One Mile At A Time: "In 2025, American Express will be opening a Centurion Lounge at Salt Lake City Airport. This is an exciting development, given the airport’s current lack of lounge options. This is in addition to plans for a second Delta Sky Club, as well as a United Club. I’m looking forward to learning more details closer to when the new concourse opens."
Skift: "Delta is currently undergoing what it describes as a “Wi-Fi transition period.” Put simply, it means massive improvements are coming, but there are still gaps in its global coverage. Additional satellites are being positioned to boost the reach of the service, but connectivity could be patchy until then."
"To manage expectations, Delta is launching free international Wi-Fi on a route-by-route basis. The carrier is mirroring its successful domestic rollout strategy where select city pairs were prioritized."
Dan's Deals: "Qatar Airways has provided an absurdly good award chart for AA and Alaska flights ever since they joined the Avios program and OneWorld."
"But outsized values never last forever and they have devalued their short-haul awards on AA and Alaska as of today."
Points Wire Note:
It's always frustrating when airlines hide award charts from consumers. This lack of transparency almost always leads to no-notice devaluations that hurt consumers.
One Mile At A Time: "American Airlines is aggressive about selling upgrades for cash. Once you ticket a reservation, it’s common to see an offer whereby you can pay cash to upgrade to first or business class. The value of this can vary significantly, and the upgrade cost will change over time, based on a variety of factors."
"Up until now, the major catch has been that these upgrade offers haven’t been eligible to earn AAdvantage miles or Loyalty Points. That has finally changed — as of August 14, 2024, cash upgrades on American are eligible to earn miles and Loyalty Points."
Travel on Points: "We have been seeing a lot of no lifetime language offers going out from American Express over the last few weeks. These offers allow you to get a card you have already had before because they do not carry the standard Amex no lifetime language in the offer (our full guide on NLL offers). We normally see them on business cards, like the Blue Business Plus or the Delta cards recently. I was lucky enough to be targeted for an Amex Gold no lifetime language offer last night, and it is a really great offer. Let's go over the details of it all."
Here are several personal and business credit card welcome offers that caught my eye.
I typically focus on transferable points programs as they provide more options for booking business and first class award tickets. However, co-branded airline and hotel cards occasionally make sense for the more advanced points enthusiast.
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Personal Cards
Business Cards
The Capital One Spark Cash Plus was just increased.
It's a cash back card, but you can turn the cash back into Capital One Miles at rate of 1 mile per cent if you have a Capital One Venture, Capital One Venture X, or Capital One Spark Miles for Business. This allows you to transfer the points to airline and hotel partners.
Sign-Up Bonus
This means $2,000 could become 200,000 Capital One Miles.
Bonus Categories
Benefits
Annual Fee
American Express has released an Amex Offer for flights on the low-cost carrier French Bee. You can get a $150 statement credit if you spend $750+ on one or more purchases with French Bee. Please note that French Bee operates flights to/from Paris-Orly (ORY), not Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG).
Important Details
Upgraded Points: "Paisly is JetBlue‘s travel booking portal, which offers rental cars, hotels, activities, and vacation home rentals. Normally, you’ll earn 1 JetBlue TrueBlue point per dollar spent here."
"Paisly now offers bookings on over 850,000 Vrbo properties, letting you earn TrueBlue points and tiles on your reservations. You’ll also save 10% on 1-week rentals and 15% when renting for a month."
Loyalty Lobby: "ITA Airways is currently offering a summer “Out of Office” promotion, providing a 20% discount on flights departing from Italian airports to nearly all destinations (domestic and international) in their network."
"The discount applies to all classes of service, including Economy Light fares, for travel between September 15 and December 15, 2024."
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To make choosing your next card a bit easier, we've ranked the best credit card offers to help find the best bonuses.
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In August 2018, I started the Straight To The Points flight alerts newsletter with the goal of making it easier to book business and first class flights with points & miles and fare deals.
I started Points Wire to make it easier for you to keep up with the news you need to know without all of the fluff.