Fraud Equals Up-sell?

A couple weeks ago, I had some credit cards stolen, and I applauded both Citibank and Amex for not trying to “reverse telemarket” me when I called to activate the replacement cards.   With that experience in mind,  I came across this article in the Techdirt blog about a guy who posted on his blog that Citibank was trying to upsell a credit monitoring service in response to a card being canceled due to a merchant’s security breach.    That’s downright tacky to as he observes:

You know what? I should just get that for free. A security breach on your end is not a sales opportunity. And when I decline, don’t try to sell me a secondary monitoring service that’s slightly cheaper. And when I question why you’re pushing this on me rather than giving it to me for free? I shouldn’t get told, “We’re just the activation department — you’d have to talk to customer service about that.” Hey, if I’m calling just to activate my card, then do that. No upsell.

He then continues:

Just a last thing. I would so dearly love that if I punch in my credit card number into your automated system, I’m not asked for it again by the human operator. It would just make me feel like I’m wasting less of my time.

When I am not in such a good mood, and I am asked to recite an account number that I had just entered, I often reply cheerfully, “My account number is exactly the same as I entered it a moment ago.   It hasn’t changed.”

Challenging Reward Bookings, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Good: I booked award travel today on Southwest airlines, and the process was a breeze.    It was almost as easy as booking a paid reservation.     There were many flights a day on my route that were available with the minimum amount of miles.   In fact, I think all of the non-stop flights I was looking at on President’s day weekend were open to award reservations.    The only complaint I had was that I couldn’t book the two paid reservations on the same itinerary, and that we will have to do the online check-in twice each way.

The Bad: I am having a slightly harder time using my American Airlines points.   Their availability is by no means generous, but it is at least usable.    One of the weird quirks I discovered was with a stopover.   I was checking itineraries from Denver, through Miami, to the Caribbean.   I could get the non-stop flight from St. Thomas to Miami, or from Miami to Denver, but not on the same itinerary!    Risking a charge, I called their reservations, only to find out that there is a maximum of 4 hours connection time on the award.   Staying 5 hours, to catch the next available flight to Denver would cost two awards.    This is only the case going to the US Virgin Islands, flights to other countries with longer layovers are permitted.      Note to American Airlines, they need to waive this rule when you are catching the next available flight out.    On the plus side, I am able to hold a reservation for 5 days, a feature I have not seen in a while.    This is great as we co-ordinate our travel plans with another party.

The Ugly: I am still trying to use 135,000 orphaned Continental miles that were accumulated by a relative using a Continental credit card.    I have so far been unsuccessful.     It their two tiered award system, the “saver” tier is almost never available.    Worse, their online reservation system loves to pull up bizarre routings with 4 flights, some in the opposite direction of your destination.     No matter how far in advance, no matter what the itinerary, there never seems to be much availability.     I am very close to just using the miles for two domestic tickets at the “standard” rate of 50,000 miles per person for a domestic award.     At this rate, Continental awards really aren’t worth much, especially if you live in the middle of the country, like I do, and don’t get the chance to fly coast to coast.

Conclusions

Airline travel reward cards are only as good as their reward programs.    Southwest’s program is flexible, fantastic, and is a no brainer for domestic travel rewards to any major city not named Atlanta.   American’s system is better than most of the large legacy carriers, but the strange 4 hour rule needs to have exceptions.    Continental’s program is almost entirely useless at the “saver” level, therefore their mile are really worth about half of what a mile on American is worth.     This would have been good to know before spending years accumulating miles on a credit card, but oh well.     For now, Continental reward cards are worth skipping.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 20:00 and is filed under News. 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.