Tag: Star Alliance

Even We Make Mistakes Sometimes…

February 28, 2016 / / 4 Comments

Hello from Queenstown, where you get to wake up to this every morning:

Unfortunately, it wasn’t all rainbows and butterflies getting here due to a snafu we had at the airport with our checked bags. To put it simply, we ended up shelling out $120/bag per person as the result of a series of mistakes we made.

Let’s start at the beginning. We purchased our tickets through Amex Travel, and we bought them for a Virgin Australia codeshare operated by Air New Zealand. At the time of ticketing, there was a notation saying that checked baggage fees were not charged at the time of booking, but as far as I’ve seen it says that for all tickets, and since it was an international flight, we assumed that a baggage allowance was included in a ticket. Furthermore, Michael has Star Alliance Gold status through a status match to Copa Airlines, which theoretically entitles him to an extra checked bag. So we were doubly good, right? Continue reading →

AwardFinder – a better flight awards search engine

December 7, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Apparently some of my travel hacker friends were not aware of this tool, so here’s a little introduction post for this very useful app. I’ve been using it for the last couple months and it has helped me find and book multiple awards. It’s mostly useful for Star Alliance, Oneworld, Etihad and partners, as well as certain specific partners for supported search engines.

AwardFinder is a App for the Chrome browser that brings the power of many airline award search engines to one convenient place. It also adds additional features on top of the official airline search engines, such as the ability to search multiple cabins, multiple origins / destinations, save your searches, and more! Continue reading →

Back to Aegean Silver… but still Star Alliance Gold!

November 30, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Back in 2013 when Aegean was still offering an extremely easy route to “lifetime” Star Alliance Gold by only earning 19,000 qualifying miles, I took advantage of this to get Aegean Gold status. It was great times with priority boarding, security, checked bags and Star Alliance lounge access, even domestically!

In September 2014, after realizing that people were heavily taking advantage of this route to gain Star Alliance Gold easily without much effort to renew the status, Aegean made it harder to obtain Gold this way, requiring 24,000 qualifying miles flown on Aegean or 48,000 qualifying miles flown on Aegean and Star Alliance partners. Furthermore, Aegean notified existing Golds that their status would actually expire at some point. All existing Gold customers would be transferred to the new Gold Tier when the program changed in November 2014. Continue reading →

Quick news and deals from around the web

October 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

From Just Another Points Traveler, you can save $10 off $50 on your first order at Amazon Warehouse Deals WD1STTIME. I’ve bought plenty of electronics and other more expensive products from Amazon Warehouse Deals and always had a good experience.

From Travel Codex, Avianca is status matching from various frequent flyer programs to its own program from October 1, 2015 to November 30, 2015. This is an easy way to get Star Alliance Gold until March 2017 if you have equivalent status or higher on another airline. It’s not certain what airlines they are matching from or if they are matching from other Star Alliance Airlines, but it’s worth a try! Star Alliance Gold gets you lounge access when flying Star Alliance airlines, priority check-in, sometimes priority security, and priority boarding. Star Alliance Gold from a program outside the United States also gives you domestic lounge access even when flying economy, which you don’t get as a United MileagePlus Gold member. Continue reading →

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