Things I Find Interesting On Friday, September 13th, 2013
So, what’s going on the world of travel, miles and points on Friday the 13th?
Gogo announced yesterday that they’re rolling out a new super-fast wifi product for domestic flights next year. As the article points out, the current wifi speeds aren’t that great. But, they’re not truly horrible, just not what you’re accustomed to on good old mother earth. The new service is supposed to be rolled out in about a year, but there’s no clear indication who will be adopting it other than Virgin America at this point.
Because of the need to install new antennas on each plane for this service, it’s entirely likely that the time it takes for this to become ubiquitous could be a while. Original Gogo installs involved the airlines taking planes out of service for a short period of time to do the installs, something that costs them money. With low adoption rates it’s unclear whether the airlines are making much money off of wifi. And, just because it’s advertised as faster doesn’t mean it really is. I had the chance to test United’s brand new service earlier this week and was duly unimpressed.
Hack My Trip has a helpful resource if you need to figure out the best way to transfer hotel points to airlines.
If you’re a Delta elite member, you should probably read this post by Delta Points about your rollover MDMs. While it’s a rare scenario you don’t want to lose them!
Did you get in on the free tickets United was selling yesterday? Yes, the tickets were essentially free. As Wandering Aramean points out, it’s not the first time United has had to shut things down recently when their website went sideways. I’ll be interested to see if they honor the fares. And, I can’t say I’m surprised. While I had temporarily forgotten the last major outage, I frequently run into pricing and booking issues on the United website. They’re just usually not in my favor!
ETA: United has announced they are honoring all the tickets booked in the $0 website glitch.
If you’re flying Delta a few times in the near future without status, you might want to check out this discussion on Milepoint about their new bundle. It provides some reasonable benefits for someone without status. If you were a family of four traveling on vacation and thinking about seats with more legroom, this would likely pay for the whole package.
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Ed,
UA responded on Twitter and Flyertalk. The fare will be honored, and miles awarded.
Dan, then I definitely missed out on a good one!
Dan, did you get any free tickets?
Txs for mention and btw LOVE the new blog look but miss the old photo on top!
Thanks, Rene. Still a work in progress and the pic of my daughter (from our trip to Pompeii) will be making an appearance again in the final design somewhere.
I hope they honor the fairs for the people that booked the flights!
Andi, they are honoring the fares!