Originally Posted by
MSPeconomist
Originally I read the thread title as "glamification" which made me wistfully recall the TWA RT IFC (Ambassador class) TATL award tickets that included a ticket on the Orient Express for 50,000 miles (plus an upgrade to IFC that I could use later on any TATL RT coach fare).
Under gamification, when I flew to Russia regularly, the cost in miles to upgrade the TATL RT (including connecting segments) from coach to "world" business class on PMNW (with KLM segments AMS-SVO and vv) was roughly equal to the number of redeemable miles I earned for the trip (and of course I also earned a ton of elite qualifying and lifetime miles on these trips). It wasn't rocket science but upgrading without guilt was nice.
Ah, the memories of flying TWA.
I took my grandmother to London/Paris from LAX on TWA in 1990 with a FC award ticket. She actually helped me earn miles as she flew a couple times in 1988 when all the airlines had triple miles. That was back when earning FFB miles meant peeling a sticker off from one of the sheets they sent you and affix it to the back of the paper ticket. If you ran out of stickers or forgot them from home--no worries, GAs were happy to give you blank stickers to hand write your name/FFB number on, peel off and slap on the back of the ticket. My grandmother had no idea she technically was breaking the rules putting her first initial/last name on the sticker--which was the same as my first initial last name. I was just a undergrad student at the time and never would have flown enough for the TWA European FC award for *2*. For 90K miles, not only did you get 2 FC RT tickets to any European city, but it also came with certificates good for 5 nights stay at any Hilton and 5 days of car rental from Hertz. Nowadays I've seen single domestic transcon flights run more than 90K. Those were the days!