Earn more Starpoints® every night with our new promotion. From January 3 through April 15, 2011, you’ll earn unlimited bonus Starpoints two ways:
- Earn double Starpoints every night of the week.
- Plus, earn an additional weekend bonus of 500 Starpoints every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday night — with no limits.
Register now, then book your stays today, choosing from more than 930 participating* hotels and resorts worldwide across all nine distinctive brands, including W®, Westin® and Sheraton®.
Register for SPG® Great Weeks, Grand Weekends by March 31, 2011.
For more information about SPG Great Weeks, Grand Weekends, check out our FAQs.
Here’s a great promotion for those of you who have reached platinum status on Starwood.
Details from the website:
Register to earn an extra Starpoint per dollar on eligible stays from October 1 through December 31, 2010.
As a Platinum member, you’ve shown your continued dedication to our program, so we’d like to thank you with an exclusive Starpoints® offer. You will earn four Starpoints per dollar for every stay from October 1 through December 31, 2010, that occurs after you’ve registered for this offer and requalified for Platinum status for the upcoming year.
- Earn four Starpoints per dollar on all your eligible stays beyond the Platinum qualification of 25 stays or 50 nights this calendar year. That’s one additional Starpoint on top of the three Starpoints per dollar you’re already earning as a Platinum member.
- The extra Starpoint per dollar you earn will be on top of any other bonus Starpoints offers you enjoy during this time period.
Register today and you’ll be on your way to earning extra Starpoints at our more than 1,000 hotels and resorts across nine distinctive brands. More luxury. More destinations.
Register directly on the Starwood promotion site here.
Details from the website:
Earn double or triple Starpoints — with no limits!
Discover a world of endless rewards with our Every Night Counts promotion from Starwood Preferred Guest®. Stay at your choice of more than 850 participating hotels and resorts across 9 distinctive brands, including W®, Westin® and Sheraton® and earn bonus Starpoints® for each night you stay between September 8 and December 15, 2010.
Nights are accumulated across all your stays from September 8 through December 15, 2010. Watch your Starpoints add up and then redeem for Free Night Awards at some of the best luxury hotels and resorts worldwide, Award Flights and more.
Register for Every Night Counts by October 31, 2010.
Usually I keep this blog targeted towards frequent travelers, but even road warriors need to take vacations. This particular incident hits a bit closer to home as my wife searched the web for a weekend getaway and thought she found a good deal until Expedia.com decided to pull a bait and switch. She even spent an hour with customer service just to have the agent repeatedly lie to her face on the phone. Buyer beware.
Here’s the run-down:
“Hey look, no additional hotel-imposed fees!”
“Wait a minute…attempting to book the room warns you of a $20 per room hotel resort fee!”
If you try and call customer service, you should just write off an hour of your life as they lie directly to your face. My wife was so steamed she posted the following on several rating/review websites. Her comments do a good job of summarizing the experience:
Expedia.com is simply horrible! Not only does the website contain blatant misrepresentations, its customer service is totally incompetent. I just spent an hour with a representative that didn’t even understand English. The website had stated that the it was providing an "Expedia Extra" of "No additional hotel-imposed fees at check-in or check-out" if I booked a certain hotel for a certain range of days. However, when I tried to book it, it gave me a total based on the room rates and stated that there will be additional hotel fees of $20/day added on. So, I called customer service about it, and all they told me was that the hotel fees were mandatory. So, I asked what’s with this "Expedia Extra?" The customer service rep could not provide an answer. He simply repeated that the hotel fees are mandatory even though Expedia.com plainly states "Expedia Extra! - This hotel has no additional fees imposed at check-in or check-out." At one point the customer service rep tried to pretend he didn’t see that written on the website. When I called him out on in (I had the website open as I was talking to him), he backtracked and again repeated, "the hotel fees are mandatory." So finally, I asked to be transferred to someone more knowledgeable about what this "Expedia Extra" is supposed to mean, he hung up on me!! Even if Expedia.com had the lowest price on the website, I’ll never use it again. The people behind it seem to have no integrity and do not appear to treat their customers with even a hint of honesty or decency. Never again!!
Don’t fall for the Expedia.com bait and switch.
Go here, provide your Rapid Reward information plus an email address, and get 2 rapid reward points for each email update subscription. If you stay subscribed for 3 months across both email subscriptions, you will receive 4 rapid reward points. Looks like an easy way to get some free points with very little effort.
Starwood recently posted the following promotion to Flyertalk:
Dear members,
I know there has been a lot of speculation and theories about SPG's Q2 promotion of late, and I'm excited to finally be able to announce what is planned! You're the first to get this information - SPG Free Weekends will kick off on May 1st and offer a Free Weekend Night Award for every eligible three stays through July 31, 2010 at any SPG property worldwide. There are no limits on the number of Awards you can earn. When you're ready to get away, you can use your Free Weekend Night Awards through December 19, 2010 at over 920 Category 1-6 hotels across all of our 9 brands -- like W, The Luxury Collection, and St Regis. And of course, there aren't any blackout dates on the Awards, and you can even combine them to use toward a long weekend or to extend a paid stay.
Go to spg.com/freeweekends(which will be put up in a few hours' time) to learn more about the promotion. We've included a full list of FAQ's. Registration will formally begin on May 1st.
Here is a simple summary I have prepared:
- 1(One) Free Weekend Night award for every 3(Three) eligible stays.
- Registration begins 1 May 2010 and ends 30 June 2010. Only 61 days, so do not miss the window.
- Earning period begins 1 May 2010 and ends 31 July 2010.
- Redemption period begins 7 May 2010 and ends 19 December 2010.
- Awards are redeemable only at Participating properties from Categories 1 to 6.
- Free Weekend nights refer to any Friday, Saturday or Sunday except for properties otherwise stated.
Finally, we are ready so fire away.
Thyetus Lee
Southwest is offering a double credit promotion with some specific criteria:
Take advantage of our Double Credit Days promotion—one bonus Rapid Rewards credit on every flight you take on Southwest Airlines. That means you can earn two credits for every one-way flight (four credits when you travel roundtrip) from any city that Southwest serves. At that rate, you’ll earn a free flight* to any of more than 65 destinations after just four roundtrip flights!
Purchase a Business Select Fare with this promotion, and you’ll receive 2.25 credits for shorthaul flights and 3.0 credits for longhaul flights.
- Register for this promotion between April 7 and May 26, 2010.
- Book a flight for yourself between April 7 and May 26, 2010.
- Complete your travel between April 7 and May 26, 2010.
Please note you have to register, book the flight, AND fly it within the specified time frame. Sign up now if you plan to fly Southwest. If you need to, take advantage of Southwest’s "no change fee" and re-book your flights to take advantage of the offer, if the fare hasn’t changed. It might be worth it even if the fare has changed a few dollars.
For fun, I registered More Than Points with www.quantcast.com to understand who the readers of this blog might represent.
The results were not surprising as frequent fliers:
- a largely male audience
- an older age group
- no kids
- above-average income
- graduate degrees
Older males without kids in households with good income, and a good education. Traveling is apparently not conducive to having kids, but you can make decent money if you’re willing to make the sacrifice. Most folks who currently travel have also had the time and money to spend on a higher education - perhaps we are doing it to pay off the loans :-)
Data is good.
This isn’t exactly recent news but worth calling out because I think it’s good for frequent fliers. Delta sent the following email to a co-worker:
The co-worker had this to say:
“Basically, I had 70,406 MQM (qualifying miles for status) in 2009, which qualified me for Gold status (50k) but short of Platinum (75k). To ensure the 20,406 MQM I had above and beyond Gold status weren’t wasted, they rolled the miles over to give me a head start for my 2010 status.”
That’s pretty sweet, anyway you spin it. Nice job, Delta.
A frequent traveler gave this review on RideCharge.com:
I’ve been using this website/iPhone app to book and pay for taxi’s in Chicago, and it works great so thought I’d pass it along. It provides the ability to reserve online and pay for the ride through your phone (linked to a credit card), and once the payment is completed, they send you a .pdf receipt with all the details about the trip (no lost taxi receipts). Also available on the Blackberry.
I’m sticking with my trustworthy cabbie, but if you don’t have a regular driver you may want to think about giving this service a try. The iPhone and Blackberry application and the ability to receive receipts in PDF seems like a big win for frequent travelers.