Following is our regular summary of the latest travel news and best frequent traveler promotions reviewed during the past week.
27.07.2023 - 18:35 / smartertravel.com / Tim Winship
The Choice Privileges program has distinguished itself in recent years on both the upside and the downside.
On the positive side of the ledger, the company has routinely rolled out high-value promotions, even when other major chains were phoning it in with predictable, perfunctory double-points offers.
Offsetting those lucrative bonuses, however, and undermining the program overall, has been its onerous points-expiration policy. Choice Privileges points expire two calendar years after they were earned, even if a member has subsequent account activity.
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That’s in sharp contrast to the industry standard, which allows program members to extend the life of their points by either earning or redeeming more points. In most programs, every transaction resets the expiration clock, extending the life of all banked points for another 18 months or two years.
Choice Gets It Right
Apparently sensitive (shamed?) to its position as an industry outlier, Choice will adopt a more consumer-friendly policy next month.
Choice Privileges members must remain active in the Program to retain the Choice Privileges points they accumulate… Beginning February 1, 2016, members have until August 1, 2017 at 12:00 a.m. Pacific Time to engage in a qualifying activity before this forfeiture policy is enforced. Any qualifying activity after February 1, 2016 will keep members’ points active for an 18 additional months.
The new 18-month extendible-life policy is hardly the industry’s most liberal. But it’s a night-and-day improvement over the current rule.
Choice Privileges members will welcome the change, but should also be wary of any offsetting negative changes that might follow. In the loyalty game, net gains are a rarity; more often, it’s one step forward, two steps back. In this case, the concern would be that Choice will ratchet down the generosity of its periodic points promotions.
Reader Reality Check
Better, right?
More from SmarterTravel: Spirit Is Giving Away 1.6 Billion Miles. Should You Care? Now for Sale at United: Economy Plus Extra-Perk Bundles These New Coach-Class Seats Are Actually ComfortableAfter 20 years working in the travel industry, and 15 years writing about it, Tim Winship knows a thing or two about travel. Follow him on Twitter @twinship.
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Following is our regular summary of the latest travel news and best frequent traveler promotions reviewed during the past week.
To seasoned travelers, the words “program updates” are the ultimate buzzkill, foreshadowing a raft of customer-unfriendly changes to the loyalty programs they’re invested in.
With no sign of relief in sight, the TSA’s inability to effectively and efficiently manage airport security screening promises to remain this summer’s biggest bad-news travel story.
Is the state of air travel improving? Not according to the DOT, which just released its Air Travel Consumer Report for 2015.
In 2014, at the behest of Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), the DOT’s Office of Inspector General began an audit of U.S. frequent flyer programs, and the DOT’s monitoring thereof, with a particular focus on unfair and deceptive practices (summary, with a link to the full .pdf report, here). The audit results were published this month, with the following headline: “Improvements needed in DOT’s process for identifying unfair or deceptive practices in airline frequent flyer programs.”
Tired of squeezing your ever-expanding frame into those ever-shrinking coach-class seats? So is Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s Subcommittee on Aviation. And he wants the government to do something about it.
You may remember the 100,000-mile bonus for new British Airways credit card sign-ups in 2010.
When Muslim Advocates and the NAACP issue a joint letter accusing the U.S. airline industry of racism, it’s big news. And when the NAACP, the “nation’s oldest and largest nonpartisan civil rights organization,” follows that up with an advisory specifically questioning the racial policies of the nation’s largest airline, American, it’s nothing less than a media firestorm. Indeed, all the major news media covered the story exhaustively. And “American Airlines” has been a trending Twitter topic for several days.
In February, when Starbucks announced it was converting its frequent-drinker program to a revenue-based scheme, there was a collective groan from the caffeinated crowd. As with similar conversions by the major airlines, Starbucks’ new earning rules would mean fewer rewards for most customers.
Marriott’s acquisition of Starwood has left one key group vocally underwhelmed: members of Starwood’s Preferred Guest program, particularly Starwood elites who have become accustomed to perks and services that play no part in Marriott’s Rewards program.
Could Spirit, the airline everybody loves to hate, become a bit less hateful? If the company’s new CEO has his way, it will do just that.
For U.S. News & World Report, the road from weekly news magazine to publisher of company rankings has been a long and winding one. The key, though, to its shift toward data-driven ratings of companies and institutions was its 1983 publication of “America’s Best Colleges.”