Unexpected platinum rewards

The price of loyalty

As a frequent traveller, I have learnt to appreciate comfort and as a creature of habit, the renewed experience of modes of travel, places of accommodation or refreshment, and services that make for the enjoyment of home away from home inadvertently enrols you into loyalty schemes.

In a bygone age, I had memberships of too many kinds of loyalty scheme, store cards, credit cards, train cards, hotel chain cards, airline loyalty schemes and obscure services that were more spam generators than you could care to be distracted by.

With time, I learnt to retain the ones with value and discard others whilst consolidating my activities with broader service providers than individual and discrete offerings.

Staying for free

When it comes to accommodation, I have kept with hotels.com and only use bookings.com if I cannot find accommodation or a good deal. For every 10 nights booked on hotels.com, I get a reward night the equivalent to the average price of the 10 nights I paid for. In six years, I have collected 52 reward nights and redeemed 40 of them saving me about £2,500 in hotel costs.

When I lived in The Netherlands for almost 13 years, KLM, then the 2003 merger Air France – KLM was my choice of airline apart from when I went on package holidays. On moving back to the UK, retaining that service has meant a stopover in either Amsterdam or Paris, a little inconvenience, but it is an outsized contribution to my loyalty points.

Platinum-plated reward

Having acquired enough Airmiles to reach Platinum last year, I was on my return from South Africa in January 55 points short of retaining my Platinum status. It would have required at least 2 business class return flights within mainland Europe to remain level par by the end of May.

I remember, just 3 years ago, I was only 30 points short of Platinum moving up from Gold, but never go to make it up. The Airmiles programme is called Flying Blue and though we get miles for distance travelled in relation to the class of travel, the measurement for traversing statuses which were based on the number of flights has changed to XP or eXperience Points.

So, imagine my glee when because of the Coronavirus pandemic I received an email from the Flying Blue programme that the XP threshold required to maintain our status by the end of the qualifying period had been reduced by 25%. As my qualifying period runs until the end of May, my already earned XP was enough to retain Platinum. [Flying Blue]

Thank you!

Loyalties - Bringing comfort back to travel

Using loyalties

I have always worked in the premise that there are rewards for loyalty especially when it come travel such that certain considerations go into what airlines I fly with and what hotels I stay in.

There is always a deal somewhere if you’ve done something long enough and been diligent to tot up the points, awards, miles, credits or whatever they might call them.

Hotel deals

For hotels, I frequented those of the Accor hotel chain or the Carlson hotel chain, the former offered very good deals in the UK and Germany, France just seemed to be overpriced compared to what one could get elsewhere, but after acquiring points over time having subscribed to a fee-paying loyalty scheme, the point could be exchanged for vouchers to defray costs.

The Carlson hotel chain offered a better value proposition that included free wireless internet access, discounts to services, late check-outs and points that could count towards hotel costs.

Airline deals

Living in the Netherlands, KLM was the airline of choice; though slightly more expensive accumulating miles of travels of a number of flights in a calendar year bumped you up to an elite status that allowed priority check-in, more baggage allowance, access to business lounges, possibly upgrades where available and much more.

I both acquired enough miles and flights to defray the cost of my trip to India last December that privileged status allowed me to check-in an extra piece of baggage on return.

Telling loss of status

On my last trip, my frequent flyer status had lapsed such that I had to be smarter about how to pack my bags. The weight limit is now set at 23kg because punier men than before handle baggage.

By the time my suitcase was weighed, it came to 25.6kg on the automatic baggage drop system, I then thought I might get it past a check-in attendant but I failed in that quest.

I was asked to move stuff from my suitcase into my hand luggage which was just a few kilogrammes short of the statutory 12kg. Now, I am only allowed one piece of hand luggage, however, if you do put your suits in a suit holder, you are allowed to two pieces of hand luggage just for the fact that one is not expected to pack suits in bag.

So, I moved two books and an external hard disk from the suitcase into my hand luggage and by sheer coincidence, luck or genius, the suitcase weighed exactly 23kg and the hand luggage exactly 12kg – we were good to go.

Other pleasures

I still have the mercy of one last loyalty card, the Privium Plus card which allows iris-scan customs control, access to their business lounge with a variety of drinks, food and snacks and now we are also given priority boarding.

In terms of loyalty, it is good to check what you frequently do and assess who has the scale and scope  - you do not want to use a hotel chain just limited to one country, likewise, it is best to join one of the major airline alliances like SkyTeam, Star Alliance or OneWorld they have more global coverage to exploit your loyalties and reap the benefits.

A Vampire Mocca Grande with Bloody Cream

Too early to last minute

My nocturnal habits must be getting the better of me, the cuckoo will pop-out announcing the unholy hour of three in two minutes and I am sat at an airport departure lounge. Madness!

That is the problem, without the anxiety in preparation for travel in the way, I could well be awake at home now, ready to juggle 4 balls balancing on a unicycle playing a harmonica as if I have just returned from Nashville.

It was all last minute preparations and that was fine because if things had been planned earlier the snow would have kept me for days in some airport terminal unsure of when I would depart whilst I am being fed something between encouragement and discouragement but no truth about the state of things, being in the Netherlands, someone might just have the Dutch courage to spill the beans and face an irate mob.

Disconnected voyages

I had hoped that was what travel agents were for when I planned to visit Gran Canaria and Boa Vista, the latter is one of the Cape Verde Islands - a good swim south of the Canaries when I was told I would have to return to Portugal to get out there – for a few hundred kilometres I was to traverse almost 7,000? Incredible!

So I stuck with the familiar, the known, the usual, the regular and the used-to – Gran Canaria it was for 11 days, the sun having set on the 29^th of December and I was not spending the New Year in the Netherlands.

The travel agents never have an easy task of my simple requirements, they had to phone up the chain and out of the loop to get things sorted, things that take 5 days of inefficient pussy-footing had to be resolved within 12 hours or my lightened wallet that had vomited into their coffers will be retrieving every single Euro cent-ime.

I was not doing alternatives, not that I am that particular but then the things that need be done, just need be done the way one wants them done, which is hardly demanding; it stress tests their procedures and highlights flaws in their system.

Surely, a stopover in the Canaries on the way to Cape Verde Islands is a no-brainer.

Weigh me, weigh me goods

In any case, I am flying charter, which is unusual and that is why we are up this early to catch the worm, the complete package had to be picked up at the airport before check-in; allowing for time, I had a taxi pick me up and a van arrived, I sat in the front and when we got to the entrance, it had been blocked off that it required a 100 metre walk to another door.

The check-in was smooth, 21.9 kilograms my baggage weighed, that was me travelling rather light, I have lugged a good 30 kilograms through the system before which loyalties allow but there was a time I had to do excess baggage; the humiliation of having your wares tossed around until you have coughed up those outrageous charges.

I would that we were weighed along with our baggage and surely a good few of us would have our flights paid for in luxury class just by redistribution and compensation, it would eventually come to that and I had better have shares in the gym business.

So tame but very lame

It was too early to exercise priority access through Customs that had set up the shortest conveyor belt they could find, probably because people travelling at that time were not on some business trip.

The strip-tease complete and cane through the system, I sauntered through leaning on everything I could, a sudden weakness seems to overcome me at those times, I am most needing of help and assistance, my cane brought to me immediately and every request to move on is a major chore.

At least it is not Heathrow, after taking off your shoes you might be asked to take off your pants too, the other Christmas someone had contraband or was it fireworks attached to the most sacred crown jewels; I quiver and shudder.

By pants, for clarity sake, I might have used Americanisms at the beginning of the blog but the pants I meant are not your trousers.

I still have not come across those full body scanners, I have nothing to fear though, the myth lives and please keep your thoughts pure. Thank you.

Just after Customs, some people had rated their performance at an average of 8.6, the multi-colour touch screen was irresistible in its draw as my finger found the score of 7; it did not however budge the average, annoyingly, but it gave me much satisfaction.

Free to post

It would appear having fleeced us for more than is necessary to get online the airport is giving us an hour of free WiFi connectivity, the given in most airport lounges except when in Spain – they get all that tourism and still would charge for the air we breathe – shame on them.

I think I have decided to use my allocation in quarters; there should be 45 minutes left of which 15 should help post this then because it is only 3:45 AM, I should go to Starbucks and get a Vampire Mocca Grande with bloody cream because it is that time of the day.

Another hour to boarding as I think of the sun caressing my ebony … sorry, that was a line for my X-rated story.

Frequent traveller takes to air again

Landmarks in recovery

It is a landmark day for me, as this is my first journey out of the Netherlands by air since before I was hospitalised and diagnosed with cancer last year.

In many ways, I see the ability to do some of the things I once was unable to do for sickness and the lack of means as part of the recovery process.

It is not full by any means, it is a gradual process and in some ways miraculous if I were to echo the words of my doctor who thought when he saw me last month that the state of my recovery was well beyond what they had ever expected for the duration in which I had been monitored.

The other day, when I said to my colleagues that I was born at 26 weeks, one of them said he saw a fighting spirit for survival in me that he had noticed in a niece of his who was also prematurely born.

Now, I do not know if there is any correlation but somehow you just believe you either would get out of it good or succumb, though the idea of succumbing is never given the space to take root.

Between priorities and perks

Having checked in my baggage, I went to the Privium Plus lounge which is a service for frequent travellers that allows for unencumbered access through airport and checking in facilities as well as iris scanning facilities for border controls.

I remember well that I was just about to be admitted in hospital the renewal notice came for my Privium Plus membership and basically, I ignored it. I just could not be bothered with frequent travel and the perks that it entailed; I was fighting for my life.

Then a few months after, a debt collector’s agency sent the first threatening letter and I wrote to both Privium Plus and the debt collector that this matter was just too far from my top priority of getting well and getting up with the sub-tone of telling them to do their worst – on the scale of recovery priority issues membership advantage subscriptions do not feature.

Eventually, I contacted the people and offered to come to some arrangement on paying off the debts which I eventually did within a month of agreement.

It has been a journey and as I plan to go by the iris scanning system in a few minutes, one just wonders if I would be recognised or some assistance would be needed – maybe chemotherapy could change the so unique identification that the iris represents – we’ll see.

Let us be thankful that the once frequent traveller is starting to travel again.