Other than frat houses? Probably not.

If irregular ops are involved, you have a good chance. I cannot speak to any recent experience not involving some sort of irregular ops.

Gaming the new standby rule for a weekend trip
 

I was thinking about the new 24-hour standby rule and how much I hate it, and also about the co.com weekend specials and how annoying it is that I have to wait until Saturday to get away. And then I got to thinking. For and extra $25, I should be able to turn a co.com special into a Friday departure, assuming seats are available. And the best part is that if the co.com special is booked late Thursday you could know whether the flight is going to clear on Friday or not and if not could cancel the original ticket with no charge.

Here's the process I foresee:

1. Thursday afternoon purchase ticket for Saturday morning/Monday morning trip
2. Friday morning (T-12 hours from desired departure) call and try to do confirmed change to that flight
3. Keep trying until ticket purchase time + 23:30
4. If still no go just cancel the ticket (or go on Saturday instead)

Any flaws in this that anyone can see?

Don't discount Four Points completely. I've stayed in a couple of very new properties that had rooms nicer than many of the Sheratons I've stayed in, and in some ways, nicer than some Westins. That's not to say that Four Points doesn't still have some real dogs, because they really do. But the new properties are often quite good.

Agreed.

Flying home the other week during irrops in IAH CO moved me from LGA to EWR without asking me. They just assumed "near" was good. This bothered me to no end.

Why wasn't I consulted about switching destination airports after I had already made alternate arrangements to get me in the next day, which they canceled on me in favor of getting me into EWR? :confused: Seeing as my car was at LGA, this was no bueno considering my flight into EWR wasn't due in until 230 a.m. :rolleyes:

First time since I started flying CO a lot that I was really flabergasted by their service. I appreciated they were trying to be proactive about things, but it was just, kinda, rogue.

And, of course, being in an airport during constant announcements rendered the voice recognition thing on the CO Elite line useless so every time I tried to call CO I got dumped into the general que. :mad:

They need to just turn that voice recognition thing off. Even in a perfectly silent room it doesn't recognize what I'm saying. :mad:

SPG has been really good to me. Yesterday I signed up for a promotion in Chicago that give me 5,000 for every 3-night stay - up to 25,000. As I stay Mon-Thurs every week - that's way easy.

Sounds like a good plan to me. Let us know how it works out if you try it.

The reverse could also work too. My biggest problem with the weekend specials is the Monday or Tuesday return. It might be possible to turn the Monday return into a Sunday evening return, provided the seats are available. Of course, that's more of a gamble since you'd still have to have arrangements made with work to be flying back on Monday or Tuesday.

I have never had CO automatically rebook me to another city during irregular operations. I always just ask the elite line or P Club agents to put me on another flight (i.e., BWI instead of DCA) or just change the flight to the following day. I definitely have been automatically protected on other flights to the original city on the same day, or whenever the next flight with confirmable seats is.

Might the specials have language in the fare rules to prevent something like that?

I dunno. I cannot figure out if the standby rule overrides the date of flight restrictions, as I cannot find the fare rules anywhere. The listing on co.com is just blank. :rolleyes:

I guess it wouldn't be too hard to try it by doing it but backing out of the transaction before confirming the standby change and then canceling the ticket.

Im paranoid about my pics, videos and music, I have a couple of external drives where i store everything and usually have copies on different drives.

Same here. I store all of my media (and other important personal files) on a RAID 5 - parts of which are backed up to an external hard drive and some off site storage. Sometimes, I still manage to convince myself that that is not enough. :D

If I lose that drive, I might as well just take a shotgun to this computer and start all over. I bought a 500GB internal drive solely for media purposes, and it's only 12% full. The nasty yellow triangles have stopped popping up since I updated my McAfee definitions, and I have chkdsk on the media drive scheduled to run after the next reboot. We'll see what happens after that.

It seems all of my external storage techniques putter out before my crashputer does. I've had painful nights fighting with my iomega Zip drive and the "click of death" (no, I didn't just get out of a Delorean with Doc, I haven't had a zip drive in a long time) as well as external hard drives that just cease to function because of a change in barometric pressure.

But, yeah, this is turning into another one of these painful lessons.

I was looking up how to swap out the power source last night. ssulivan, you're right, it doesn't seem that complicated and I'll get the part ordered one of these days.

Of course, nothing is ever simple with me. Swapping out the power unit will most likely result in a White Snake-esque pyrotechnics display. Or, aurora borealis, localized, right here, in my kitchen. ... mmmm... steamed hams for lunch.

Capri-sun time. :cool:

WHy not ask Travelbosslady for advice????