interesting comment war...
 

another interest comment war, on VFTW

VFTW rediscovered PointsHound, posted a referral link for signup on this article

http://boardingarea.com/blogs/viewfr...-booking-site/

when i read the article, i was like, wow - isn't this the type of thing that is usually done via a conga - so that everyone can get double the bonus? a couple of people (including seth, with some really good points), call him out for backing PointsHound now that a referral exists and all heck breaks loose. interesting read. in the end, apperently PointsHound is giving 2x the bonus the the one who signs up, so it all ends well.

anyhow, one other thing I never understand is the profuse "thanking the blogger" that some commenters often do when someone dares to offer some skeptism. i mean they do realize that 99% of the bloggers are not doing it just because they want to share information - rather they are compensated, sometimes quite well. its like when commenters thank bloggers for a post that pushes a credit card for the 50th time.

ironically, there was quite a bit of unfair criticism on seth in the comments - funny, because he's one of the few guys who DIDN'T sell out. keep calling them like you see them seth!

Two points here. First, Gary's referral link is better for folks signing up than the standard referral congas since it comes with 60 days of "level 2" points-earning (~ 50% more mileage earning) from the site. Second, Gary has it set up with PointsHound so that instead of the referrer getting 250 bonus miles with each booking, and the person making the booking gets 250, the person making the booking gets the full 500. So it looks like Gary doesn't get anything from this "referral link" at all.

The way it played out it appeared at first that Gary was going to get the 250 (his proposal to Pointshound to give his readers the full 500 and his 0 hadn't yet been approved when he first posted). But he fully disclosed the potential for the link to give him a whopping 250 miles.

Anyway, there are some good criticisms of the site -- Gary really likes the mileage rebate from bookings while earning elite status credits, even though it's only available for ~ 1000 hotels. Others like cash back sites better. Probably depends on which chains you book most often whether or not this winds up the best deal.

Uhg. What I get from that deal and the comments exchange is that there is far too many middle-men in the travel business. Booking engine gets a cut, bloggers get a cut, and the consumer gets a 'rebate.'

All of that spiff is being paid for by....us.

I know it would be a huge blow to FlyerTalk, bloggers, etc. But some days I do think the JCPenny/WN square deal approach is so much better than the game of over-pricing travel products then making consumers play a 'how much of the overcharge can you get back' game. Or other middlemen playing the 'how much of the overcharge you are paying can I get in spiff' game.

Of course, we saw how that worked out of JCPenny, so I'm not holding my breath for the elimination of the overcharge/spiff game anytime soon.

I noticed something today very interesting that I wanted to mention:

Raffles' blog has incredibly amazing comments and no haters. I don't think the blog censors, so I find the lack of British haters very amusing. :)

Be nice to the readers and the readers will be nice to you!

A lot of the bloggers are super nice. still haters...

Spiff has a blog?

This gives me an idea....

After the OJ Simpson car chase, wasn't there a cable TV channel that popped up dedicated to carrying whatever live car chases it could find?

We need a similar notification system for the comment wars! Maybe we could start a thread here for 'best of travel blogger comment wars'. Now if we could just write a robot crawler that could detect these while they are happening!

It seems pointshound bumped its numbers significantly and other players became interested in acquiring them:

http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-...2-906250.html#