News and notes from around the interweb:
- In 2014 Virgin Australia spun off its frequent flyer program raising $293 million at an $838 million valuation. They could be considering an IPO at a valuation of up to $2.5 billion on projected 2017 earnings of $250 million.
- Airline and hotel award search tool Pex Portal now offers a premium version that starts at 10 cents a search ($5 for 50 searches) and awards 3 Alaska Mileage Plan miles per dollar on larger purchases of points that do not expire.
- 3,500 PEX Points one-time purchase
- 1,250 PEX Points monthly purchase
- 1,000 PEX Points/month purchase paid annually
- 3,500 PEX Points one-time purchase
- Shangri-La and Taj Hotels have a new loyalty program partnership in some ways similar to what Hyatt and MGM pioneered two and a half years ago (and are now diluting).
- 2 hurt when airport catering truck does nosedive (HT: Ken A.)
- Doha – Canberra and Doha – Las Vegas do strike me as odd choices for Qatar Airways destinations.
- American has chosen IBM as its cloud service provider over Amazon and Microsoft after a bake off we learned about in September.
- Government ownership of airports in the US is an anomaly
@Gary — PEX may not be ready for primetime. Searching for award travel in First Class for two between SFO-JFK, and specifically looking for Virgin American and/or JetBlue — both allow one-way travel — I received the following message: “Oops, looks like there aren’t any flight results for your filtered search. Try to broaden your search criteria for better results.” However, by checking each website, there were plenty of available seats . . .
@Jason – VA made some drastic changes yesterday that had affected the connection. This has been resolved and it’s working on PEX+ now.
Great to hear — thanks, Jessica!