CO OnePass is the only one of the Big Six programs I would classify as probably fraudulent in a strict legal sense. It "advertises" awards that do not in practice exist (standard Y to Europe in summer, etc.) and, like Continental itself, treats non-elites as irritating cargo. OnePass is absolutely the worst FF program in the US.

Yes, people get standard awards from OP now and then. People hit the progressive jackpots at Caesar's, too, but I wouldn't make pursuing them the backbone of my investment plan.

Eurobonus stinks these days - pity, it uesd to be a good program. Now when you get better benefits with UMP even if you fly all SAS metal (as complimentary E+ seating and more miles) there is no reason but to leave.

Nonepass is known to be what it is. A super, award-winning (Randy can't stop awarding them Freddys it seems).

777, this was a satirical comment I made. Probably did not come through entirely. I know Randy doesn't personally award freddys...but several years ago, I suggested Randy should put in place criteria that examines the ratio of affinity points/miles issued versus award availability, with some sort of "minimal acceptability" threshold, that if an airline fell below, then it would not be eligible for freddys...after all, who cares how well an airline treats its top-tier elites if one is sitting on a quarter of a million miles and can't find darned base level seats (my case at the time w/ re: to Nonepass) ? In my book, the program is and has been for years fundamentally flawed and arguably fraudulent.

Pleas went unheeded and Nonepass was racking up freddys while this non-elite (yours truly) could not find darned seats like apparently a lot of other travelers, and literally could watch flights out of my local airport w/ empty continental partner commuter seats feeding into their HOU hub. My real experience w/ Nonepass was poor and I watched over and over ultimate greed and arrogance shown by an airline by Continental's opting, over and over, to let seats go unused versus allocate them to base level awards, even if last-minute. Watching this model for years is why I have been so vehement and vocal AGAINST AA's rolling out milesaaver in spring, 2004...because it encompasses the same goals and objectives as what I've watched nonepass evolve into for years...veiled capacity control aimed at forcing award travelers to have to burn double miles to get a seat on the plane. Nonepass just took it to the highest level and has been pretty well outed for their policies over the years, THANKS to this group of flyertalk posters, but *NO THANKS* to InsideFlyer for continuing to bestow freddys on a corrupt elite program.

If the airlines *don't want to honor 25K base leveal awards*, they should be professional and have integrity to just nix the award level. And the implied responsibility by and message to Inside Flyer (IMO) is that Inside Flyer should have the guts to require a given affinity program to have a MINIMUM LEVEL OF CREDIBILITY and GOOD FAITH AWARD AVAILABILITY, measured by some agreed-upon standard, that if, failing to achieve this standard, the airline or hotel would NOT be considered for freddy awards. Once I saw Continental winning freddys, and knew I myself could not get a base level award seat, after repeated tries, the value of the freddy award took a nosedive in my book. If Inside Flyer ever saw themselves as *official Ombudsman* and would-be watchdog of airline affinity programs on behalf of "Joe Consumer", and maybe I misunderstood their role and they did not, then I believe they have failed we consumers collectively in favor of staying in Continental's good graces.

So - my mention was merely satirical - not literal.

Continental would not even need a "good" attorney to defend themselves "in a strict legal sense" although misleading, if not false and possibly libelous comments such as you have made above might require your seeking "good" counsel. There have been numerous posts by people who have gotten standard awards to Europe this summer, including my wife leaving from Newark Wednesday and myself leaving from Houston Friday. Thursday I checked travel in July from IAH to AMS and there were numerous dates available for both coach and BF and not in the Elite screen. You have obviously not done the homework to make such blanket statements.

elgringito, ILUVCITIBANK is saying the same thing I am... and so have lots of others:

I have said before that the Freddies are a worthless yardstick of FF program quality because the voters are a self-selected sample. It's not a statistically valid way to conduct a survey. It's more like an election. If Nielsen conducted TV ratings like this, inviting fans of various shows to write in, some teen drivel on the WB would emerge as "more popular" than 60 Minutes.

Having said that, even the CO diehards seem to have caught on lately -- I don't think OnePass won much of anything this year.

It is a really poor program today but remember Global Pass (Latin Pass) is simply making up for the giveaway of the century. It seems we all forgot the million mile program.

I also vote for CO One Pass. To try to make a reservation on-line using miles is near impossible and when you pay the blood money to speak to a person, you don't do much better.

mypoints has been good to me because I just click on the 5 point things, let the site of that link open, then close it and delete the offer. Once and a while there IS something I may actually particiapte in, and if you find and offer or a survey, you can participate but for those you HAVE to keep records. They almost always require waiting, faxing, calling and emailing but if you basically only go for the 5 point click and trash emails, then it is fine. I have told them repetedly that they ALWAYS mess up on the offers that yeild between 20-100 points, but eventually, if I stay on top of these, the points do credit. To counter this, I often sign up for things like the free AOL or PeoplePC offers with UBER pointage ;) and then cancel. But again, you have to play administrator for the length of time to get that properly taken care of.

How do you make the umlout ??sp?? key on a PC keyboard? I copy/pasted these but DON'T ask me how to spell the word for the two dots over the letter:

ö, Ä, é, ß

:)MM

Whereas I agree the Freddies are not a statistically valid survey to evaluate the general public perception of FF programs, which the Nielsens are, the Freddies ARE a valid means to evaluate the FF perceptions (self selected, yes, but by INTENT) of FF programs which is relevant in my opinion. While Continental did not win, it was near the top and the highest rated of the legacy carriers. This supports MY opinion, and contradicts yours and some of the others, that at the very least the Continental program is providing a higher level of satisfaction to its members than the other legacy carriers. Of course, this is an opinion and nothing more.

Having worked at a consulting firm, I can remind us all that surveys are often designed to steer people in directions with no alternative choice. In some cases, stacked to make it be the choice they hope for.

Soutwest's Rapid Rewards makes me cringe because I'd have to fly Southwest. ;)

Best Western Gold Crown
 

The points expire unless if you stay at Best Western once a year.

I'm kind of bashing this program on another thread (the program "enhancement" thread), but I'll defend 'em here. From an honesty/ethics perspective, RR is probably the most straightforward, user-friendly program of all.

Yes, the earnings/redemption expiration dates are strict, and yes there are blackout dates, but the user can easily understand exactly what they are from the very first time he/she logs in. The execution of the program is simple and transparent. WYSIWYG.

We can debate the quality of the WN product itself. (I understand why some people love it and others hate it.) We can debate what constitutes "fair" adjustments to redemption levels. (Arguably, WN's original redemption level of 8 RT's = 1 no-bull freebie is already competitive, and they operated extremely generously for several years before returning to their original levels.)

But as for the program itself, I think anybody who participates in it sees its simple mechanics and lack of fine print to be a breath of fresh air.

I have to agree with this post because it is what it is and it is transparent. That's all I asked of any of these gigs but until Southwest goes international, we are gonna be flying blind with the other programs. I don't particularly care too much for southwest but I would definitely use them if they did go overseas! Think: PEOPLE'S EXPRESS!
Anyone remember the $100 trips to places like London where they would litterally ask you on a plane from say, LAX to BOS, "If you have your passport and $100 cash on you and you wish to continue on to London, we will walk down the isles and collect it right now from any passenger who wishes to do this..." I almost did but I met a cutie on board while en route to my home in Boston, and ended up dating her for a summer we both happened to be spending at separate rental houses with friends on Cape Cod. (Yes, I like Pina Coladas!)

;)MM

I was going to jump in and bash Southwest but look, many have done it for me! Not only do you have to fly Southwest but you have to fly them an awful lot in a short time for your flights to be worth anything. When I was living in Seattle, I usually looked at them for options since they have a lot of flights on the West Coast but always ended up booking Alaska.

Now there's my vote for best program: Alaska's Mileage Plan. Mostly because it has so many partners and outside the alliances. In the US alone you can earn/redeem on American, Delta, Continental and Northwest, so it basically covers all the big carriers except United and I can throw away the rest of my points programs.

deleted

Hold down the ALT key and type in the appropriate number from this list. (Look at ALT 128 -168.) Or, just copy and paste from the list.

I emailed this list to my travel email addresses so I can write these from any computer no matter where I am.

If you type a lot of accented characters, as I do when I write in Spanish, there's an easier way.

For WinXP: In Control Panel, Regional and Language Options, Languages tab, click Details button.
Then select the Keyboard and click Add.
Add United States-International
and make sure it is selected as Default Input Language

Then you can type any accented character with 2 keystrokes. For example, to get ö you type " then o, to get é type ' then e, to get ñ type ~ then n. If you only want the special character, e.g. just a quote character type it and then a space (or it will just appear if the character typed next doesn't have an accented version). Once you're used to it, it's very fast.

Nice. Where can I get a list of all key strokes useable in United States-International to get all international letters?

thanks for these tips, mates!
now if this were an airline or a points program, simply obtaining that information from CSRs would have made for at least 45 mins of on holds and transferred called to other departments, lots of typing and some illiterate person in the Tulsa office telling you, "I'm sorry sir, we do not service that type of request here and there's a fee for it anyway"

;)MM

Hmmm, no idea where there's a list. Mostly it's intuitive. I think these are all the characters that generate an accented character: ' " ~ ` ^

From there it's pretty intuitive to get the accented character you want.

Worst stinker of a program? E-rewards without a doubt.

Ridiculous redemption rules, bad award selections and outrageous asking prices (25 dollars for 1000 HHonors points? I can get the same amount of points directly from Hilton.com for 12.5!)

But E-rewards money is fake money. Think of it as 2500 "points" for 3000 HHonors points. It doesn't cost anything to do E-Rewards surveys (except time).

I think it's a great program except for the expiration policy and limited awards. In other words, it's great for a free 12,000 HHonors points/year.

I earned two Southwest reward tickets within the last year without ever having been in one of their planes. There are all kinds of partner opportunities, including triple points from Hertz, double dipping from Hilton Hhonors, etc. Plus, despite stories of a crackdown on eBay sales of their vouchers, there still seems to be pretty brisk business selling them at around $350/pop.

When you add the comments posted above, I think that most people would agree that even with all that some people think is wrong with WN, Rapid Rewards clearly isn't among the issues. If you don't like it, you don't like it.....but there has to be something worse than this.

Stevekoe

Is this unique to Best Western? I think that most hotel programs have a similar policy, but offer some partner activity that can earn points to keep the account active. Does Best Western not have any partners with which you can earn credits, or is their policy more strict in that you have to physically stay in a hotel once per year?

Stevekoe

I wouldn't be so mad if they use terms like "points" or "beans" or some other made up words, but "dollar" is an established currency. When people hear the word dollar, they naturally associate it with a certain level of worth and buying power. I believe many were enticed by their e-mails that promise "20 dollars for surveys" (I know I was). So if the money is fake, and has only half the buying power of the actual thing, they should either make that fact real clear, or drop the term "dollar" altogether.

Think about it, if you join a company that promised you a salary of 100,000 dollars, but later you realized that those 100,000 dollars are custom currencies that's worth only 50,000 in real life, wouldn't you feel cheated?

I agree with you on the "fake" nature of the e-Rewards currency. My problem was that I was spending too much time (which is far more valuable than the piddly little fake-dollar numbers they like to throw around) to try and reach the little awards.

For example: it might take me 2-3 hours of time to reach $50 (in fake money) to redeem 3,000 HH points. I value that at about $20. So, I just spent two hours or more to earn $20.

Oops.

Of course, if I were getting those $75 surveys I've heard about, and could finish it in an hour, now we're getting close to a threshold that is worthwhile. 1 hr = 4500 HH points = $30. Since HHonors points aren't subject to taxes, we're at least in the right ballpark.

Problem was: I wasn't getting $75 surveys. A few $10 surveys if I were lucky, and I eventually got one $25 that I actually qualified for. It was a slow crawl to earn stuff for me, so I got out.

(sarcasm font on)Really, ejross, you're so mean to CO. I was able to redeem "valuable OnePass miles" to get upgraded to Business Class on a transatlantic. Once. On a flight leaving in late September, 2001. And only on the return trip. (sarcasm font off).

After 4 years as a CO Elite, I flew 670 miles on CO last year. I'm hoping to fly even fewer this year.

I do E-Rewards and MyPoints. I've been doing MyPoints almost since they started. And I've always liked it a lot. I saw the redemption values go down, and that bugged me, but I'm getting something for practically nothing- clicking a link and closing a window now and then, and making my purchases through their web site. Big deal. When I'm shopping online, I check my frequent flier shopper site first, to see if I can directly earn FF miles for shopping, and if the site isn't there, I go through MyPoints. I've racked up a lot more points that way, though I haven't decided what to use them for yet. Someone here on FT had a matrix that broke down the value of each reward to show which MyPoint redemption was the best financially, and I think the Starbucks cards rated very highly. Anyway, I always send flowers through MyPoints, and they've always been very good about giving me my points. And now it's even easier to track, now that I learned about the USA Today MileTracker software.

E-Rewards I'm not sure about yet. I'm not impressed with the rewards, frankly, and they all seem to require that you buy something to use them. But I'm racking up my dollars and waiting to see what interests me, and since it hardly takes any time at all, maybe it will prove fruitful in the end. If not, I'll ditch that program, but I'll probably remain a loyal MyPoints user for quite some time.

Now, Points.com really annoys me. And I think the Frontier Airlines FF program is a little weird, because there's no upgrading on their planes, apparently, so for my purposes, there's not much point.

GG

I am not going to stick up for CO too much and I do think collecting CO miles for the sake of it is stupid (do AA instead), but for me as a mid-tier elite they are great. I fly regularly to Australia and so I can use a year of mid-tier elite flying to earn enough miles for one QF award (avaialability is not great, but it's usable if you travel alone and are flexible). And since I would never pay to upgrade, OP only has to do better than the equivalent of the 4*500 mile stickers I get per 10K flight miles on AA (or UA) to do well on that grounds. Which they do. Plus the planes are clean and (EWR apart) the staff are great.

Plus I am used to QF so even CO's award availability seems good...

I understand where y'all are coming from, and I understand that reward availability can suck for many routes, but for my personal circumstances, given I fly on routes mostly served by CO, I'm not unhappy with Onepass at all. YMMV, obviously, but there are two sides to the same coin.

Fourth would be Delta Skymiles. I looked for reward availability from WAS (any airport) to BOM (Mumbai) in January and February and there was NONE, ZILCH, NADA at the Skysaver, but if you want to fork over double the miles they'd happily give you Skychoice!

Who do they think they are kidding?

Perhaps they make you cringe, but the bottom line is that SWA awards are are in huge demand on the open market and - despite reports that the sky is falling due to recent crackdowns on RR sales on ebay - they are still very easy to turn into cold hard cash.

Case in point: someone close to me sold a RR award in the past week or two to an "internet stranger" that needed one short-notice roundtrip, to minimize any possiblility of problems with what some call the Rapid Rewards Police the seller did the following:

1. DID NOT use ebay
3. DID NOT use a ticket broker
2. Actually spoke on the phone to the eventual buyer before the sale to explain the ins and outs of using the award and to "get their story straight" in the unlikely event that questions were asked (they weren't of course)

The end result was a win/win situation for the two parties involved: after expenses the seller ended up with slightly over $375 in their pocket and the buyer saved $200+ from what they would have had to pay for a "normal" ticket.

I agree with Best Western Golden Crown Club being the pits. Not so much for the annual expiration but more for the completely useless systems they use. Not once in the dozen or so stays in Australia I credited to my account did the points post automatically - every time I needed to send in copies of the bill, call, email etc and months later the points would post. The last time they just completely failed to post the points even though I sent in copies of the bill twice and called and emailed etc - they stopped replying to the emails.

As a result I avoid Best Western if at all possible. If you have to stay with them in the US get the miles instead and if you are overseas don't hold your breath for the points.

Hilton of course posts with no problem at all... as does Priority Club etc.

Also avoid Best Western like the plague. Would rather stay in a lodging that did not offer points than go to a BW.

As far as I am concerned BW is the biggest promotion going for the French company (Accra) that owns Motel 6 and other chains in Europe - Ibis, etc.YMMV

Goldpoints: in terms of the highest error rate per transaction, backed up with abhorrent customer service. However, I’m not really familiar with any other portals (I have never had a paid stay in a Raddison, and only use them as a engine to purchase stuff), so perhaps GP is par for the portal course.

I’ve no huge complaints with LatinPass, although it was a heckofalotta work to use the miles, especially as they required a fax (not email) every month to do that 30k transfer to Marriott, then after Marriott dropped off, Hilton. LP was useful to snag a bunch of South/Central tix to places that I might not have otherwise traveled.

Of the big three (Marriott, Starwood and Hilton), Marriott seems the most problematic, hence all my stays now go to *wood and Hilton.

Finally, I think that Southwest fills a nice niche, but clearly they are not trying to attract hardcore frequent flyers, and people who use 'em (i.e. my mother in law, seem to love the flexibility). True Blue (Jet Blue) is the best named FF program, but the one that seems to me to have the most minimal benefits.

How about this "winner"?
 

The fine benefits of BW
 

You left out one other major benefit with staying at Best Westerns
You get to argue with them that the stay doesn't qualify after check out because of the rate plan
So no points and miles at all :td:

Talk About Worthless Programs
 

I agree with 777 there. I have the card and NEVER got any points. Come to hink of it, i filled an application, sent it in and NEVER got the card. I just checked my Frequent Leather Keeper (where I keep all my affinity program credentials). I quit staying at BW's mostly because there are very few in my destinations and frankly they're too cheap for my taste.

In the realm of worthless programs, my vote goes to CHOICE PRIVILEGES, from the folks at Choice Hotels International.

I signed up for their program on the Internet when I realized I was going to spend a LOT of time at a Quality resort in Brazil, during an installation of the equipment I sell. I spent over a month at the place. With subsequent 3 and 3 day stays over a 2 month period afterward. In fact, I am going there tomorrow (7/20).

I faxed all of the receipts to them when I was back in the U.S. in Aprl. To this day, NO POINTS. Then I read you only accrue points for stays in the U.S. but can use them for stays OUTSIDE the U.S. as well as in. How stupid is this? Then the card is made out of paper. Give me a break.

It's going in the fireplace.

The thing about BW that has always prevented me from staying there is that I don't really know what to expect of it. It's a very veeerrrryyy loose affiliation of properties without any strong brand. I've seen small towns where the BW appears to be a beautiful hotel with character and charm unmatched by any of the Hamptons and Fairfields of the world. But I've seen many more towns where the BW looks like it's falling apart and there's a nice, new Hampton next door where I know exactly what I will get.

Therefore, I'm never going to book a BW ahead. If I pull up late at night and the building has curb appeal, I might walk inside and ask for a room.

It doesn't surprise me that their frequent-guest program is less than stellar. It probably stems from the fact that their affiliates are so loosely organized with the corporate entity. It's not like a Hampton franchisee that has to "play ball" with Hilton in order to fly the Hampton flag.

Lots of CO bashing here but back when I was a frequent business traveler and had their elite status, I was getting upgraded almost every flight. No upgrade coupons, no limits on number of upgrades, etc. That ranked them pretty high for me.

As far as using points go, I'd still vote for Alaska as the easiest to use points since there are so many options.