Triangle Trip

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.

I contacted the Starwood Preferred Guest’s (“SPG”) Platinum reservation line to redeem my Starpoints for a hotel stay. The customer service representative (“CSR”) was friendly as usual but was not able to help me with my reservation and raised a huge security and privacy concern. Before I could complete my Starpoint reservation, the CSR requested for my password to my SPG account. When I told the CSR that I do not recall setting up a password to make Starpoint redemptions or any special types of reservations, she informed she needed my website password to complete my reservation.

After trying for over 10 minutes to explain to the CSR that it would be a security breach if I had given her my password, I decided to ask for a supervisor. All the supervisor  could do was to refer me to Starwood’s corporate policy which required me to provide my personal password to complete the reservation. She also told me that I could make the reservation via spg.com and stop hassling her. The supervisor also didn’t want to provide me a name or number for Starwood to escalate this issue.

I’m also pretty I am not the only SPG member to have raised this security concern to the SPG call center. I am also extremely baffled to have learned how Starwood Corporate has such a lax customer security and privacy policy. SPG needs to learn from Hilton where they only require two pieces of private information (i.e., mailing address and phone number on file) to make a points redemption reservation. SPG also needs to understand that its member’s password may be used on multiple sites. The SPG team should look at the cartoon below and learn more about security and privacy policies (special shout out to Brian Lewis’ blog for providing this cartoon image link).

Now there’s all the more reason to room hop for those extra nights! SPG is offering free Internet service to Platinum members:

“As a Platinum member, you have access to our highest level of benefits, which now includes complimentary in-room Internet access. Now when you travel with SPG you’ll enjoy in-room Internet access — on us — at any of our more than 940 participating properties worldwide.”

In addition to the free Internet access, you can get double, triple, and quadruple Starwood points between now and March 31, 2010. Check out my previous post in case you have missed it. Enjoy!