After spending almost two days traveling back to Southeast Asia from Australia, we are finally at our destination in eastern Thailand, sweating like crazy in the tropical heat! We had a great time in Australia and will be writing about our adventures in Sydney and Melbourne in the future. For now, thanks to everyone who entered the $50 Gift Certificate Giveaway last week by following the blog and/or sharing one of our Facebook posts! The winner of our random drawing of all the entries is:
Kathy from Vancouver!
Congratulations to Kathy, who choose to receive a $50 gift certificate from Air Canada. She plans to use it to help pay for a trip to Europe within the next year! I haven’t mentioned Air Canada on the blog before, but it actually has a very interesting frequent flyer program of its own called Aeroplan. We are seriously considering transferring some of our stash of American Express points to Aeroplan to book ourselves a flight back home from Europe this June to end our trip.
After being on the run for the last week plus in Melbourne, we finally have a couple of days now to sit back and spend some time writing, so we look forward to finally publishing some posts not related to this contest over the next few days. Let us know if there is anything in particular you would like us to write about and we will see what we can do about it.
Aurelien, since you mentioned having 40+ loyalty programs, I am interested in hearing more about them. Do you have a small number of hotel loyalty programs and make sure to always book a room at one of those, while having a large number of airline loyalty programs to have flexibility in how you fly or something different? Also, how challenging is it to manage that many programs? Thanks for all the helpful advice!
Will, good questions. I’m signed up for so many programs because you never know when one of them might send out an interesting promotion to their members, but I don’t actively use all of them.
For example, I’m a member of the Qantas frequent flyer program, not because I plan to get miles with them, but because they allow you to search for OneWorld Alliance award availability on some alliance members which you can’t see on AA.com search.
Regarding the hotels, I have ended up booking paid rooms on IHG and ClubCarlson hotels because they had some good promotions, but I’m signed up with all the major hotel groups in case they have their own great promotions in the future.
Managing all these programs is not a hard as it seems, especially when you use Awardwallet.com to track all of them.