Ok, enough is enough.

What is with all these same offers the airlines keep throwing at us? I don't know about you all, but I don't do FTD.COM, I don't clothes shop and I certainly don't need 10% off my next stay at any Renaissance hotel in the Midwest. Why in the heck would I want to go anywhere in the Midwest.

It seems like everyone has the same to offer, can't they think of more useful and interesting offers that might get me to jump on board?

Maybe, Earn 5,000 miles and 10% off your next three visits at X Grocery store. Why not have it pay at everyday places we shop at. Its definitely not everyday that I shop at FTD.com.

Am I alon on this one? Thoughts?

 

Truth be told, most of our UA points which pay for our 2-4 coach rt's per year come from UA's partner programs and bonuses. We just shop them very carefully and only for things we'd be getting anyway.
Wife buys clothes at Eddie Bauer locally....why not order the same stuff online, often for the same or less money, and get miles to boot?
A small wine order on wine.com and a 10.00 lunch at a local iDine restaurant netted her 7500 bonus miles in December during a special offer. I was buying the wine anyway for our Christmas dinner and the prices on wine.com were competetive vs. our local supplier on the particular brands and vintages we wanted.

Shop the bonus programs and use the affinity card for your airline and play the billing float game for awhile and I think you'll start to see what I'm driving at. We'll be going to Hawaii this year on bonus miles earned. I only pay to fly UA when it's dirt cheap to do so; haven't done that much lately.

Even can get E+ seats on certain flights (I'm not premier) by knowing which seats on which planes will book as economy but will be E+ on the plane. Seatguru.com has been an interesting place for me

Right now FTD is doing 20 mpd, 21 if you pay with UA's card. Buy a normal bouquet, earn around 1300 miles. Valentine's day is Saturday...

Pat

 

Following pinniped's lead and deleting my post.

I'll just sum it up with this:


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"I just wanna wish you good luck, we're all counting on you"
-Dr. Rumack

[This message has been edited by g_leyser (edited Feb 10, 2004).]

 

Nasty response edited out... This newbie-troll isn't worth it.

[This message has been edited by pinniped (edited Feb 09, 2004).]

 

Way to take the higher ground.

A quick response because general business sense dictates that this is a marketing promotion. Why would they reward you for habits you already have? The concept is to attract & retain new business. Logic, simple logic. And guess what? It works!

 

That's EXACTLY why they keep promoting it, because not enough people are shop there enough, and they want more customers! These promos are to get new customers (or to get infrequent customers to shop there more), not to reward customers who'd shop there anyway no matter whether there was a bonus or not!

 

Point well taken, Thanks!

However, I still think there are too many offers out there in the market place. I am looking for a FF program to open the doors to new promotions.

Start looking at the consumers bottom line. We all want everything for nothing. So, like airfare, give us a great rate and reward us with something that will keep us loyal.

I was always a big fan of a promotion AA did a long time ago. When you purchased a full fare round trip ticket anywhere in the US, AA would send you and embroidered airline pillow. To some this sounds too cheazy, but I actually enjoyed it and as a matter of fact, I still have the pillow to this day.

I won't beat this one into the ground anymore. I am just tired of the fly 6 fly three for free or the 123 promotion. Anyone else?

 

A pillow in return for a full-priced ticket?! For the difference between full-fare and a discount ticket, you could have bought just about any resonably priced pillow in the world, and a fair number of unresonably priced pillows to boot.

[This message has been edited by DaxOmni (edited Feb 12, 2004).]

 

Well, I do see new (to me, at least) promotions from time to time, but it seems each time in a different program (I belong to Southwest, BA, NWA, AA, UA, and Frontier). A few examples: AA a couple months ago had a promo where you stay one night at a Sherton and pay with an MC and choose to earn miles and you earn 5000 miles. NWA has one about to start where you get triple miles from them (semicombinable with some double miles offers from the hotels themselves!) for hotel stays starting with your 4th, so if you're a frequent stayer you could be earning 1500 or even 2000 miles per one-night $80ish stay. But the whopper of them (that happened just before I joined BA EC late last spring) was the Jaguar test drive, where each person in your household (including dogs? ) could earn 20k BA miles just for a test-drive and then pool them.

Then of course there are the new promos that are new but not worth it (if you're paying attention to the more "mundane" promos). For example, NWA's Mile-a-Rama offered you choices like 5000 or 15000 bonus miles when signing up for their MP Visa with an annual fee if you also did a whole bunch of partner "challenge" transcations. Trouble is, concurrently there was (even if not widely advertised, but known to careful readers of FT) a way to get the same credit card with 6 months fee waived and 20k bonus miles! So why would anyone want to use the "new" promo, however new it might be, when the simple old (but tried and true) one was so much better?

Me, I don't care how new the promos are, just whether they work for me. Most of the flying ones of either today or yesterday don't seem to work for me, while at least a decent number of the ground-based ones of both today and yesterday do. (But YMMV, of course.)