Triangle Trip

We recently put this question to the test on American Airlines. We booked two business class seats with our twin infants. The airplane was a three cabin plane. Online you could select the seats next to each other with no issues. Right up until check in, they swapped one of the seats to another row. This could have been automated or someone noticed the common issue this causes. The standard practice is you cannot have two infants in lap in the same row due to number of oxygen masks. There has to be enough for each passenger. This applies mainly to economy class. You would have to buy the third seat to have one infant take that seat.

After calling the airline about this issue for Business Class, multiple people said it was okay for this particular plane and flight. It seems like even though there are two seats, there are a standard four masks above. We had to ask passengers to swap but again we then ran into issue on board with the attendants. We told them how we called and said it was okay. Off they went to confer and gave us approval after they looked up in the airplane manual. Your mileage may vary depending on the flight but it was all good for us with some debate.

With the pending merger between Alaska Airlines and Virgin America, Alaska will be merging its Mileage Plan with Virgin America’s Elevate Frequent Flyer programs. Virgin America’s Elevate Points will be converted to Alaska Mileage Plan miles at a rate of 1.3 Mileage Plan miles per 1 Elevate point. Unlike previous airline frequent flyer program conversions where it’s 1:1, the Virgin to Alaska miles conversion will net you 30% more miles. Everyone should try to earn more Virgin Elevate Points before the merger of the two frequent flyer programs.

Given Alaska’s generosity, we also recommend you move your hotel points to Virgin America’s Elevate points. For example, transferring your Starwood (SPG) Starpoints to Virgin America Elevate points is 1 Starpoint for 1 Elevate Point. If you transferred 20,000 SPG Starpoints, SPG would give you another 5,000 points for the transfer. After transferring the SPG Starpoints to Virgin Elevate Points and the Alaska Virgin frequent flyer merger, you can net up to 63% bonus in Alaska miles. We highly recommend you execute the above strategy before the Alaska and Virgin America programs merge on January 9, 2017.

Here are two related articles you may also find interesting:

If you are not an Alaska Airlines frequent flyer or do not want to maintain too many airline accounts, did you know that you can bank your airline miles with SkyTeam and OneWorld partners!? Click here to find out.

Here’s an article on why we think hotel points are more valuable than airline miles.