a trip and had multiple options, I’d probably pay a little more to fly something better than United, but I wouldn’t reconfigure my whole trip or add three layovers just to get a reverse herringbone seat instead.

There are two types of seats I will avoid altogether, though: seats that face backwards, and seats that face away from the window. I’ve never tried it, but flying in a backwards-facing seat just seems like the absolute worst. However, those seats are pretty easy to avoid – even in forward/backward products like United or American, you can just verify that there are forward-facing seats available at the time of booking and make sure you select a seat before the cabin fills up. (If you get bumped from your seat later, you can always play the “unending and violently emissive motion sickness” card.) British Airways is tougher, since all the window seats face backwards – and that’s not necessarily a knock on BA (which I have knocked plenty of times in the past). It’s mostly just an admission that my personal priorities when selecting flights disqualify me from them (not the other way around).

However, unlike forward/backward configurations where some seats are perfectly fine, standard herringbone seats all face away from the window, so there’s no way to avoid spending the flight looking at the middle of the cabin. Unless you’re Linda Blair from The Exorcist, you aren’t going to spend much time looking out the window in a herringbone seat (on the flipside, though, if you were Linda Blair, you’d have to deal with unending and violently emissive motion sickness).

Even in cabins that otherwise look pretty fancy, such as this sparkly Virgin Atlantic 787, the configuration looks narrow and claustrophobic, and it erases one of the best features of the 787 – the huge windows. People say that herringbone seats are nice because of how private they are, since you can’t see the person sitting next to you at all… although how private is it if you’re splayed out in front of every person who walks down the aisle?

This came up recently when I was looking at transatlantic availability next summer on Delta. Burning my Delta miles is a priority right now, although SkyTeam awards were pretty scant (certainly a departure from this past summer, when most days had a couple seats on either Delta, Air France, or KLM). One option that did come up fairly often was Virgin Atlantic, and at least for now, Delta doesn’t tack on absurd fuel surcharges on the outbound leg. That got me thinking about whether I would relax my general self-prohibition on herringbone seats if this were my only option. I probably would, but I’d be anxious leading up to the flight about being stuck in a diagonal cocoon of shittiness the entire time.

Virgin Atlantic’s premium economy actually looks really nice, and I’d certainly prefer to book that with my Delta miles if it were possible. I don’t want to be like that guy on The Points Guy earlier this week who claimed that he’d rather fly Lufthansa economy than United Business (come on bro), but I can’t help but think a wide recliner seat with decent legroom would be nicer than facing away from the window, having no elbow room or storage space, and having to spend the entire flight at a weird angle. (It’s also not that many miles when booked through Virgin Atlantic, although the fuel surcharges are absolutely killer, to the point where you’d probably be better off just paying cash for premium economy on Norwegian.)

Virgin Atlantic isn’t the only airline that has this configuration, either. Air New Zealand has it on their 777s (although they almost never open up award seats), Air Serbia has it on their A330, and Delta and Air Canada both have it on 777s. I’m sure there are more – that’s just off the top of my head. And any time I read reviews of flights on these planes, no matter how positive the review, I can’t imagine that I would enjoy the flight.

So, I’m putting it to people who have more experience here: am I missing something? Do you love herringbone seats? There are supposedly some really awful business class seats out there, but I’d rather be in some weird angle-flat dentist chair contraption than one of these. I’m happy to be set straight, though, since it would open up more booking options!

I have used the same suitcase since the year 2000 – it’s a TravelPro Crew 3 that my parents bought me (OOOH SPOILED BRAT) when I was in college. It’s a fantastic piece of luggage, and I especially like that it’s expandable. You don’t see that feature much anymore, but I use it all the time, to the point that the zipper pull ripped off of the slider a long time ago. It’s perfect for a trip where you know you’re going to buy a bunch of stuff, since you can pack the suitcase in normal mode and then give yourself tons of extra space for all your knick-knacks. I’ve overpacked it so much that I’ve practically turned it into a cube by the time I was done stuffing it full.

Alas, 17 years of use has taken its toll, and now the fabric along the corners is scuffed away, the handle at the top is ripping out, and the wheels have completely fallen apart. Originally the wheels had some kind of plastic shell that rolled smoothly, but that has long since crumbled away, and what’s left makes the loudest godawful noise, no matter the surface. I was dragging it through the cavernous departure hall in Zurich airport, and I swear it sounded like I was driving a tractor.

I decided that I should be in the market for a new suitcase, since my trusty TravelPro was clearly not long for this world. I was in a fancy mall in San Jose recently and ducked into a Tumi store to check out their wares, but I didn’t realize that Tumi luggage sells for so many hundreds of dollars. Everyone talks about Rimowa luggage, and I’m not opposed to a hard-sided suitcase, but with a $500 point of entry, it too was way more than I wanted to spend. Same thing with Briggs & Riley. I guess designer luggage is just more expensive than I thought it was, having never really paid much attention to it.

But then, what I like to call the process started. I started convincing myself that dropping $600 on a Rimowa suitcase was a good investment – it would be the last suitcase I ever bought, yadda yadda yadda. I’m self aware enough to admit that I care about luxury stuff – certainly moreso than I wish I did. I like having nice stuff, and I like traveling with my Bose headphones and my backpack that I got from a guy with a small shop in Berkeley who makes everything by hand. I’m never going to be one of those early retirement financial independence people, since I simply spend too much money on things.

In this case, though, the process was annoying me, because I was starting to feel like I was just trying to justify checking off another box on the luxury travel checklist. Amex Platinum, check. Week at the Park Hyatt Vendome, check. Bose QC35 headphones, check. Rimowa luggage, check. No offense meant to anyone who does have Rimowa luggage – it definitely looks nice, and as I mentioned, I most certainly appreciate the appeal of fancy shit like that. It’s just that in this one case, I was able to separate the seduction of tumbling further into the luxury travel lifestyle from my actual material wants.

It’s an exercise I try to perform whenever I’m about to make an impulse purchase… will this thing really make me happy? (By the way, I 100% believe that material possessions can make me happy. Not in the same way as my wife or my dog, but just because you can’t take it with you doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it before you go.) No luxury item is necessary – in fact, that’s exactly the appeal. A luxury purchase is a way of treating yourself to something you don’t need – it means recognizing the line between wants and needs and indulgently catering to the “wants” side of things. It’s easy to get carried away, though, and that’s what started to happen when I found myself on cashbackmonitor.com looking for the best portal bonus for Rimowa dealers.

I’ve already established that I’m not at all frugal, but in this one case, I decided to stop being such a goddamned yuppie and fix my goddamned perfectly good suitcase. First, I cut some holes in the interior lining so I could get access to the screws that affix the handles to the polycarbonate shell. A bunch of the nuts had fallen off, which is why the handles were starting to detach from the suitcase. Since the ends of the screws are really sharp, TravelPro originally used domed, closed-back nuts, which I didn’t have in my toolbox. Instead, I used drywall anchors, since they anchor the screws against the shell and get pretty flat in the process. I then taped up the holes in the lining with Gorilla tape, and suddenly the handles weren’t threatening to come off anymore.

I took a heat-sealing iron to the corners where the fabric was starting to fray – originally there were plastic guards there, but those are long gone. I wish I could buy more, but TravelPro’s online catalogs for replacement parts only go back ten years or so. Instead, melting some of the nylon around the corners will keep it from fraying further, and honestly the suitcase being a little threadbare isn’t something that’s going to keep me up at night.

That left the wheels, which were harder than I expected to remove. The axle is press-fit, so you can’t just unscrew it. Instead, I used one of my mountain bike tools to pry the edges of the plastic fixture that holds the wheels, and eventually I was able to break the axle loose and pull it out with a pair of pliers. I found a flight attendant supply website that sold replacement wheels for TravelPro Crew-series suitcases (including my ancient #3), and $20 later I was ready to roll as quiet as a mouse. Now I’ll get another 17 years out of it, and then maybe I’ll get a Rimowa suitcase.

So there you have it. I’m a materialistic piece of shit, but at least in this once instance, I was able to curb my consumerist impulse and put off a large purchase. Now I’m going to drink some 18 year-old scotch, because I really am the absolute worst.

 

I’ve been paying more attention to AAdvantage lately, having collected two big sign-up bonuses from Citibank and Barclaycard earlier this year. I now have a decent stash of AAdvantage miles, and every so often I look at ways I might want to use them in the future. The reason I’ve never been that big into this program in the past is that their transatlantic awards almost always involve British Airways, meaning they entail big fuel surcharges. However, they do have some other partners that fly to Europe, including Air Berlin and Finnair.

I’ve previously described my interest in Finnair, and even though their SFO-Helsinki flight isn’t on an A350, they still seem like a pretty fun airline to fly. I may need to go back to Europe next summer for the same trade show I was just at a couple months ago, and American showed pretty decent availability in both directions on Finnair’s seasonal SFO-HEL flight. In the past, when I’ve done random searches on this route, Finnair’s availability has been pretty bad, so I was surprised and excited to see that it was coming up as an option.

Not so fast… watch what happens when you try to select the flight. Here’s the first screen showing available saver flights on the day that I searched:

And here’s that same screen after I select the flight and hit “continue” – American tells me that the flight I wanted is no longer available, and now shows no available flights on that day.

At first, I thought someone else just happened to book that flight at the exact moment I was trying to, but I was able to get the phantom availability to show up again by running the same search in a different browser. I was also able to reproduce this error on every day in June that showed saver availability on that flight, and each time I selected the flight, it disappeared from the list of available flights for that day.

There’s nothing that pisses me off more in this game than phantom availability. It’s this kind of bullshit that gets Delta’s dishonest black box of a frequent flyer program voted #2 overall by US News & World Report, since at least you can book the awards that show up there. Between American’s dearth of availability on their own flights and their website showing unreliable results on partners, AAdvantage is teetering on the brink of uselessness for me. (I realize this is probably an isolated case, and AAdvantage is still majorly useful for many. I don’t care. I’m still mad!)

Anyone else run into this? Is it just Finnair, or has this been happening across other AAdvantage partners?

I’m late to the party with this news, but Cathay Pacific’s Asia Miles card is offering an increased bonus of 50,000 miles right now. If you haven’t already, check out the analysis of the offer and the card over on Miles to Memories.

The reason I bring this up at all (since I generally stay away from posting news items) is that one of the earliest posts to get any attention outside the blog was this one I wrote a long time ago about redeeming 35,000 Alaska miles for Cathay’s JFK-Vancouver flight in first class.

If you’re not planning on traveling to Asia any time soon and are thus thinking to yourself, “What the fuck would I do with 50,000 Asia Miles?!” I’d first tell you to watch your language, and then I’d remind you that the JFK-Vancouver flight is 40,000 Asia Miles one way plus around $50 in taxes. Plus, award availability is generally pretty good, as long as you only want one seat or can book a couple days in advance when Cathay opens up additional seats. I don’t pay tons of attention to Asia Miles in general, although I’d much rather pay for the JFK-YVR joyride with 40,000 miles earned thru a sign-up bonus in a program I otherwise don’t have much use for rather than 35,000 Alaska miles.

I’ll be skipping this card this time around, because I already have too many miles in programs like Delta and Korean Air with no immediate plan to use them. If I had a trip to New York on my schedule already (and hadn’t just committed to a bunch of minimum spending requirements on other new cards), I would consider jumping on this. As it is, I don’t want to pay the annual fee and funnel spending onto the card just for the theoretical possibility of taking a trip I may not take any time soon. I already did that with the Korean Air card earlier this year, and now I have a bunch of Korean Air miles that are just sitting around waiting to devalue. (I know, I know, it made sense at the time, and those miles will still most certainly come in handy at some point.)

As long as we’re on the subject of the JFK-YVR flight, I want to hear from commenters about which direction you’d prefer to fly it. It seems to make more sense to go JFK-YVR, since it’s a longer flight and the time zone change makes it less critical that you spend most of the flight asleep. However, you’d have to have an overnight layover in Canada, and I’ve heard the immigration officers are real dicks to people who try to do this. Going in the other direction means you don’t have to set up a hotel and can even save on a NYC hotel since the flight is a redeye and you arrive at 7AM. Thinking about the whole first class experience, it’s also relevant which lounge would be more fun… now that Cathay has moved terminals at JFK, you’d get to visit the American Airlines flagship first lounge and fancy dining, although Cathay’s own lounge in Vancouver looks damn swanky as well. What do you think?

One of the pitfalls of booking travel way in advance is that the trip you take is often not the one you booked. Usually this just means some minor rescheduling that moves the flight a few minutes before/after the original time, which isn’t a big deal. Today was different – I got an email from KLM that my original flight from SFO to Amsterdam was canceled, and they automatically rebooked me on a flight for the day prior.

On the one hand, this kind of sucks, since a full-day change in any travel itinerary can possibly mess up all kinds of other non-refundable bookings, connecting flights, etc. For instance, if this had happened on my return flight, I would have a nightmare trying to untangle two separate positioning flights and a non-refundable prepaid hotel booking, not to mention having to update existing rental car reservations, AirBNB, etc.

On the other hand, due to some luck, KLM is basically just telling me I have to take a longer vacation and spend an extra night in Amsterdam. THE HORROR! Maybe now I’ll actually have time to go the handbag museum, or maybe I’ll just kill the entire day at Lambiek (one of the best comic shops I have ever been to)…

The only variable I had to deal with at this point was to figure out an extra night of hotel accommodations. Fortunately, Amsterdam is a great city to redeem points, with multiple offerings from all major chains. I could use my free IHG credit card night at the ~$600 per night Intercontinental, or my free Hyatt credit card night at the brand new Hyatt Regency nearby. There are tons of Hiltons at multiple price points, including the Waldorf Astoria, where my other three nights were already booked. I have a bunch of Hilton points due to the last round of credit card sign-ups, so it was a no-brainer just to extend my stay at the Waldorf once I saw that standard room awards were available on the day I needed them. (I know the Waldorf has a terrible reputation for gaming its inventory, so I feel pretty #blessed that I was able to put together a 4-night redemption between my points and my free nights from the Citi Hilton sign-up bonus.)

That brings me back to KLM. At first I was annoyed, because my travel plans changed without my consent. However, the more I thought about it, this seemed like pretty good customer service, considering that I had made an award booking for two seats on one of the small handful of days during the timeframe I searched that KLM had saver availability. Even though they show no saver seats on the day I’m now flying, they still booked Justine and I into the same class, and they even kept our seat reservations. I feel like this is the type of situation where you hear horror stories about airlines zeroing out itineraries or involuntarily downgrading people to economy, so my irritation with KLM pretty quickly turned to gratitude that they made this as painless as possible for us given the flight cancelation. (Why the flight was canceled remains a mystery, given that they usually have a daily flight between SFO and AMS.)

I haven’t been shy about my brand loyalty toward KLM, so perhaps that puts me in a forgiving mood in the first place. Still, for whatever reason, our original flight ceased to exist, and it sure looks like KLM was proactive in making sure it disrupted our overall trip as little as possible.

*This post brought to you by KLM. Just kidding.

I was thinking more about the offer I got yesterday to upgrade my Citi Preferred card to a Premier with no fee for the first year, and I thought of a good reason why it might make sense for me to do it. Right now, my wife has no relationship with Citi, and so she’s eligible for both the Premier card with the 50k bonus and the Prestige card with 75k. Either one of these cards will generate a nice chunk of transferrable points for her, but getting them over to me could be an issue, since Citi point transfers work differently than Amex and Chase. Unlike those guys, who let you transfer your points to an authorized user’s frequent flyer account (although with Chase, they have to live at the same address that you do), Citi just has you transfer the points straight to the transferee’s Citi account.

This is both good and bad – and it’s definitely bad in my case, since I don’t have a premium Citi card right now. That means that I couldn’t transfer any of the points I received to my frequent flyer accounts unless I got a new card. Since the public offer on the Premier includes a waived annual fee, I could have done this for free anyway, but with the special upgrade offer, I can avoid a hard inquiry on my credit report, as well as the inevitable process of moving credit around with Citi, since I already have a bunch of cards. (Not that I’ll ever be back under 5/24, but this would help in that department too.)

So, now I’m leaning toward it, since a big chunk of Citi points could help take the pressure off my Chase and/or Amex balances the next time I want to redeem through FlyingBlue or Singapore. The only question is which card for my wife to get – Premier or Prestige? I’m not huge on the Prestige’s benefits, since we never stay in hotels for four nights in a row. If you do this routinely, the Prestige is the most rewarding card ever invented; otherwise, especially after its “enhancements” this month, it mostly duplicates the Sapphire Reserve’s benefits (with some differences regarding travel insurance and the Mastercard World Elite program that I’ll let you guys point out in the comments). The first year cost basically averages out, since Premier is free and the Prestige will net $500 in airline fee credits against a $450 annual fee. (I’m still hesitant to cough up $450 right away, though.)

I still have to think about this one, to be honest. The $7500 min spend on the Prestige is another knock against it, since that will require me to use it for all spending for a whole three months, thus increasing the opportunity cost by pulling the Freedom off of restaurants and the Everyday Preferred off of grocery stores.

Anyway, I’m getting kind of far afield here, since the basic point of this post is to note the utility of a fee-free Premier card if you’re doing two-player mode with Citi. Did anyone else get this offer, by the way? I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere, although that comes with the standard disclaimer that I may just be lazy.

Here’s an interesting offer that landed in my inbox just now:

I’d take it in a heartbeat if there were a bonus involved; as it is, it’s not a bad offer for someone who is ineligible for Citi sign-up bonuses due to their new, more restrictive churning policy. (Which, if you’ve forgotten, is that you can only get one bonus per card family per 24 months after opening or closing a card.) Since I recently transferred out all my Thank You points and closed my Citi Prestige card, I’m out of the Citi bonus game for a while.

If I did want to start earning Thank You points again, this would be a good way to get the best-earning card they offer without getting a hard inquiry on my credit report. I also don’t know if this would reset the 24-month clock or not. If it does, that would definitely change my decision calculus, since it would make little sense to reset the clock with no bonus to show for it. Unfortunately, I don’t trust Citi’s customer service reps to give me the correct answer here.

Bonus restrictions aside, I’m going to pass on this one mostly because I can earn the same (3x on travel and gas) through other cards that have more valuable points in my opinion. I originally downgraded my Premier card to a Preferred when I decided that Citi’s rewards program was less useful to me than Amex and Chase, and therefore had no reason to keep paying the annual fee. In the right circumstances, the opportunity to earn additional Thank You points for another fee-free year could make sense, although I’m happy to leave this one on the table.

Sometimes I wonder how much Delta pays attention to what their legacy US competitors are doing. They tend to lead rather than follow, which suggests a certain insularity in their thinking; in other words, they know their customers well enough to know what they will and won’t tolerate, regardless of whatever American and United are up to. On the other hand, though, industry consolidation produces a bandwidth of acceptable behavior, and the game that everyone seems to play is to figure out how to operate on the margins of this bandwidth.

Supposedly, Kierkegaard’s father wanted to test his son’s intelligence, so he told him that he wanted him to be the third best student in his class. Being number one only requires outpacing all your other classmates; being number three is a greater challenge, since you need to adjust your performance by forecasting what #2 and #4 will do. The recent behavior of the big 3 legacy carriers suggests they’re all vying to be little Kierkegaards, making sure they aren’t too much better or too much worse than anyone else.

With that in mind, I can’t help but think that Delta calibrates what they can get away with by looking at United and American. (This is true for the other two as well, although this post is about Delta, hence my focus on them.) Here’s where I’m going with this: Gary Leff published an article about yet another Delta devaluation, which have become depressingly common, and I’m wondering how much this has to do with the piss-poor availability on United and American lately.

In general, domestic first class award availability on Delta is better than United and American, because Delta’s lack of a published award chart permits a range of pricing beyond just saver and standard awards. (A while back, I wrote about the same thing regarding how Flying Blue prices economy awards, meaning it’s often much easier to get intra-Europe economy awards directly through Flying Blue than it is through Delta.) Of course, this sucks because the lack of a published chart enables Delta to pull all kinds of shenanigans, including exactly the type of no-notice devaluation that Leff points out in his article.

I’m not defending Delta here, although I don’t know that I think Delta’s devaluations are any worse than United and American’s refusal to open up domestic first class award seats. Charts are great and all, but they’re dependent on availability, and consistent lack of availability is a bait and switch. Delta tells you up front that you won’t know how much you’re going to pay until you book your flight, whereas American and United tell you up front while making it all but impossible for you to book at that rate. Seen this way, Delta’s program could be seen as a savvy combination of a traditional program with chart-based pricing and the kind of revenue-based system disingenuously marketed by the Capital Ones of the world to convince people that traditional frequent flyer programs are too hard to bother with.

Leff illustrates his article with this photo, as evidence that 30k is the new 25k (and that Delta’s hidden award chart is getting fuzzier by the day).

However, I look at this and say “holy shit, that’s a LOT of lowest-level first-class availability on a hub-to-hub route!” Let’s look at a couple other hub-to-hub routes that I’m choosing at random right now…

(In defense of American, some of their hub-to-hub routes do have pretty good availability, including LAX-ORD and LAX-DFW. However, in general the longer the distance, the worse the availability gets. Also, I excluded premium transcon routes here, since all three carriers mess with variable pricing and sporadic availability on these routes.)

So anyway, my point is that while the principle behind Delta’s oft-changing pricing is obviously craptastic (“Loyalty programs should be loyal” indeed), in practice, Delta’s pricing is lower on a long-range hub-to-hub route than either American or United. Yes, Delta jacked up the price by 5000 miles, but United and American are effectively doubling their prices by forcing you to book standard awards on these types of routes. In this way, the 5000-mile surcharge becomes an availability tax… due to United and American’s lack of availability, if you want saver seats at all, you’ll have to pay Delta a little extra.

I suppose the bottom line is that Delta isn’t unique in being disloyal to their loyalty program members – their tricks are aided and abetted by their competitors. If United and American offered gobs of saver seats on their flights, Delta would look bad in comparison. Instead, they’re able to make the case that even after they jack up prices with no notice, they’re still the best program for domestic awards.

What do you think? Is Delta uniquely terrible, or are they merely exploiting the award seat scarcity created by their competitors? Pushing this theory a little further, Delta just proved again that they’re the smartest people in the room – as United and American restrict inventory to [presumably] save money, Delta is in position to siphon off their frustrated customers at the same time that they charge those customers more.

 

Here’s an interesting offer that landed in my inbox just now:

I’d take it in a heartbeat if there were a bonus involved; as it is, it’s not a bad offer for someone who is ineligible for Citi sign-up bonuses due to their new, more restrictive churning policy. (Which, if you’ve forgotten, is that you can only get one bonus per card family per 24 months after opening or closing a card.) Since I recently transferred out all my Thank You points and closed my Citi Prestige card, I’m out of the Citi bonus game for a while.

If I did want to start earning Thank You points again, this would be a good way to get the best-earning card they offer without getting a hard inquiry on my credit report. I also don’t know if this would reset the 24-month clock or not. If it does, that would definitely change my decision calculus, since it would make little sense to reset the clock with no bonus to show for it. Unfortunately, I don’t trust Citi’s customer service reps to give me the correct answer here.

Bonus restrictions aside, I’m going to pass on this one mostly because I can earn the same (3x on travel and gas) through other cards that have more valuable points in my opinion. I originally downgraded my Premier card to a Preferred when I decided that Citi’s rewards program was less useful to me than Amex and Chase, and therefore had no reason to keep paying the annual fee. In the right circumstances, the opportunity to earn additional Thank You points for another fee-free year could make sense, although I’m happy to leave this one on the table.