Overall Rewards Network wish list
 

Sorry if this sounds like a rant. Manipulating my accounts is so freaking painful.

My Wish List:

- One website, one login, one user interface.
- An easy account management screen: allow me to add, modify, and delete credit cards, and then drag airline icons or click a dropdown list to associate Cards to Airlines or Card to Cashback.
- Eliminate the requirement that I always have 1 credit card attached to every airline. Right now, I have fake CC numbers attached to three airlines because the various sites wouldn't allow me to have 0 cards earning mileage in that program. (To fake an Amex number and still have it accepted, I modified only the last few digits of the acct number.) Why did I do this? Well, a year ago I wanted to earn NW miles. Now I don't. I still have that credit card, but now I want to earn cashback with it. In order to do this, I have to unattach it to NW first (replacing it with a fake) and then attach it to Cashback.
- If Rewards Network insists on keeping all of the crappy user interfaces separate, at least provide a way for me to recall my user name/password via either the FF account number or the credit card number. Currently, if you don't associate the username to the current account, you can't get a password reminder. That account is essentially "dead" unless you start making phone calls to iDine.

End of rant...

That would be my wish also - but it makes too much sense, so it wouldn't work! :D

After all, every CSR for Idine/RN works in the same office, every CSR uses the same computer, all computers can retrieve all of your accounts from all FFPs/hotel/point/cashback accounts, there is only one FAX number to Idine/RN for all accounts, etc...

So you see, it can't be done! :mad:

The main problem, at least for the airline programs, is that the airlines are their customers, not you. Delta isn't going to want to make it more convenient for you to earn miles on America West.

Other reasons it would never work:

- It would save everyone a lot of money long-term in maintenance. Less front-end creative, HTML production, development, datalayer integration, etc. It might also save the company and/or the airlines some in licensing fees for the various software packages they are using...maybe/maybe not...depends on how they have it architected.

- It would be less hassle for the airlines, as they'd be able to simply outsource the whole process to iDine and not have to worry about propogating current look & feel to the "hybrid" sites.

- It would save Rewards Network a lot of money in customer service calls from people who don't fully understand how all of the subsites work together. (The only reason I halfway understand it is by reading these boards...and because I've managed site builds myself.)

- Performance of one well-designed, integrated site would probably be better.

- In very technical terms, the Lameness Factor of these sites could be reduced from "Extreme" to "Moderate" by consolidating them into one site.

I just wish that they don’t go bankrupt. I can deal with the petty inefficiencies of the site.

becarefull you do realize this is CC fraud. Anytime you handout a CC number that does not belong to you, or you do not have authorization to give out it is considered fraud.

I know you are not trying to scam anyone, but you dont know what the otherside is thinking of it.

Actually, the numbers I'm using probably do belong to me - sort of. That is, the placeholders I'm using are actually the numbers that would be assigned to me if I were to add a card for my wife. In fact, following the format I recognized from the credit cards on which I do have 2 cards was the only way I could get iDine to accept the numbers. Typing in completely random digits, all 0's, all 9's, etc. does not work. (I tried that first, hoping maybe their system was hardcoded to take 0's or 9's for this specific case.)

Besides, they'd have to prove intent to secure unlawful gain in order to prove fraud. An unusable CC number sitting in a database that is never acted upon cannot be considered fraud.

As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for!!!

The ability to use different credit cards linked to different airlines to "work around" the 1 visit/month limitation at some restaurants, or to follow the best bonus, would likely DISAPPEAR if the they ever got linked. It would be replaced with you having to choose only one airline at a time for all your cards. Is this really what you want???

I see NO reason why they would want to combine the website if it were not to get rid of these loopholes!!!

Other than at FT (which is a tiny proportion of their user base), iDine wants to maintain the illusion of being a whole bunch of separate dining programs, because each airline wants to maintain the illusion that their dining program is their own (rather than outsourced).

In turn, I suggest that it's ONLY because of the desire to maintain this illusion that you can sign up for multiple programs at the same time. (Note that unless you try to sign up the SAME card, one iDIne dining site doesn't even tell you that another one exists!)

Well, it wouldn't bother me too much, but why would they change the rules? It's in both iDine's interest and the airlines' interest for you to keep dining. If they really wanted people to only play one airline at a time, they'd have made that rule long ago. They have the data right now. They have our addresses and credit card numbers. If they had any desire whatsoever to lock people into one airline at a time, they could just do it independent of the websites.

Yeah, I guess this is possible. The airlines do like to make a big deal of "AAdvantage Dining" and "Skymiles Dining". But now we're about 10 years in, everybody has a dining program, so the illusion is probably not there anymore. Besides, a well-designed interface could still allow for airline-specific creative & branding and targeted/untargeted promotions.

They'd change the rules because doing so would simplify the user interface that YOU suggest: Just like Priority Club lets you keep a list of airlines on file, but you can only have one (or earning points) selected as your earning Preference at any one time. (Those of us who stay at Priority Club then have to do tricks like waiting until a stay posts, then instantly changing our preference if we want the next stay, possible from just a night or two later, to post differently. And then it all breaks down if stays post out of order!)

Meanwhile, they may have our addresses and card numbers, but that's not the way they organize the data right now, which keeps them from looking "too much" at whether you're "working around loopholes". I get the distinct impression, from every time that I've talked to an agent there, that on their screen they can only see the account you're calling about. (They always ask for my FF number, and then verify my name, not vice versa.) So I presume I've got a bunch of different accounts with them. They send me duplicate everything, so it seems they're not into cross-checking EXCEPT when you try to sign up a credit card. But if they adopted your user interface, they'd have to cross-check all the time, and hence I think a light would go on and they'd say "aha, now that we're cross-checking to do the website this way, we can lock out all sorts of multi-airline behavior.

There are COUNTLESS stories of other programs all across FT where good deals existed ONLY while there was a limitation with the internet sites, and as soon as the sites got "cleaned up" the good deals (which were essentially loopholes) all went away. The latest is how Scandic wasn't integrated into HHonors well, and so every Scandic used to be 10k HHonors points a night. Now they're finally integrating Scandic better, and guess what, rewards shot up by up to a factor of 3!!! :(

I don't get it...why would they want to halt your multi-airline behavior? If they cut you down to 1 airline at a time, you'd only be able to eat at an iDine place once a month in many cases. I always figured the multi-airline feature was intentional, because it encouraged you to engage multiple iDine programs and it allows you to return to iDine restaurants more frequently. Everybody wins - iDine, the restaurants, and the airlines all make more money. And the diner is happy.

No, you're thinking in FT terms. The VAST MAJORITY of the people using iDine (who aren't on FT, but then most people aren't on FT) are using one program only.

iDine is offering the 1/month restriction because those RESTAUARANTS WANT IT. Those restaurants don't want 5 times/month, only the FT-reading diner (who belongs to lots of different programs) does. If iDine OPENLY allowed that, those restaurants would either drop out or request 1/month from ANY airline (rather than from EACH airline).

Look, from the restaurant perspective it's just one program. If they wanted more dines, they'd be unlimited dines already! They are 1/month because they know they get hardly any money from iDine dines, and so they hope you come back and do some non-iDine dines later the same month so that they'll get 100% of THAT money. If they allow unlimited dines, they're only getting a tiny fraction of EACH of your dines. So they've chosen between those two options. I bet the iDine rep has never even told the restaurant that there's some small fraction of users who come back many times a month, each time earning toward a different airline. (The restaurants only figure that out if they compare the names on all the transactions for which iDine took most of the take.)

Have you read the threads about how the iDine-restauarant relationship works? You seem to think the restaurants would love nothing more than for every one of their dines to be iDines. Nonsense. They want iDine to be "bait only". They make no money if TOO MANY of their dines are iDines. (That's why, for example, some iDine restaurants in hub cities of airlines are dropping the airline that hubs in that city, while keeping other airlines.)

The multi-airline "workaround" is simply a loophole (not intentional). It works only because restaurants aren't aware of the loophole (unless it hits them in the pocketbook, and in that case it's well after the fact).

So I would suggest we shutup about this, lest Idine read this and take it away. :-)

Agreed. You never know who may be lurking! :eek:

I'll take advantage of any loophole I find! :D

Fair enough on the point about "bait only" - the restaurant wanting you to come back and do "ineligible" dines. As I go back and look at the list of restaurants I frequent, they're all unlimited dines up to $600/month. They vary in discount from 8% to 20%, I'm guessing they'd vary similarly in rewards if I picked air miles, but they don't limit to 1 dine/month.

The reality is that I may end up bailing on the whole thing. Most of the iDine places near me have been cutting benefits - 20% places are now down to 10%, etc. - and if a restaurant is actually any good, it leaves the program as quick as it can. (We have a lot of BAD iDine restaurants around here!) Locally in Kansas City, two or three other programs have popped up that provide discounts for the city's truly top-tier restaurants. (One is operated by the local restaurantuer's association and another is run by the local NPR affiliate.) I'm hanging in with iDine for now because of 2 bars, one pizza joint, and a Thai place that delivers. And because by pure random luck, I sometimes have an unexpected bonus hit when I travel. :)