When I traveled around the world for six months in 2007, I racked up more than 80,000 frequent flier miles with USAirways. Since returning all of my travel has been by car, so I haven’t had an opportunity to redeem any of my mileage. Recently I discovered that USAirways frequent filer miles expire if there has been no activity on the account for18 months – and my 18 month deadline was fast approaching.
USAirways Dividend Miles program bears watching
Initially I thought about going out to California to visit some friends, but the more I tried to purchase a ticket, the more frustrated I became. At one point I thought I had figured it out, until discovering at the last minute that the airline’s web site had booked me into Santa Barbara on the outbound leg but through San Diego on the return leg. Eventually I decided I just wasn’t meant to go and started looking for another solution. I phoned USAirways and asked if, like American Airlines, I could buy a certificate with my frequent flier miles and redeem it any time during the next year. No, USAirways doesn’t do that. Could I pay a fee to extend my miles? Nope, they don’t do that either.
The customer service representative’s only suggestion was to buy a magazine subscription through the web site – that would extend my mileage for another 18 months. But the last thing I need is more garbage in my mailbox; with the amount of travel I do I am always trying to get rid of extraneous mail. Her suggestion did, however, get me thinking. Continue reading →
United Kingdom 
France 
Morocco 
Czech Republic 
Slovenia 
Croatia 
Hungary 
Romania 
Metasearch Engines Evolving Into Excellent Travel Booking Sites
In the beginning, if you wanted to book airfare online you visited each airline’s individual website, entered your search criteria, and compared the prices, routes, and travel times from the multiple sites prior to booking. Ditto for hotels. It worked, but the process ate up a lot of time and was extremely frustrating.
Sensing an opportunity, sites like Expedia and Travelocity sprung up. These search engines gathered all the information on airfares and hotels and made it available on a single site. That was better, but some things were still missing. In order to read customer reviews about hotels travelers could visit TripAdvisor, but once again that meant visiting multiple sites prior to making travel decisions.
Enter metasearch engines. These relatively new sites incorporate everything into one place, making travel research and booking a breeze. If you’d like to know more, check out the recent post about travel metasearch at UpTake.com. UpTake just happens to be one of the top metasearch sites on the Internet, if not the best. And in the interest of full disclosure, I must say that I am a contracted travel writer for UpTake.com, but then I wouldn’t be working for them unless they were the best.