Triangle Trip

Similar to Delta’s extension of its double MQM (Medallion Qualifying Miles) offer (see: previous post) to selected members, American Airlines (AA) is offering double elite qualifying miles (EQM) to all of its members. Unlike Delta’s offer, American’s offer is not selective or limited to certain class of airfare. You do however have to register. Here’s the link to register at American’s website. This offer is from September 2nd to December 15th, 2009.

If you’ve Elite status with American, you should also register for Elite Rewards (here’s the link). American Elite Rewards are addition perks after you have attained Elite status. For example, if you have earned 40,0000 to 49,999 elite qualifying miles (EQM), you can pick from one of the items below:

• 2 500-Mile Upgrades
• 1 Set of Elite Luggage Tags
• 1 Admirals Club One-Day Pass
• 7,500 AAdvantage Bonus Miles

I am not a frequent American flier. Here’s a link to more info on AA’s programs:  link.

AA has finally adopted Alaska Airlines‘ one-way reward model.  Passengers are no longer required to book a full roundtrip reward, but can segment out legs of the trip.  Think about the opportunities that you have missed in the past:

1.  While booking your reward ticket, you see that one leg of the trip requires an AAnytime  (50k) ticket, while the other leg only requires a MileSAAver (25k) ticket.  Instead of paying 50k, you now only pay 37.5k!

2.  While booking a normal ticket and comparing prices, you see that one leg of the journey was 3x as expensive as the other, but it still didn’t make economical sense to use your points on this one.

3.  You decide to extend your stay on a trip, but it’s prohibitively expensive to change your return ticket

4.  You’re running from the law and you’re not coming back stateside

No, this doesn’t excuse poor service and whatever other faults American Air may have, but it’s a great reach out to its core customer base.

American Airlines new Flex Rewards webpage

Video announcement by the President of the AAdvantage Program

-Terminal D

Most major car rental companies allow you to choose from earning airline miles, hotel points or their loyalty points. I have never been a huge fan of earning car rental points because they generally expire after one year. In addition, I lost about 10,000 points when Budget decided to end their PerfectDrive program without notice. In order for you to earn the hotel points, some hotel requires you to book the hotel with your car rental. Booking hotels on a rental car site makes me nervous and complicates the points earning process. Hence the best practice is to choose airline miles as your reward on all your car rentals.

For every car rental day, major car rental companies will give you 50 airline miles. However, the car rental companies do not tell you upfront that they are passing on what they called “Frequent Flyer Service Charge” or “FF Surcharge” to the renters. This means you are paying US$0.50 per rental day to earn 50 airline miles, making each airline mile = $0.01. A penny per airline mile is not that bad value wise but there is a way to get around it.

To avoid paying the US$0.01 per airline mile surcharge on your next rental car, you should choose American Airline miles as your reward. Hertz and National Car Rental do not apply the Frequent Flyer Service charge or (FF Charge on your Hertz bill) if you select AA miles as your reward. For all other airline programs, Hertz and National will charge you US$0.50 per rental day.

Since we are talking about rental cars, I would like to pass along to my reader the following: National Car Rental is offering triple airline miles for car rentals from April 29 to June 25, 2009. Here’s a list of National’s airline partners. With the National triple mile offer which will give you 150 miles per rental day on most airlines, paying the US$0.50 per day is not so bad.