We're Going to Vegas, Baby!

Why it's sometimes worth making a polite call to an airline:

This past year, we went to the Las Vegas edition of the Electric Daisy Carnival. We had a fucking blast and wanted to do it again this coming year. However, for any such event, there's the problem of airfare expenses from the East Coast. This past year, we'd flown free by using a goodly chunk of the frequent flyer miles I'd banked from my days as a traveling professional services consultant. That chunk, however, left me a fair amount short for being able to do the same for 2019's EDC.

So, I signed up for an American Airlines rewards card so that I could pocket 60,000 frequent flyer miles. The cost of getting that bonus was spending across three months less than what I normally push through one of my cards in a few weeks' time. At any rate, those points finally posted a few weeks ago. So, I went to book the free trip for my wife and myself using those points. Unfortunately, by the time the points had posted to my account, the itinerary's cost in points had gone up (naturally) such that I was short, again.

One of my other credit cards is a hotel card. The chain has a transfer agreement with American that let me convert points. When I'd looked to see how many points I'd need to convert, I found a page that said "transfer before December 21st and get a 30% bonus." Score. That would let me book the trip with points to spare. So, I went to my hotel's site to initiate the conversion. The points showed up today. However, there was no 30% bonus present and I was still 500 points shy of the free itinerary. So, I called American.

The CSR was very helpful. She pulled up the page showing the bonus-offer and contacted her help desk. Since I was very close to my points needed and the help desk was potentially going to take a while, she comped me the necessary points to get me to my free trip. In the mean time, her help desk informed her that the bonus-offer web page we were both viewing was a 2017 offer that their web maintainers hadn't taken offline. However, since I'd acted in good faith (and have done a few hundred thousand miles of travel on the airlines that became the current incarnation of American), they comped me the bonus. Presumably, they'll be trying to figure out how to offline that stale page (since the page's terms only mentioned a month/day and not a year).

Now, to sort out hotel...