BearX220

Come on. It IS an opaque scheme, as are all FF programs, and they run solely on your faith. You are paying tangible dollars today for the possibility of a reward tomorrow -- a reward whose cost is unknown and could rise at any time. AS is better than most (DL has discarded its award charts, etc.) but it's still a transaction in which you hold no leverage and AS holds all of it. If they decide tomorrow a RT to Pasco is 100k miles, that's what it is. Your only recourse is to spend your money elsewhere. It's the very definition of both opacity and uncertainty.

airplanepeanuts

This happened to me. I had transferred over 150k into my alaska account for 2 one way award tickets and took the flight a few months later. Since it took a few weeks to go from SPG to Alaska, upon my return I put in another 150k but this set off a fraud alert because my account was locked with some reference to "discrepancies"

I called them at 11am PST and they simply said the high volume of points from SPG is alarming since they have encountered fraud in the past. They asked for proof of residence and I sent it over at 1pm. And by 1:30pm they had emailed me that all was well and released the account. The representative was Yvette and appeared professional and competent.

It's good that they are catching fraud because if it continues they may inflate redemption rates higher.
If you have not done anything wrong you have nothing to fear. Goodluck.

CDKing

Looks like the common denominator is SPG transfers. No more fear over here.

dayone

In these cases, not in AS' fraud detection algorithms.

CDKing

Were actually at 5 now in this thread. Seems to be a SPG transfer crackdown


haha10
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/24724222-post1.html

timtetra
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/24770611-post42.html

td2014
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/24773388-post62.html

MikeFly
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/24917089-post126.html

airplanepeanuts
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/24943424-post152.html

dayone

I edited my post. My point was that fraud triggers are not limited to SPG transactions.

haha10

Hi everyone,

I still haven't received any respond from AS. Currently, I wanna email my story to their leaders. I got those leaders info is below:

Primary Contact
Trudy Dobbins
Manager of Customer Care
P.O. Box 68900
Seattle, WA 98168
(206) 392-2777
[email protected]

Secondary Contact
Joe Sprague
Vice President of Customer Service
P.O. Box 68900
Seattle, WA 98168
(206) 433-3200
[email protected]

Ben Minicucci
Chief Operations Officer and Vice President
P.O. Box 68900
Seattle, WA 98168
(206) 433-3200
[email protected]

Chief Executive
Bradley D. Tilden
P.O. Box 68900
Seattle, WA 98168
(206) 433-3200
[email protected]


What you think? Any suggestions for me? Thank you very much.

dayone

My informed guess is that any executive communication would be routed to Mileage Plan Audits and Fraud for review and response.

Often1

+1 - A waste of time.

I would take the no response as the answer. Nothing is going to change. OP may or may not someday get a response.

jackal

Eh, I see no harm and a potential resolution. The account is already closed and gone; what worse could happen by contacting executives?

That said, OP, you REALLY need to get a native English speaker who is competent at written communication to copyedit your letter, ESPECIALLY before you send it to anyone with an executive title. Words like "wanna" or other incidents of bad grammar will NOT win you any favors with the higher-ups.

Even if you do not believe this is necessary, trust me: it is necessary.

aubreyfromwheaton

Isn't it better value to use SPG at SPG anyway?

lkar

Alaska is clearly feeling emboldened by recent decisions holding that claims for bad faith in implementing their frequent flier contracts are pre-empted. But I think they are taking it one step too far, and since they have a number of frequent fliers who are lawyers, they probably ought to tread with caution here. It's one thing to find preemption when a pax challenges how the program awards miles or changes how they can be redeemed.

But AS seems to be taking the position that so long as they have terms in their program that say they can close your account for any reason, they are bullet proof. Either they don't have very sophisticated lawyers, or they don't care because they think nobody will sue. I don't think they want to be a test case here. If an airline takes your cash to sell you miles -- either directly or indirectly by taking the cash from US Bank, SPG, Citi, Chase etc. -- then refuses to let you use them, I don't think it would be too hard to draft a complaint that avoids ADA preemption arguments. That's a straight unjust enrichment or conversion claim. It's theft, basically. Their argument would be you agreed to the terms and so you agreed to let them unjustly enrich themselves. I doubt that would hold up in most states. Maybe. Unlikely. But the point is, this would be their defense and it would be much more difficult for them to get preemption on that kind of defense.

Maybe they would. I think it would be risky, though. The airlines have gotten about as much mileage as they can in their frequent flier programs out of ADA preemption. If they try to push the envelope like this, they are going to get burned. Flyertalkers love to say, in posts like these with respect to those who push the boundries of frequent flier programs that pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. The same is true about frequent flier programs. They have pretty broad latitude to be piggish under recent preemption decisions. Taking cash from third parties and then restricting you from using the miles they sold? That is bordering on hoggish.

(This is not legal advice. Don't rely on the internet for legal advice anyway. If you decide you want to sue an airline, get a lawyer.)

eponymous_coward

http://www.alaskaair.com/content/mil...embership.aspx

I wonder, if they're telling you up front "this pig you're buying, it's in a poke, and incidentally you don't even own the pig once you buy it" is enough. So far it has been. So far, nobody's been able to make "contract of adhesion" arguments successfully about FFPs. Perhaps they will someday.

(Note that when you outright buy miles from AS, let along swap SPG for them like the OP did, you are specifically not given a property interest in them.)

lkar

But for the ADA pre-emption part of of this, I much prefer the plaintiffs' side of the case on an issue like that.

Forget about the regulation overlay and DOT oversight and all that for a second -- imagine just that Alaska Airlines were a regular company that sold a service. Imagine they sold gift cards, but put in a term that said "once you pay we can drain your account and not give you any services." Or, imagine their contract to join their boardroom said, "we can decide, after you pay, to exclude you from the club."

Actually, imagine they were less clear than that. Suppose they simply said, "we can change the terms of your gift card redemption" or "we can change the terms of your board room membership." And then when you tried to use your gift card or the boardroom, they said, "sorry, we've changed the terms and you can't have what you paid for, and you should have known we might do that."

Would one have a cause of action under state law? Almost certainly. Here's the tricky part, though. If your claim is one for basically stealing from you, then you probably can go forward with the claim. It might be a fraud claim, or conversion, or something like that. If, however, a court were to hold that contractual agreements that the company interprets essentially to mean "we can steal from you" are binding, you would likely only be left with a good faith and fair dealing claim. Why is this important? Well, a good faith and fair dealing claim is pre-empted. A fraud or conversion claim likely wouldn't be. As I said, I'd like the plaintiffs' side of that argument.

eponymous_coward

We don't have to imagine anything. It says, right there in my post and in their terms: "Alaska Airlines reserves the right to terminate the membership and/or suspend access to the mileage balance of any member at any time for any reason it deems appropriate."