- New Online Gift Card Vendors With Cash Back Opportunities by Chasing The Points. More useful gift card churning news.
- Marriott Rewards Whacks Members Again With Big Increase in Reward Prices by View From The Wing. I think Marriott got a little jealous about all the negative attention the Delta & Southwest devaluations have been getting and decided to join the party. I’ve got a bunch of Marriott points from the Chase Ritz Carlton 140k offer, so I better get booking before the March 20th deadline.
- Is the Marriott Rewards Premier Visa free night certificate worthless? by Free-quent Flyer. It’s definitely not a card I plan to keep long term anymore.
- Marriott Plans to Start Expiring Points by View From The Wing. Keep in mind there are a lot of cheap and easy ways to get some activity on your loyalty account.
- Filed Under WTF: Brand New, Highly Personalized Credit Card Available by Miles Remaining. This card can absorb smells and then give that smell off later. It’s only available in the UAE, so if it sounds appealing you might have to wait for this technology to come to the States. Somehow I don’t think it’s going to be very popular.
- Expedia Coupon Fiasco: Guess Who Won’t Own Up to Their Mistake! by Lazy Travelers. This just goes to show why it’s so important to have competition in the market and why the government needs to block some of these OTA mergers & acquisitions. We’ve all seen what has happened with the airline industry with less competition and guess what? It’s worse for consumers. Big business is always pushing for a free market, yet they refuse to regulate themselves and are constantly colluding. Thanks, but no thanks.
- Bet You Didn’t Know: Using Hipmunk to book ITA Matrix flights by Frequent Miler. Very useful post in a very interesting series.
- Manufactured Spending in New York City Or Any Big City by Chasing The Points. There are actually quite a lot of advantages of MSing in big cities (e.g more stores to hit up, easier to resell items using places like craiglists to afford shipping & eBay fees etc etc).
- Missed News and my CLEAR Card Enrollment Experience by Travel With Grant. I have Global Entry so I am interested to see what benefits there are to holding both this & CLEAR.
Thanks for the mention DOC.The way Expedia’s handling it (actually not handling at all) is beyond comprehension. I guess, I might be spoiled, but I have never encontered this level of arrogance and disregard from any large US company. Comes with the growth, I guess.
I really don’t understand how what they are doing is legal. The terms & conditions were crystal clear, phone operators booked the rooms and now they are reneging. I guess this is what happens when competition decreases so dramatically.
They probably have that little legal disclaimer that says they can cancel any booking if they feel like it, and that by booking with them, we automatically agree.
I’m not a lawyer but typically those catch all disclaimers aren’t enforceable. It’s like non compete agreements can very rarely be enforced. I’ll speak to some lawyer friends (or maybe some lawyer readers will chime in) to get their thoughts. I’m a bit sick of politicians talking about free markets and then doing nothing to ensure their is adequate competition to ensure a true free market exists.