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Loyalty programs are a really good deal ... only if you treat the whole subject as a hobby and spend time herding it all around and keeping track of all the little things. Otherwise, it's a complete waste of effort.
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Originally Posted by peachfront
(Post 19733657)
Another thing I've especially noticed is the large number of Flyertalkers who are no longer happy to get a seat in business or first class. Now they must chase suites in chain hotels. If they looked back on their past and their youth, they would be horrified at themselves. There is no real purpose to travel if you're going to stay in a chain hotel. Stay in a hostel, stay in an eco lodge, heck, stay in a cave or a tent. But once people get their heads eaten by miles and points, then all they think about is "free hotel rooms" and their world gets a little smaller even as they are traveling over a wider piece of the globe. It is a very easy trap to fall into. When we were young, we used to laugh at the masses going all the way to London or wherever to stay in a Best Western. Now too many of us have lost our way and become those masses.
I have found it useful to ask myself, why am I traveling? Just because it's free? Heck, I can stay home for free. There has to be something more out there, or I am letting somebody else (loyalty programs and marketing campaigns) decide how am I spending my time. Scam is too strong of a word. The programs are not scamming people so much as they are letting people talk themselves into upselling themselves. Hey, I'll freely admit it worked on me. I'd done plenty of mileage runs to keep my upgrades. In my experience I am not saving money. However, I am using it to make more effective use of my money, so I can get two or three trips for the cost of one. If I just focus on "free, free, free" though, I get pulled off my own path and onto some marketer's path.
Originally Posted by mnscout
(Post 19738260)
To be perfectly honest, I indeed tend to spend a little more time on the hotel grounds if the hotel is gorgeous and even more time if it has a lounge:). It's a good point. Do luxury hotels distract from travel experiences? In my case, they do even if a little. I guess I've just never thought about it.
I've stayed in hostels and budget hotels before and I will again, and there is nothing wrong about it. Give me a clean motel or hotel with a private bathroom, and I'm content. In hostels, though, I've always used to take a single room. I left bunking with other people behind, in my college times:) Not that it wasn't fun, but nowadays I do want a good night's sleep, especially when I travel. So I disagree with Mr Elliott, the programs are not a scam but they do require good planning to properly maximize. People who get a credit card bonus of 50k and then want to book 4 tickets for their family to see Grandma at Christmas are going to be disappointed, especially if they don't try to book way in advance before the award seats book out. The ones I feel sorry for are the people who go to extreme lengths to collect miles (Bluebird/Vanilla, hotel mattress runs, even mileage runs if they aren't after status). Often if they look at all the options (especially true of US domestic routes), they would be better off with a cheap paid ticket booked on Expedia or airline site - done and dusted in 5 minutes! |
I'd go further than that - everyone (but me) should cut up their ff cards and pay full fare. Then the 47% Club would be more exclusive.:p
Originally Posted by Delta Points
(Post 19736550)
I agree with CE. I think "most" should cut up their FF cards!
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Thanks to this "scam" I recently booked an F award, that had I paid for all flights would have cost me close to $30,000 in tickets. Oh the horror!
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His points are valid for infrequent travelers, but only if flying was the only way to accumulate miles.
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Originally Posted by GetSetJetSet
(Post 19743867)
Thanks to this "scam" I recently booked an F award, that had I paid for all flights would have cost me close to $30,000 in tickets. Oh the horror!
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Looks like CE has tried to book a reward on DL at low level.
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Originally Posted by fti
(Post 19745147)
But reality is you would never have paid anywhere close to $30K so the true value of the miles is really only what you would have otherwise been willing to pay.
Cash and loyalty programs offer different buckets of currencies. Many times loyalty redemptions involve opportunities unavailable to most (or absurdly unreasonable) from the cash bucket. The relationship between the values of cash and loyalty currencies is much more variable than the relationship between, for example, dollars and euros, which I think would be closer to comparable to the analysis you're proposing. (If one would be willing to pay x dollars, one would likely be wiling to pay the identical amount in the euro equivalent, since the currencies are easily convertible.) One reason is that loyalty points can be so absurdly cheap to accumulate (relative to cash) through credit card and other offers, and absurdly cheap to use for premium travel (again, relative to cash). Since some kinds of travel make sense at all to most people only when using the loyalty currency bucket, comparisons to the theoretical cash price, or the theoretical amount one would be willing to pay in cash, are frequently not a very good way of evaluating them. So I would say it is of limited value both to say that you got $30k worth of value out of a redemption, or to say that you got a value only equivalent to what you would pay in cash for the same trip. |
Wirelessly posted (BB Curve: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.4; en-us; myTouch_4G_Slide Build/GRJ22) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1)
I think it's interesting that some FT'ers metric of value discounts the retail cost of the ticket. Sure, someone may never actually pay $15,000 for a first class ticket, but that doesn't mean it wasn't worth $15,000. When someone buys a $80,000 luxury car for $10,000, they don't tell people that it's a $10,000 car because that's what they can afford. Or if the contractor performed work on the home valued at $50,000 but the owner didn't pay the full amount, they don't discount the value of the contract; the home owner says "I paid $30K for $80K worth of work". |
Originally Posted by luv2ctheworld
(Post 19746461)
Wirelessly posted (BB Curve: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.4; en-us; myTouch_4G_Slide Build/GRJ22) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1)
I think it's interesting that some FT'ers metric of value discounts the retail cost of the ticket. Sure, someone may never actually pay $15,000 for a first class ticket, but that doesn't mean it wasn't worth $15,000. When someone buys a $80,000 luxury car for $10,000, they don't tell people that it's a $10,000 car because that's what they can afford. Or if the contractor performed work on the home valued at $50,000 but the owner didn't pay the full amount, they don't discount the value of the contract; the home owner says "I paid $30K for $80K worth of work". (TAs get 75% codes for those tickets, but I'm not one, I just saw a section after looking at $V/xx) |
One poster in the Linkedin discussion commented that there is no such thing as a free lunch. I agree! We have already paid for this lunch in our fares etc, so we might as well partake. Sometimes we need to pay a bit extra to make the most of it, but that is a value judgement we as individual consumers can make.
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Yeah, you really took the descent into The Heart of Darkness.:cool:
But we gotta ask, would you ever have really paid $30,000 for those 4 free flights to Damascus?:p
Originally Posted by GetSetJetSet
(Post 19743867)
Thanks to this "scam" I recently booked an F award, that had I paid for all flights would have cost me close to $30,000 in tickets. Oh the horror!
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What drives me to put a price on miles is opportunity cost. Would I spend $200 when a domestic saver seat costs 25,000 miles? Well, I'd prefer to spend my miles on international premium cabin travel, so no.
But if I *need* to get somewhere and that ticket costs $1000 (yet still 25,000 miles) well, the answer isn't so clear. IMHO, 25,000 miles seems like a bargain to save $1000. So really, my valuation of a mile is based on what I give up, not from using math based on the retail cost of a ticket. |
Oh, that is soooo wrong! Someone has to educate you concerning the miracle of the coins and the miles. The way I heard it 47% of those watching the miracle swear they got a free lunch. And it was yummy!:D
Originally Posted by Me2E
(Post 19749159)
One poster in the Linkedin discussion commented that there is no such thing as a free lunch. I agree!....
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Originally Posted by Tiki
(Post 19743727)
So true, it does become easy to get so caught up in the pursuit of miles and points that you become closed off to experiences that can be even more enriching. Earlier this year (when I was expecting there would be a Grand Slam 2012) and I was planning a trip to Brazil for ecotourism I started to get caught up in where I could find chain hotels in the big cities as gateways. We all know that Grand Slam didn't happen and we ended up staying in local pousadas with one exception. These pousadas were a lot more fun than a chain hotel would have been. I got a HIX Pointsbreak in Cuiaba for the night before we headed out to the Pantanal. It turned out to be a false economy and I should have paid more attention to routes out of Cuiaba to the Pantanal as the next morning I got hopelessly lost trying to find the road. I ended up paying a local R$20 to escort us to the beginning of the road.
I've had my hosteling days which back in the day were a blast! I'd feel out of place in one now as I am more the contemporary of a typical hosteler's Mom. I do find great value in hotel points for stays in gateways when I want to be near an airport for an early flight (addressed in my blog about Lima, Peru). I also like using them for certain aspirational beach resorts like the IHG properties in Bora Bora or SPG resorts in Hawaii. And they do save me lots of money in Europe where hotels tend to be more expensive and the bulk of my accrued hotel points are earmarked for Europe and Israel 2014 pre and post cruise. So I disagree with Mr Elliott, the programs are not a scam but they do require good planning to properly maximize. People who get a credit card bonus of 50k and then want to book 4 tickets for their family to see Grandma at Christmas are going to be disappointed, especially if they don't try to book way in advance before the award seats book out. The ones I feel sorry for are the people who go to extreme lengths to collect miles (Bluebird/Vanilla, hotel mattress runs, even mileage runs if they aren't after status). Often if they look at all the options (especially true of US domestic routes), they would be better off with a cheap paid ticket booked on Expedia or airline site - done and dusted in 5 minutes! And, if you do it right, there are even ways to get AA miles <1cpm which I have taken part in but those require lots of time. |
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