Originally Posted by
Tiki
No one has mentioned US Grand Slam as a deal that was killed, although I gave more details on a thread in the GS forum, I would attribute the killing of that deal to a certain female Texas based blogger (mother of a toddler) who was running monthly tutorials on how to prepare for GS 12. I'm pretty sure the USDM people saw that and decided they didn't want hordes of people buying the minimum on their partners and having to deal with complaints when it didn't post on time. USDM still wants money so they at least gave us a share miles bonus but even that wasn't half as lucrative for experienced Grand Slammers.
The other killable deal occurred in April and May of this year. Now it's one thing if a company wants to promote tourism in the USA but quite another for a blogger to break down in great detail how to use hotel points in certain hotel programs to exchange for cheap airline miles. Result was that it was nearly impossible to log on to the site in question to buy points because of all the newbie traffic. For the sake of the OP, you can file that one under the same female blogger from Texas.
Originally Posted by
balima
I have to agree with Tiki (post 75) and his summation of the demise of the GrandSlam. the GS went on for I believe 8 years, each year getting bigger and better. Then last year it hit the blogs hard with details of how to get tens of thousands of miles for less than $100. As soon as GS was over, bloggers started talking about how to set up for next year's GS. The upshot? No GS. Really did we need to have things outlined on how to set up for next year's GS? If you can not figure that one out yourself....
But, those posts were to generate traffic, even without knowing if the GS was to be repeated. So, many newbies are sitting on points in erewards and e-miles, wondering what to do with them.
The blogger from Texas also had a prime time slot at the Chicago Seminars specifically to talk about the GS. Since that never happened, she had little to contribute to the seminar. You would have thought that she would have had something to pull out of her hat.
Thanks for the concrete examples folks. I will add these to the examples to the list in the OP.
BTW, I assume this is the same female blogger from TX that also pushed and pushed and pushed people to sign up for Amex PRGs and Amex Business Gold CCs with her referral links last year, and told everybody who would listen how easy it is to "Bump The Bonus". Then of course lots of people got stuck in the middle when Amex axed the deal midway through cuz everybody and their mother was trying to get 100k Amex pts for Bumping the Bonus?
BTW folks, please keep the examples coming so I can further update the list in the OP. If anybody feels like digging through blogger's posts and seeing what deals were posted about, and which have died soonafter, please do so.
Also Tiki, thanks for the idea to not overtly identify the blogger which will cause them to move up in the Google rankings. I will try to edit the blog names while still making them identifiable to FTers.