elleana

This thread has been interesting. After reading some of the reviews and responses I decided to go with Matthew from UPGRD. Pretty simple itinerary - SIN-SFO O/J LAX-SIN, 2F and 2Y but booking on SQ would probably incur a ton of additional fuel surcharges (and finding award availability can be a pain) so am looking to see what else they can come up with.

HMPS

pls keep us informed. as I wrote when I did some groundwork the price elsewhere went up instead of remaining as quoted !

MatthewLAX

Looking forward to hearing from you and helping you with your trip. If you have sent us an e-mail, we have not received it yet.

Best,
Matthew

elleana

Hm, that's odd. I've sent something in, got an acknowledgement, then radio silence..

My ticket ID is CMS-600-42451 for reference.

mintcilantro

I took Tariq's help for a difficult award around Xmas and NYE holidays. Tariq put a lot of time into it and gave me a variety of options. In retrospect, I should have provided him with my preferences so that the list of potential options can be narrowed quickly and effort can be saved for both parties. He gave me a lot of interesting itineraries that I couldn't have found on my own. I ultimately decided to go with convenience of schedule instead of premium cabin.

Kenny Lok

Finished one hours worth with Andrew from shrewdtravel.com and that was enough to get me into the award bookings game ..the guy is an award booking beast who has the ins and outs competency drilled into himself.

To Matthew and others: yes I wasted his time, don't think I said otherwise. Not really important what I did, it's more important on how the situation was handled. If you think you handled it perfectly, disregard what is going to be said -- think about a successful way of handling a potential client and what he could offer. Example -- If I had a bad outing with Andrew and now I need a consultant again or if I have friends or even myself who wants to book a complicated award travel. Instead of Andrew, I'll try out Matthew since I respected the way he handled his correspondence with me.

Never bash a random guy wanting something..you never know!!! That's my point. Hope all is well on your end.

MatthewLAX

Thanks for sending over your reference number - it seems my system masked your ticket request. You now have a proposed outbound itinerary in your inbox.

JuicyMiles

@RTW - Hi, this is Adam from Juicy Miles. I appreciate and understand your healthy skepticism in posts (reference to deleted post) and (reference to deleted post). However, I can assure you that all reviews are written and posted directly by our clients.

At the end of our booking process or post trip, we receive emails from clients asking where they can leave a review. Our website currently has no review section and so we send them a link to this thread. The clients who left these reviews happened to not be FlyerTalk members (I think it says a lot that they took the time to sign-up just to submit the review). A review section will be coming in the next Juicy Miles iteration.

<redacted by moderator>

...and yes this will be post one for Juicy Miles on FlyerTalk. We never felt the need to create a specific business account for FlyerTalk and we let our clients speak for our award redemption skills and quality. However, I did want to respond directly to your posts.

Thanks again,

Adam

cevee

I found *A seats for AUH-BOS (pretty last minute -same week) that would require I transfer in 40K additional UR points - I'm not very experienced so thought a service might find better so asked one if they could do better using points from cancelling either the AA trip I currently had booked or the UA trip I currently had booked- gave my AA and UA account numbers and the next day received a reply saying they reserved seats in my account and I needed to call AA. The first AA agent said I could not cancel the last two segments of my trip until I flew the next segment (to AUH) in a few days when the seats reserved by the service would have expired. I called back and the second agent chastised me for reserving the seats under a different reservation - saying if I had called and booked them within my current reservation it would work but the way I had done it would mean when he canceled that reservation to book under my current reservation- the award seats might not go back into inventory- and that is what happened so he said he could not help me and hung up.I then transferred UR points and booked the *A seats I had found.
I let the service know that AA said the seats they reserved were not available to me due to being reserved the way they were. I offered to pay for their time but not the full amount as it was not done in a way I could use. The service wants the full amount. What do you think? I feel they should have known that reservation would not work for me. Thanks for your opinions.
I have learned a lot from reading this site over the years though I have a long way to go. Btw- DH previously grumbled about my 'nagging' re which credit card to use- now -after experiencing LH and UA biz long haul and the lounges- he says he will call before buying even a pack of gum to ask which card he should use

RewardFlyer

Most award booking services don't ask for payment until you are 100% happy with your itinerary. In this instance it sounds like the service wasn't even able to put the ticket on hold correctly. It's generous of you to pay them for their time, as most services wouldn't even bother asking you for a payment.

RTW1

And you have just proven the point again... as a first time poster you couldn't pass up the opportunity to promote your service.

And while I appreciate your response here, my skepticism remains... I simply don't trust reviews from first time posters with no proof of their actual experience. And that you actively encourage non-FT members to post here does nothing to to change that. In fact I feel it reflects badly on you to use a forum for what I simply feel is free advertising. Backing up your claim with bloggers, that are also just in it for the money or other freebies, is another bad sign for me.

Participation (and that means more than advertising your services) should be compulsory in my book for commercial accounts like yours..... So in my opinion you should stick to providing client feedback on your website only and stay away from FT if promotion is all you're interested in.

kathykathy

I emailed Juicy Miles to book an award trip for next June to Prague and returning from Budapest. Miguel Quinones answered my text within the hour and had my husband and I booked in business within a couple hours! I had tried to book myself with Delta, but the lowest amount of miles I could use was 200K with 10 hour layovers! Our layovers are no more than 2 hours! Unbelievable.

Believe me, this is worth $125/person.

Thanks, Miguel.

Kathy Jones

lin821

(Bolding mine)

If the review section will be coming in your next iteration, that's where and how you should instruct your clients to leave reviews, not FT. You are literally abusing FT as your own "playground" by directing your clients to this particular thread on FT in the correspondences you send to your clients. That's very bad business practice if you ask me.

FT is NOT Amazon.com where customers leave feedback for the products they buy from Amazon. Not to mention it's you who are selling services and FT isn't part of your site/business.

If so, why are you comfortable using FT for your own commercial gain?

FYI. In the eyes of savvy FTers, positive reviews for any particular service/website from newbies and/or one-time posters only carry as much weight as spammers. And here on FT, we don't welcome spammers.

cevee

Thank you RewardFlyer for your response. Anyone else care to share an opinion?

RewardFlyer

Hope you didn't end up paying more miles as a routing like that requires two awards. A journey from North America to India must be transatlantic per AAdvantage, otherwise they'll charge you the USA-Asia and Asia-India routing separately.