Points Addict

Priority Club has a promotion where you earn 500 bonus points per stay between 15 September and 31 December 2011.  In addition to the 500 bonus points if you stay at more than one brand the points may be multiplied by up to 4x.

For example, if you stay at a Holiday Inn 4 times you will receive 2,000 bonus points (500 points for each of the 4 stays), if you stay at a Crowne Plaza 6 times you will receive another 6,000 bonus points plus at the end of the promotion you will receive an additional 8,000 bonus points because you stayed at two brands.  This multiple brands will be up to 4 brands to make 4x the bonus after the promotion ends.

For those earning miles, the promotion is similar with 100 bonus miles per stay up to 16,000 bonus miles.

Lucky over at One Mile at a Time has offered some interesting ideas on a recent Priority Club mistake.  Over the weekend various people including Lucky (and including myself) received 60,000 points for Crack the Case Visa Activation.  Unfortunately, I never applied for, nor activated a PC Visa.  Obviously I am totally okay with getting extra points but I did not really think about it much at the time I just noticed it and that was all.

Yesterday morning, I noticed that the points were gone.  I assumed that PC simply corrected the mistake they made.  In my PC account there was no negative transaction but I cannot see any other reason they would have deducted them.  I do not have a problem with this since I never really earned them in the first place.

Apparently though, others who received these points, used them for rewards and now have negative balances.  Lucky is torn a bit over whether these should be honoured or not.  I am not so torn on it.  I would be shocked if PC honours them nor do I think PC should honour them.  While I will not go so far to say that the people who spent them did them as a means to use something they knew they did not earn (it is possible that some people overlooked it). 

I do however thing that with all of the mistakes in miles awarded (or not awarded) for Verizon Headphones, and such, that we have lost a simple concept.  This concept is of common sense and of responsibility as a customer or client.  Yes I do realise that mistakes do happen and sometimes people are awarded miles or points in disproportionate amounts for relatively little spending on their part, but this is not something we should expect to happen.

In the Verizon “GlitterGate” case, unless there is evidence of Verizon or Cartera deliberately inflating the mile number in order to drive sales (and if this happened I am not sure it would have been to their advantage because of all the returns which would happen when the miles were not honoured) we should assume that it was an innocent mistake.  As a mistake, we should not get worked up too much when the mistake is fixed and the unearned windfall is not awarded.  This seems to be common sense to me.

In the case of the PC points.  I am thinking that people would have known that being awarded points for something they never did would qualify as a mistake.  Going on to use those points anyway seems to be not just a little dishonest in my opinion.   Now arguments can be made that the award was confirmed, etc… but if the points used to confirm the award were not really belonging to the person using them, this argument is void.

Through my short time in the miles game I have noticed that many many people are trying to earn more miles or be more efficient with how they earn them.  However, there also seems to be a rather vocal minority who are determined to get something for nothing and when the mistake they tried to take advantage of gets fixed, these people feel entitled to the mistake total anyway.  I mentioned in the milepoint forum about this already and I will repeat it here.  This type of behaviour gives us all a bad name.  We win some we lose some but get over it when it doesn’t work and don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

I am very eager to hear your opinions about this.

Priority Club is offering 500 bonus points for enrolling in their Rewards on the go service which is essentially a bunch of travel deals sent by sms message instead of by email.  In order to get the points you need to sign up, register a visa card and that is all.

Yes I know, I am becoming more of a shameless promoter of GoMiles but… recently they redesigned the user interface.  The good news is that everything fits into the web browser window much better now.  Also, they have added new programmes to the site.  The bad news though is that the numbers in the bar graph of how many miles you have are so small that they are nearly impossible to read.  Granted, this could be due to my resolution settings and not have anything to do with GoMiles settings at all but it is also not a deal breaker.

In other news, I did finally order some coins from the US Mint for the miles.  They are actually turning out to be quite handy.  Instead of sending them right to the bank to pay the credit card bill (and thus completely violating the spirit of what he mint is trying to do with making these coins available with free shipping), they are allowing me to “get miles” for some things which I would not ordinarily earn miles on.  A good example of this is paying tolls.

Finally, the Priority Pointsbreak list is out.  This is the list of hotels where you can redeem 5000 points for one night free. http://www.ichotelsgroup.com/h/d/pc/1/en/c/2/content/dec/pc/0/en/points/us/hre/pointbreaks.html?rateCode=IVANI

Well the Priority Club is keeping up its tradition of innovative promotions to earn lots of points without actually staying in one of their hotels.  This time they are promoting their feature of using Priority Club points to stay in any hotel even non Intercontinental partner hotels.  So for this challenge, they are giving pictures of scenes from around the world with new hints 4 days a week and a more complete picture each time a new hint comes.  This is to run for 8 weeks.  The first three have been Aruba, Nepal and Alaska.  Of course the rules say that you must be specific about where the scene is from so you cannot just say Alaska, you must say Kanai River, Alaska, USA.  Depending on when you get the correct answer depends on how many points you get for that week.  It can be either 2,000, 1,500, 1,000 or 500.  The game can be found here: https://challenge.priorityclub.com/

For those who are completely into the points and miles game this is probably old news but for some newbies there are three quizes which can give you 500 points total between them.  The questions are quite easy and if you don’t know them, the answers can all be found in the details about the Priority Club programme.  Sorry, not giving out the answers outright… I mean, these are free points so we should do the 15 seconds of work to get them.

http://usa-survey.priorityclub.com/fhaidt

http://usa-survey.priorityclub.com/unfvmw

http://usa-survey.priorityclub.com/mwpvwj