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Hello from Singapore, after a fabulous Kenny Rogers concert last night, part of his final world tour! It isn't everyday that one gets to listen to The Gambler live! All set for Kenny "'The Gambler" Rogers! Also, I'm staying at the Holiday Inn Singapore Atrium, where ASan stayed a few months back , and I simply love HANDY ! Meanwhile, here's a round up of the week that was - a summary of posts on this blog as also other things travel, aviation, points and miles that we found interesting.Hope you had a great week, and here's wishing you the very best in the next one! To begin with on a slightly sombre note, earlier this week, EK521 from TRV to DXB crash-landed at DXB. All passengers and crew were safely evacuated, but in the aftermath of all of this, racism reared its ugly head (again). Here's where we stand on that topic . Airline News Reviving the Maharajah’s expiring miles , at Rs 0.60 a mile. Worth it? Coming to grips of the beating Jet Privilege has...

About two and half years back, Air India partnered with State Bank of India to bring two co-branded credit card variants - Signature and Platinum. At the time, I rated the AI-SBI Signature card as possibly one of the best credit cards around , in terms of mileage earning and related benefits. Effective 11 April 2016, however, all of that bites the dust, after a massive devaluation . Here's more... Here are the changes in detail, and you can look up the summary announcement here . Bonus miles earning The AI-SBI card offered some of the best miles earning opportunities. These came from spends, both directly as well as from bonus miles for achieving certain spend thresholds. Base spends earned 4 AI Flying Returns (FR) miles per Rs 150 of spend, and 20 miles per Rs 100 for spends on Air India's website. That part remains unchanged. However, one of the best earnings came from bonuses based on spend thresholds, as follows: Rs 300,000 - 20,000 bonus miles Rs 500,000 - 20,000 bonus mil...

Today, Air India formally joined Star Alliance as a full member , after years of uncertainty and near misses, and also  some last minute suspense . What this means is that it opens up a lot of Indian destinations for Star Alliance fliers globally, and also enables travellers from India to get to over 1300 international destinations. It is also of keen interest to those that are looking to earn and burn miles, and Air India has announced precisely that, today, and that's what this post is all about. Earning AI miles Earning miles on AI's Flying Returns program will be at set percentages, depending on the operating carrier. AI has published an earnings chart that you can access here , but for quick reference, I've summarised the information in the image below. Note, that where there's a range mentioned, it will depend on the class of booking - you can get that information on AI's published chart (linked above). I like that you can earn up to 300% of base miles for fir...

Today - 23 June 2014 - will be a big day for Air India as later in the day, Star Alliance will decide on AI's induction into the alliance. AI's membership, if granted, will end its 7-year wait to join Star Alliance, which in turn will give it access to Star's global network of over 18,000 daily flights to 193 countries. Here are some statistics about Star Alliance: 18,000 daily flights Flying to 1,269 airports across 193 countries 4,338 aircraft currently operated by the existing Star Alliance members 640 million passengers carried in a year (to put that in perspective, Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport which is possibly the busiest airport in the world, handles 95 million passengers a year). But it isn't for AI's sake that I'm hoping for their membership to be approved. As any true blue points and miles enthusiast will agree, the whole thing is about miles and status. Firstly, the miles. I've written about AI joining Star Alliance in the past (you ca...

Earning air miles without flying isn't anything great. Many travel blogs and "services" offer advice on how to rack up thousands, if not millions, of air miles without ever setting foot on a plane. I'm not talking about any of that. I was checking my points and miles accounts earlier today, if only as a way to break the monotony while catching up on several hours of lost sleep, after my crazy travel week . That's when I came across something really strange. Some of you may remember an earlier account of mine  from a month back, when I was travelling CCU-MAA and had to go through security twice in 20 minutes. At that time, I had to cancel an AI ticket and rebook on Indigo instead, because I received a message very close to my original departure time that the AI flight had been delayed for many hours. I never took that AI flight, and I received a complete refund on it. In fact, there was some issue with my travel agent on the refund, and AI wrote back in response to...

In December 2013, Star Alliance announced that they were working with Air India to integrate AI into Star Alliance, and that Ai would be joining them as a member airline. At the time, I wrote about what effects this could mean for us fliers, as well as AI and Jet. The first update on this front is that Star Alliance seems to be happy with AI's progress on the integration, as this piece  from the Economic Times reports. Christian Klick of Star Alliance's corporate office is quoted as saying...                  ...Integration of Air India with our network is on track.                  ...it's up to the airline to decide when to join the club, which currently has 28 members,                      including  Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines and United.  and                  ...Air India ...

Air India is currently running a promotion for double the eligible miles on all its metro-to-metro city flights within India, for flights till 30 April 2014 . This offer is a redux of the promo that Air India ran in Q3 of calendar 2013, for 2x miles on metro sectors. Earning miles generally is hard enough, and Air India makes it harder by letting you earn miles based on your booking fare class (something that Jet used to do up until a couple of years ago). However, any miles are good miles, so if you fly AI a little (or a lot), then do look out for these extra miles because they will certainly help. The offer is valid on flights between pairs of the following cities: Delhi  Mumbai Hyderabad Kolkata Chennai Bangalore I've said this before, that AI isn't the best airline around, but I have the feeling that they're trying quite hard to shed their negative image. Also, I'd like to have some AI miles in my bag in case they eventually do get into Star Alliance - but that'...

I know its been a couple of weeks into 2014, but (and so) I thought I'd take stock of my status on the loyalty programs important to me. To be honest, almost all my travel is official (read: paid for by clients), which means I don't get to decide what airline I fly or where I stay, as often as I'd like to. Also, there are no co-branded credit card programs in India that will offer you status with airlines or hotels (in fact, it is usually the other way - airline status gets you fee waivers on high-end credit cards). Therefore, much of my status is through special promos or status matching, or in one case, simply good fortune in 2013. Also, you'll find that where I do have some level of elite status, it is usually mid-tier and not top-tier. This is a natural consequence of relying on promos. Read on, see if you've missed something, and equally importantly, see if I've missed an offer for elite status (in which case, do leave a comment; my thanks in advance!). Air...

I recently wrote about the Air India-SBI co-branded credit card , which has some rather unique features. In particular, this includes the uniquely high level of threshold bonuses. Now, reader Deepak MV has an ongoing spreadsheet on Google Docs that he keeps updating, and at my request, he has been most kind in updating that spreadsheet to include the AI-SBI card as well. Thank you, Deepak! You can find that spreadsheet here . I'd only like to add, that the spreadsheet shows you results for an annual spend of Rs 300,000. But as I had reported earlier, higher spending thresholds lead to much higher bonuses, more than proportional. And if you want to reach Deepak, then  you can contact him here . I do hope this helps you in your search for the optimum credit card in India!

Image courtesy: The Hindu Business Line I’ve written in the past about how under-matured the Indian market is, as regards loyalty programs. You can read more about that here , and as a friend of mine mentioned earlier today, the India scenario is probably 15-20 years behind most mature markets. I can’t disagree. But here’s a little something to perk up your day, particularly if you fly Air India. Now, I used to detest flying AI (OK, detest is probably too strong, but you get the general drift, right?), but of late, I’ve found them to be pretty OK, considering that in the full-service airline market in India, their only competition is from Jet Airways, who are trying their best to compete with AI as to who’s worse! Plus, Jet's FFP - Jet Privilege - isn't exactly the greatest loyalty program around. So when Air India and State Bank of India recently launched their co-branded credit card, the Air India – SBI Signature credit card, I was definitely interested. At the time it was an...