2x miles on JETihad, Oberoi extension for free night, SPG program changes

I'm taking a break from all the madness with work these last few days. Personally, it has been a tough week for me, and I'm hoping for a couple of days' R&R before the grind resumes. However, life doesn't stop - and some of the stuff I've written about earlier have undergone "upgrades", to use frequent flyer lingo. So here they are, as also some other useful bits:


Double JP / Etihad Miles

Before I went MIA, I wrote about how I was let down by Aegean's Miles & Bonus program in my quest for Star Alliance Gold status, which post included a Jet / Etihad promo for 2x miles for bookings up to 6 October 2014 on their entire network.

Jet has updated this promo to give 2x miles on all international travel for bookings up to 13 October 2015, for travel till 15 December 2015. The best part about this is that the 2x miles also applies to the 50% or 100% cabin bonus for business and first class respectively. This makes it an eminently useful promotion, if you have some travel coming up that can be booked on this promo - think December, vacation time! Register here or click on the image below.


Pro tip: If you've already booked your tickets, try and see if cancelling them and rebooking under this promo works for you. You'll need to consider cancellation fees here, as well as the cost of the rebooked ticket. If it does work, please please rebook first before cancelling the existing ticket!

Bonus deal: Booking under this promo enters you automatically into a lucky draw, where 10 entrants can earn 100,000 JP miles each.

And if Etihad miles are your ken, then you can choose Etihad Guest as your choice of program too, and earn 2x miles there instead.


Oberoi extends qualification period for the free night promo

I've written earlier about The Oberoi Advantage - Oberoi Hotel's loyalty program - which provides possibly the best return for award stays. The best part of the program, which has summer and winter versions, is its simplicity - you get a free 1 night stay in India / Dubai / Indonesia / Mauritius / Egypt if you complete 5 nights across any of the participating Oberoi hotels in India. The summer program usually runs from April through September each year.

Now, maybe because they're finding it hard to run a summer and a winter program each year, or because they haven't had a good run with 2014 revenues, Oberoi is extending the qualifying period for the summer 2014 program, right up to March 2015. This means you get another 6 months to qualify for your free night. That also means there won't be a fresh Winter 2014 program.

I've mentioned in my previous post on this program, that the biggest downside to this offer is the high price of rooms in general at the Oberoi hotels. That hasn't changed, and so continues to be a challenge to this program.

Changes to the SPG program

Starwood has recently made some changes to the SPG program, some for the better and some not so. Gary (View from the wing) has written about these in detail, so I'll stick to the 2 most important things I see:

  • Gift award stays don't count any more: SPG considers award stays as part of qualifying stays towards elite levels. In the past, you could book an award stay for someone else (gift award) and continue to earn credit towards stays. That's no longer possible.
  • Retroactive membership possible: This is good news. You can now get retroactive credit for stays in the last 30 days. So if you, or someone you know, isn't yet registered with SPG but has had such qualifying stays, now's a good time to register with the program. 



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