Points Addict

Well this seems to be the story (or the mistake saga) that won’t end.  Instead of 83,000 miles for a pair of headphones like the AA version, now it is 2,300 Delta miles for a $5 phone charger.  Gary over at A View from the Wing is covering this in much more depth than I will be but it is interesting to see what will happen with it all.  In addition to Gary, the Points Guy has his own commentary on it.  I am not really a huge Delta flyer so I am not going to hop on for the miles even if it is only $5 or so to get in on it.

As I do find it interesting that it is 2,300 miles offered after some people from the AA mistake supposedly received an email offering 2,500 miles as a consolation.  To date I have not received any email at all about this from Cartera so I really do not know if it is even true.  Gary had discussed a few days ago about the level of trust in mileage shopping malls.  Since it is not always immediately clear who is providing the miles, the vendor, the mileage shopping manager or the airline directly.  Also, the impression given either intentionally or not is that the offers are made by the airline.

He goes on further to address the issue of which offers can really be trusted and which ones cannot be.  Especially after Cartera seemed to give the impression that they are not really obligated to give miles for anything according to their terms and conditions.  While this is likely there to protect themselves from unintentional mistakes, it could be used to justify a deliberate posting of high mileage offers only to later deny them as an effort to increase sales.  I am not saying that this is definitely what happened but it is a possibility worth thinking about.  The fact that Cartera is quite slow/stingy with posting miles (if they even post at all) even when it is only $1 or $3 per mile through their toolbar or their shopping links does not really inspire confidence in the offers they make.  In contrast, I must say that every promotion or mileage offer I ever received through AA directly has always been honoured and been honoured rather quickly.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 14th, 2011 at 13:55 and is filed under American Airlines AAdvantage, Delta Airlines SkyMiles, Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.