Dieuwer

Also, the 60,000 F award does not exist. It is either 75,000 or 100,000 miles one-way to Asia or Europe.
I start to wonder if this Sam guy is a liar.

apodo77

That article was on my yahoo home page for about 72 hours.

Madone59

dozens of people must have seen it

Astrophsx

Also note that the trip was taken back in March. The website is trying to gather a following. It wants to encourage users to sign up for specific cards after they enter in data about where they'd like to travel. It seems like a more elaborate tool to push credit card sign ups. The website also wants you to input your budget and what not. Guessing this data could then be sold to make even more money. Much like the MMS and TPG apps.

Dieuwer

On top of the fraud indications regarding the mileage requirement, the award chart to/from Australia for EK does not exist!

Astrophsx

$60,000 he is saying would be the cash price equivalent. He disclosed in the write up that he spent 100k each way which is in line for USA to Asia.

UAPremierExec

It most certainly was nothing more than a blogger wanting/demanding/paying for attention.

Besides my superman airline job, I also am a correspondent for **********.com . We've had a few paid advertorials - and I've even been paid by ******** to write a story on them comparing A380 and 777 business class. While I had 100% editorial control over the article, I was required to hit certain points, which I did. I can also tell you that ** was not overly thrilled when I said I preferred the 777 business class to the A380 for the fact the 777 had more consistent service, same FA's, etc. I did tout the bar and shower for F, but felt the 777 was a better product. ** then rolled back a bunch of their planned "linking".. which is what this guy did.

thankfully **********.com doesn't rely 100% on credit card links, but other links and the fact we also have a ****** service, ***** planning service, and ****** following service. So that pays for the blog, which gets heavy attention from ALL the major news sources and ***** gets asked to speak or attend many, many airline and industry events.

(I edited out names to protect the innocent and make sure I'm not pushing **********.com on here!)

TheBOSman

Yes, you cannot book a Mileage Plan ticket on EK originating in Melbourne.

Astrophsx

Here is a copy of his itinerary:
https://cdn.topmiles.com/images/mytrip/USD300-proof.jpg

He spends no longer than 24 hours in each city except for his stopover in Dubai.

Both tickets look like they were originally booked and then had changes made. So he is actually lying when he said he got these itineraries by playing around on their website.

Theory: He called in to book a basic award ticket (Asia-USA & USA-Asia). He then called back to get segments added. He then called in several times to ask for segments to be added or perhaps knew someone that is an Alaska agent who could make changes to the itinerary once it was created by someone else?

Notice the change in amount of taxes due. The original was ~$47 and the new was ~$82.

Dieuwer

His first segment is SIN-MEL. There is NO Asia-Australia award possible. This is the first indication of fake itinerary/photopaint shop.
And what idiot would publish both the confirmation code and family name?

Dieuwer

Photoshopped.

Astrophsx

The loophole would be booking a Asia-USA ticket and then calling back and adding in segments to get that to work. If you got the right agent to preform the search and the system allowed it... it really wouldn't matter what the website shows. The main rule is that you either have to start or end your travel in the USA.

The itinerary was Photoshopped. I did notice that the image of the Alaska Air card at the bottom of the page was cut off and the personal info was covered, but there is no indication that he faked the itinerary.

eponymous_coward

Read that post by TheBOSman again, but this time, very carefully, with attention paid to ALL the words and what was said and NOT said.

If you think things like this aren't possible, you obviously have never booked an AV or US award ticket with similar kinds of crazy routings to get around rules or exploiting loopholes. For instance, back in the day, people would use the fact that Russia was considered in Asia on the US award chart at the time to get ICN-FRA-DME-FRA-ICN in LH F for 40,000 miles. US didn't have any maximum permitted mileage on award itineraries at the time (so I've seen awards issued JFK-FRA-JNB(stop)-PER(dest)-SIN-HKG-ICN-JFK, for instance).

Is the penny dropping yet?

Dieuwer

There ain't no penny.
If I call Alaska and started feeding the rep segment by segment starting with SIN-MEL the rep will refuse.
If I start with SIN-DXB-MIL-JFK the rep will oblige. But if I try to change SIN-DXB to SIN-MEL-XYZ-DXB why should the rep oblige?

eponymous_coward

Are you quite certain of that?