Originally Posted by
MrVette
The agreement indicates that they are booking award flights, not purchasing tickets from the airlines. The awards are supposedly coming from their "corporate" award points/miles, whatever that is...They say that they do have contracts with airlines for travel to Europe and Africa but not Asia. They also say no airlines have been able to get contracts to Asia and they are interested in doing so and have tried. I assume it would be safe to use this company for flights to Europe or Africa as long as they are not selling you an award ticket.
Hopefully you can learn from my experience.
MrVette--thanks for your diligence on this operator.
I think you were lied to, as there are many contracted fares to Asia with repubable consolidators. I think they were just providing a rationale for why you have to travel on an award for your requested itinerary. Would be interesting to know what airline you were offered and whether the fare was significantly less than consolidator offerings.
Originally Posted by
MrVette
How they get FF miles from award tickets is beyond me
I'm goint to venture a guess that this business operates a few different scams and the contract is worded broadly enough to cover all of their activities. First, they probably do sell consolidator tickets, for which they create new FF accounts and collect the miles. If the carrier offers a corporate travel bonus plan (i.e., AA's "Business Extra") TopBusiness probably enrolls you as one of their travelers there too.
So, some customers are then sold consolidator tickets for which they will never receive FF miles, because they are actually deposited into the duplicate account controlled by TopBusiness. Perhaps they use airlines that permit household accounts to pool miles, and perhaps they actually do pay to transfer points into other accounts. Keep in mind, duplicate FF accounts are generally already a breach of FF program terms and conditions, so even the flyers on "contract" fares are at risk of having their primary account canceled or penalized.
Other customers are then sold award-based flights and bear the risk of the airline discovering the ticket is not legit.
Just speculation, but perhaps with all this activity, TopBusiness is able to "juice" their revenues above a legitimate travel agent/consolidator operation and pass some of the "juice" along to customers as savings.