April 2008

As seen in the National Post- Air Canada is introducing a $25 fee for checking a second bag on all flights within Canada and the United States starting on July 15th. The reason given for this is the increase in fuel charges. Usually I would tend to blame the airlines, but with oil prices increasing the way they have been I can see their point… Read the article here.

The annoying thing is that not only does it cost more to fill up my car- but now it costs more to fly too… Of course, not everybody is suffering.

A couple of days ago I received a newsletter from Lufthansa.

Usually I would delete the email (except for Aeroplan) but this time I opened it and while reading the latest Lufthansa news I spotted an interesting number in the corner- I actually have 47,000 Miles and More points.

47,000 is not a huge number of points- but it is enough for a free flight in North America- or if I can manage to get 13,000 more I will have enough for a flight to Europe, or 2 flights within North America.

If I had not signed up for the newletter I would have forgotten for sure and the miles would have expired, probably without me even knowing about it. I checked if these miles expire and sure enough they do expire after three years- which gives me only 11 months to use them. Many miles programs expire even sooner than three years.

So this is a reminder to check your old plans- you may get a nice surprise like I did.

In general I have been a fan of Delta… until today. My girlfriend reserved a week in the Dominican for my birthday, and because I have a lot of Delta miles I thought we could use my miles to fly there. One of the great things about the Delta website is that if your dates are flexible they give you a calendar which can help you determine which days require less miles.

Last week I made a reservation which had to be completed by this weekend. So a couple of days later I decided to complete my reservation online. I went through the entire process on the Delta website and entered all of my information… Uh-oh.. I get the following message

Call Delta to Complete Reservation

We are unable to complete this reservation online at this time. Please contact Delta immediately and provide your reference number to complete this reservation. Call 888-750-3284, or the number on the back of your SkyMiles card for assistance. Non-U.S. based customers, please call the Delta Reservation Sales office for your country. You must call within the next 4 hours to confirm your reservation. We apologize for the inconvenience.

I called the reservation number- thinking, this shouldn’t take long- after all, I had a reference number. The person took all of my information, my reference number, and my credit card number (for the taxes)… confirmed my address… and I waited… Then I was asked for a different credit card- so I gave them one… and I waited some more… the person I was dealing with came back and asked me to stay on the line.. then put me back on hold… for over an hour!!!

I didn’t want to hang up and have to start all over again but after 75 minutes I was worried that my cordless phone was going to die on me so I called the reservation number back from my cell phone, and sure enough, while explaining everything to the second person the first person came back on the cordless phone. They had finally worked it out, but in the process have given me two seperate reservations for my flights.  

I don’t know if it due to the fact that I was making a Skymiles redemption but my total time on the phone was 88 MINUTES!!!

Seems to me like Delta is making it complicated to redeem miles.

It’s interesting that I never had to wait that long to reserve a regular ticket.

I’m a bit late on this one but if you have not seen it yet, you should register for the Spring 2008 Mariott Megabonus.

If you are staying at any Mariott (or related brand hotel) before May 15th, you will want to sign up for this promotion.

Register here and get yourself up to 7,000 extra Marriott points for free.