Good morning, and welcome to today's community discussion thread! Today's posts will appear here throughout the day, but this thread is for going off-topic. Did you love/hate something about today's coverage? Are you tracking other news I missed? Or, do you just have a general question about rewards travel? This is the place for your wandering thoughts.
Today's posts on OMAAT:
- Southwest Rapid Rewards Selling Points At A Discount: When Is It Worth It?
- Aman Makes Mexico Debut With 18-Casita Amanvari, In Costa Palmas Complex
- Book A Southwest Airlines Ticket, Get Promotional Companion Pass
- American Boeing 777-300ER Retrofits Underway: Fancy New Cabins Coming Soon
- Lufthansa Expands Business Class Seat Fees To A380: Sitting By The Window Will Now Cost You
- My Strange Amex Credit Card Fraud: What Really Happened In Malaysia?!
- Marriott Selling Bonvoy Points With Up To 50% Bonus (0.83 Cents Each): Worth It?
- Insane: $6K Per Night Aman Hotel Calls Cops On Hotel Reviewer, Cancels His Reservation
- Major (Positive) OMAAT Changes Are Live, And They’re All About Community
Daily threads stay open for a week, so it's never too late to jump into a recent conversation.
We've made lots of changes here at OMAAT overnight, so there's a post coming shortly with all the details. There are a few more kinks to work out, so stay tuned. In the meantime, if anyone has any news they saw that they'd like covered, or has anything else travel or points related to share, this is a great place to do so! 🙂
Excited about the new community! Hopefully this is the correct place for this
I think I just discovered a sharp way to fly United TATL if you only want a one way. I am planning an East Coast to London trip and Virgin had great saver fares for the return (but APD still🙄 ). For outbound leg I noticed if you search “Y,B,M” you can get B class fares that include free Economy Plus and when using a miles upgrade have no co-pay.
I have points but no status so the standard options would be book saver standard economy (S) for $570 or a flexible (V) for $978 and then pay about $500 co-pay +20k miles for an upgrade and pay for Economy Plus.
My trick: Book B for $780 which includes Economy Plus and no co-pay for an upgrade is its just 20k miles. Hope some others are able to use this (but not so many that they close it!)
Jake B, this is a great place to share that, thanks! So the B fare was cheaper than the V fare? Wow, that's pretty cool/surprising, because I thought it was supposed to be the higher fare class (and second only to Y)? That's a heck of an upgrade deal, so great find!
@lucky I tried to attach two screenshots, hopefully it worked. United seems to be doing this weird thing where fare classes have different refund rules. Both the $780 and $1010 are in B.
The changes to the blog look great! I originally joined when I was researching a TAM First Class review back in the day, and I've been a loyal reader ever since.
On that note, it's sad to see yet another First Class product disappear, this time AA's. Sure, it was never the most groundbreaking experience, but where else can you enjoy an ice cream sundae, watch Netflix on your iPad, and stare out at the clouds all at the same time?
Swiveling seats are dead. Long live the doors!
@carlos_f TAM first class, those were the days! It was so hard to redeem miles for that, except for the one brief period where they opened redemptions. Fun times! In retrospect, it sort of reminds me of Air France La Premiere in terms of the hard product, minus the curtains, given the one row of 1-2-1 seating.
And you're right, American first class might not be fancy, but it's something, and was usually easy enough to book with miles.
Concur, this looks really good. I'm looking forward to at least lurking...
Although, with that said, actually using the site is rough right now. Pages are horrifically slow to load, and the settings and account pages essentially don't work at all (clicking the buttons do nothing). I'd really like to change my name to a pseudonym and it appears I can't do it.
I have a reader story I was considering submitting, but the site needs to functionally work better than it does in order to ask for the time.
Great changes and updates. Community engagement is important and fun.
love the new features.
But seems like the pages load really slow.
Page speed should be better now, but let us know if you continue to have issues.
@jeremyonemileatatime-com Congrats on joining the OMAAT team and congrats on the redesign! 🍾
@peter_ Thanks! Excited to be part of the team and for the other projects we're working on.
@jeremyonemileatatime-com Hello! Nice to meet you Jeremy. I wanted to let you know that I usually use safari as my browser and at this time I have no access to post in this section when using safari. I have logged in through opera and now have the option but have tried off and on today on safari and was never able to comment. I simply have a grey box that will not let me type. If you want screen shots I can send them to you. Thanks for any help you can provide with this issue.
@luca Thanks for letting me know. Do you happen to know what version of Safari you're on? I'd recommend updating to at least version 17 if you haven't already. If that doesn't solve your issue, you can let me know @ readerstories@onemileatatime.com with your current Safari version, and I'll take a look.
Great to see OMAAT growing and developing, already enjoying the new interface & features. And emojis 😆
@uncleronnie Thank yoU! And hey, those three... suns... or whatever they are, look great!
Yep, sorry to everyone about the speed issues initially, but hopefully they're better now. If you still have issues, let Jeremy or me know (ideally Jeremy, because he's the one who can actually fix these things... I can only ping him). :p
This looks great! Looking forward to additional discussion (beyond the usual banter in the posts).
Wheeee! This works 🙂
Ok, future posts will be more serious.
Are the reader stories working? I tried to submit a story but the website seems to be saying that there "was a problem submitting the story", I tried several times, made sure no grammar mistakes, I'm above the word count...etc. Is this something wrong on my end? Also: great changes to OMAAT! Looking forward to the video series
@flyreal I sent you an email to get some additional information. They should be working for everyone, but we'll figure out what isn't lining up for you.
Looking at a Hyatt Vacation Club timeshare visit offer. In addition to the room, I can get 5k Hyatt points. In their terms they try to make this sound really sweet: 10,000 points are enough for up to 2 free nights at a Category 1 hotel during standard redemption periods (emphasis mine). Yea! Two free nights at their worst hotels for a mid-week stay in the middle of the worst time of the year to go.
(I think this is the right sort of thing to leave here?)
Ok, what is a "reputable member" and how is that different from a "noble member" and why is Ben only a "member"?
@jallan That is an excellent question... for Jeremy! :p And don't forget the "Trusted Member."
@jallan it is...gone! It was initially a 10-tiered system based on the number of comments a user had in the forum, but it didn't align with our ratings on the blog side of the house, so it was removed to avoid confusion. Great question, though.
I read about your credit card fraud - pretty weird story! I'm heading to KUL next week - hope that doesn't happen to me, and I'm looking forward to reading the reviews from that trip! I'm hotel hopping in a few Hyatt properties there.
@chris_ I'm hoping it was just an isolated incident and very bad luck. Which Hyatts are you checking out? There are quite a few to choose from. KL is such a good value hotel market. I've been tempted to check out what I believe is one of the world's two lowest price Alila properties.
@lucky The Alila on arrival day, Hyatt Centric, Grand Hyatt, and Park Hyatt! They all have things about them that made me want to check them out, and with solo travel and globalist late checkout, it shouldn't be TOO annoying to switch that many times!
I'm loving how OMAAT feels like how FlyerTalk was back in the day when they still had the Expert Hotel Reviews. Very excited for these changes, Lucky!
@kata Thank you, that old school vibe is the goal, so I appreciate the support and interest! 🙂