Delta

July 9, 2014

Point & Center: 1,000-1,500 Free Miles, Check Your Rewards Earned & Bonus Delta Miles & More…

Point & Center is a new feature that seemed to be pretty popular last week. I plan to make this at least a weekly post briefly highlighting some news and offers in the points & miles world.

 A quick run-down of some of the news & offers out there:

1) 1,000-1,500 Free Air Berlin Miles – Rental car company Sixt is offering 1,000 free Air Berlin miles for registering with Sixt here. Brush up on your German or use Google Chrome to translate the page for you. Note you must first create an Air Berlin account here (if you do not have one) in order to have the miles deposited in your account and they are currently offering 500 miles just for signing up and giving them your email address! Remember Air Berlin is a transfer partner of Starwood so you accumulate additional Air Berlin miles via SPG.

2) Check the Rewards Earned on your Credit Card! –  After I broke the news on the easier way to track rewards on the Chase Freedom card, I went through all the dining & travels transactions on my Chase Sapphire card (ya, I’m a little obsessive) to make sure I earned the appropriate 2x bonus and I found a charge that was not awarded the extra bonus points. Yes, it was only $3 bucks so not a big deal but it was for a coffee at Gregory’s Coffee so it should have counted. If this happens, I recommend securing messaging Chase to look into it and fixing it. Basically, the principle here is always check your transactions because if this was a $1,000 dollar charge, the extra 1,000 points start adding up quickly.

I want my extra 3.24 points please!

I want my extra 3.24 points please!

3) Up to 5,000 Bonus Delta Skymiles per Flight! – Most of the time promotions like these are targeted but this is open to anyone and I think its actually quite a good offer for a leisure traveler. If you travel to the Caribbean, Latin America or Mexico from September 2 through December 11, you will earn an extra 2,500 to 10,000 miles per roundtrip flight with no limit!  And that’s on top of the miles you would already earn from flying. You must register before purchasing the tickets and all tickets must be purchased by September 30th. Even if you are not sure you will be flying Delta on these routes during that time, register just in case here.

Mexico in Economy is the Sweet Spot

Mexico in Economy is the Sweet Spot

4) New TSA Policy – Lastly, the TSA recently announced that on flights back to the US from abroad, they might require you to prove your cell phone or laptop can be turned on as the fear is terrorists might have figured out a way to “hollow” out a phone or laptop and turn it into an explosive device. The easy solution is to always carry a charger on you in your carry-on luggage but a real question to me is – what do you do if your phone or laptop actually breaks on vacation and can’t be powered on? This is obviously unlikely but still a concern to me at least.

June 19, 2014

Good To Know: Do Not Open a Frequent Flyer Account for Your Cello

This is actually a bit of old news but a musician and his cello were kicked out of the Delta SkyMiles program. Yes, this musician, Lynn Harrell, opened a frequent flyer account for his cello as he always booked a separate seat for his cello and earned several hundred thousands miles. That’s easily worth a few round trip flights in business to Europe or a ton of domestic flights – I get why he did it.

However, Delta apparently frowned upon that and closed not only the cello’s account but also Lynn’s account as well. It’s safe to say he was not happy.

Stephen Colbert cover this in a pretty funny piece featuring one of the premier points  and miles blogger, Gary Leff, from View From the Wing. Check out Colbert’s piece here.

Cello1

I hope everyone has learned a valuable lesson from this – do not open a frequent flyer account for your favorite wooden instrument.

**PointsCentric is on vacation, using his points and miles, without access to wifi and thus, cannot respond to emails or comments. Please enjoy this run of scheduled posts – I will respond to all email and approved comments upon my return. Thanks!**
March 19, 2014

1,000 Free Delta SkyMiles…New Members Only

Delta released details of a new promotion today as they are giving away 1,000 free Skymiles if you open a Delta Skymiles frequent flyer account. This is for new account signups only.

This offer appears to be targeted at Hertz customers however 1) there is no way for them to verify this & 2) chances are maybe you were a Hertz customer many moons ago so technically that would qualify you anyway. In my experience, Delta will honor this promotion for anyone who signs up for it.

Now if you’ve flown Delta before, I hope you already have a Delta Skymiles account. But if not, this is a great chance to signup for their frequent flyer program and earn miles for it. Delta Skymiles do not expire so it doesn’t matter if you have no plans to travel on them anytime soon. Additionally, if you apply for a Delta credit card in the future, you will need to link it to a Skymiles account.

Bottom Line – This is a no-brainer for 1,000 free miles. I would have your whole family signup for an account if they have not done so already – mom, dad, even the kids! It’s never too early to start building your points & miles portfolio.

(h/t Gary at View From the Wing)

February 28, 2014

Why the Delta SkyMiles Changes Aren’t Awful to Travel Hackers

You probably heard by now, as its been blasted all over the news, but Delta announced some very radical changes to its frequent flyer program, Skymiles. Historically, when flying, a passenger earned frequent flyer miles based on the actual distance of the flight. A JFK-LA roundtrip flight is 4,950 miles, so if you booked a standard economy seat, you would have earned 4,950 miles to use later on for free flights.

Going forward, Delta is changing the metric to calculate how many frequent flyer miles you will earn every time you fly Delta by basing it off the fare of the flight. For non-elite members (which is the majority of Skymile members), you will now earn 5 miles per dollar of the fare price. So in the same JFK-LA example above, the flight might be $400 but only $350 of that is actually the fare price while the rest is taxes/fees (which you do not earn miles for). You would earn 1,750 miles for the same trip that used to earn you 4,950 miles no matter what you paid for the flight. This part is obviously bad news as Delta seems to be shifting their focus towards business travelers and appealing to them with this new Skymiles calculation as they are the ones who typically buy last minute expensive fares.

However, the reason I’m not as upset as I first was at the announcement is that travel hackers do not earn the majority of their miles by actually flying.  We mostly earn them via credit cards, shopping portals, and other metrics that don’t include paying money for flights. So unless your travel a lot for work and earn a significant amount of miles that way, this announcement isn’t as devastating as it could be.  While it would certainly be nice to earn the most miles possible in the rare times  I actually pay for a Delta flight, its not a crushing blow.

What could be crushing though, is if the redemption of Skymiles is based on the price of the flight, instead of fixed values as it currently is. I don’t see forsee that happening as Delta dropped a few hints indicating their new award chart will have 5 tiers, with the lowest tier remaining at 12,500 miles for domestic US flights. Unfortunately, they will not provide more clarity on this until the 4th quarter per the announcement.

In short, a good travel hacker rarely pays for flights (unless its part of their job), so this announcement isn’t too impactful to us. It’s still a negative but considering all other options Delta could have taken, I’m ok with this pending further clarification in the 4th quarter on the redemptions of Skymiles.