WestJet has introduced improvements to its Plus product, available for booking starting today (May 6) for travel beginning Sept. 14.
“The evolution of Plus is primarily targeted to business travellers who look for more comfort, flexibility and convenience,” said Bob Cummings, WestJet executive vice-president, Sales, Marketing and Guest Experience. “With our growing network of nearly 100 destinations, ever-improving flight schedule and loyalty benefits offered to WestJet Rewards members, we are well positioned to meet the needs of travellers who are always on the go.”
Guests in WestJet’s Plus seating will enjoy more personal space and comfort. Middle seats in Plus on WestJet’s Boeing Next Generation 737s will be outfitted with a new tray table between the aisle and window seat, giving guests a guaranteed empty middle seat for more space to work or relax during their flight. Seats in Plus on WestJet’s Boeing 767 aircraft will be wider than the airline’s current seats, arranged in a two-two-two configuration, with an aisle separating each set of two seats.
WestJet is upgrading meal options for guests in Plus to include a premium boxed meal on longer 737 flights and premium hot meals served on 767 flights, both with complimentary alcoholic beverages.
Air India, a Star Alliance member airline, is India’s national carrier. Headquartered in New Delhi, they offer passengers seamless travel across domestic and international routes. Air India serves over 50 domestic destinations and 31 international destinations in 19 countries across Australia, Asia, Europe and North America.
You can earn Aeroplan Miles on most scheduled flights operated by Air India.
Earning Aeroplan Miles on flights will change on March 1, 2015.
Earn miles when you purchase an eligible booking class and travel on flights operated by Air India. Some exceptions may apply.
Aeroplan Miles earned on all eligible Air India flights are also Altitude Qualifying Miles and count towards Air Canada Altitude™ status. For more details, please consult altitude.aircanada.com.
Be sure to provide your Aeroplan number when you make a reservation.
Always keep your ticket and boarding pass until the miles have been credited to your account. If the miles for a recent flight have not been credited, you can request the missing miles up to 11 months from the flight date. Learn more about Requesting Mileage Credit
Please refer to the charts below to see how many miles you will earn.
For codeshare flights marketed by Air India but operated by another Star Alliance member airline, the operating airline determines how many miles you earn for your flight. Therefore, the booking class that appears on your ticket may differ from the booking class that the operating airline uses to determine flight miles earned. Refer to the Eligible Flights Tab of the operating carrier.
Mileage earned is based on actual miles flown, the percentage of booking class accumulation and the minimum mile rule.
Charter flights operated by Air India are not eligible.
Codeshare flights marketed by Air India and operated by non-Star Alliance airlines are not eligible.
The ride-sharing service has increased in popularity since it began and has now expanded to 80 different communities across B.C., as well as areas in Alberta and Washington State.
By using Hitch, everybody saves money.
Return trip from Vancouver to Whistler
Hitcher
Driver
Bus
$50
Hitch
$35
Savings
$15
Gas cost
$40-60
$ per hitcher
$30
Gas cost
with 2 hitchers
$0
As a hitcher, you’d save you about $15 on a bus ticket since your cost of using Hitch is only around $35 (the gas contribution to the driver).
As a driver, the 120km between Vancouver and Whistler cost around $40-60 in gas (return). By taking 2 hitchers and asking each to contribute $30, your gas is covered!
Any contributions exceeding the gas money help drivers cover hidden costs, such as car insurance and maintenance.
The service is free to the drivers, but passengers are required to pay a small fee for their seats.
The company is still growing, but he says they’re attempting to provide incentives to potential drivers to post trips that are a minimum of 50 kilometres so the service can grow from city-to-city.
It seems like a great idea – filling empty inventory.
This is a great story! Meet travel bloggers Charli, 28, and Ben, 34, both from Norfolk, are one lucky couple living the house-sitting dream, having stayed in Las Vegas, Australia, Costa Rica, St Kitts and Nevis, New Zealand and Canada via the website trustedhousesitters.com.
The majority of homeowners sign up to the site because they have a pet who needs looking after – and all the evidence suggests that animals are much more comfortable being cared for in their home environment.
Trusted Housesitter’s Marketing Director, Laurence Bresh explains: ‘The pet owner saves a large cost on kennels, while sitters save a small fortune in accommodation while travelling.
‘Research shows that pets are much happier in their own base, keeping to their own routine, than in a kennel or a cage.’
No money changes hands – rather, homeowners and sitters pay a small monthly fee, with the exchange of services proving to be a win-win for both parties. The length of the placement can vary from a few days to a few months.
What a great idea for a young couple if they love pets.
Aeroplan has committed 1 million Aeroplan Miles split between three Canadian organizations that are responding to the call for aid for the tragic earthquake that struck Nepal on April 25th.
The three organizations are part of Aeroplan’s Beyond Miles program:
Aeroplan would like to ask its members to join us in supporting these organizations in their efforts in helping the people of Nepal recover from the devastating event. Visit www.aeroplan.com/donate for more information.
In addition to a corporate donation of 1 million Aeroplan Miles, Aeroplan Canada and its parent company Aimia will match its employees’ individual contributions worldwide to the Red Cross until May 25th.
Now that I have a house, I would love to rent our house on AirBnb for a weekend getaway or for our longer trips.
Here is a scary story from Calgary, where a Calgary couple with two children were left stunned after a group of Airbnb renters ravaged their home over the course of a weekend.
I am a big Plaza Premium fan (great wi-fi and service and so many lounges in Canada)!
Plaza Premium Lounge has opened its fourth location at Vancouver International Airport. It is located on the domestic departures level 3 of the domestic terminal, in the airport’s new A-B Connector. It’s nearly 600 square metres in area and has a seating capacity for 135.
Services include free high speed WiFi, computer work stations, charging sockets, TVs, magazines and newspapers. A self-serve buffet has hot/cold foods like pastas, soups and salads, plus beverages. Sleepy inbound long haul passengers waiting for their connection can grab a nap in semi-private rest rooms for an extra fee, and showers are also available.
When 3-star and 4-star hotels have unsold rooms, they use Hotwire to fill them, so you get them at prices lower than booking directly at the hotel. Hotwire® is similar to Priceline®, where you are shown the name of the hotel after you book to get hotel stays that are significantly below published prices.
When you visit Hotwire.com, you simply choose the Hotels option and enter your destination, dates, number of rooms, and number of adults and children that are staying.
After pressing the Find a hotel button, Hotwire® will take you to a page where you will see two tabs, Hotwire® Hot Rates and Standard Rates. The Standard Rates tab just shows hotels and the price per night is next to each listing. The Hotwire® Hot Rates tab breaks down the city by zone and star-rating.
In each zone you will see that price per room and included amenities are shown. If you click on the Area Map hyperlink, you will see what the zone boundaries are for the map.
Another nice feature in Hotwire® is that they provide a small sample of the hotels in that particular zone at the star-rating you are looking at. My experience has been that I rarely get a hotel that appears in this list, but that gives me enough information to make an educated guess as to which hotel I might get.
On the side of the page, you will find additional filters like star-rating, reviews, price, and hotel amenities. This is a nice feature, because if you are looking for a hotel with an indoor pool or free breakfast or free Internet, you can filter out hotels where those amenities are not available.
How to get a good price on Hotwire®?
Before you start to look closely at the prices, I recommend looking at historical information on what other users have received for hotel prices using Hotwire®.
I recommend using the website Hotels Deals Revealed. This is a forum where former Hotwire® users name the hotels they received from Hotwire®. Each user shares the price that they paid, along with the star rating, dates, and amenities included.
Another great resource is Better Bidding. This is another forum website where locations are organized by geographical area. The list in each thread list is only a compilation of hotels that have already been reported on the forum.
How to guess which hotel you’ll get on Hotwire®
One of the main reasons people avoid using Hotwire is the uncertainty in the hotel they are getting for a successful bid. I wanted to show an example of how you can use a combination of the Trip Advisor rating, amenities list, and other tools to make an educated guess to see what hotel is being offered to you.
We will work this sample listing in Orlando, Florida. It is rated a four-star hotel in the SeaWorld South area with a Fitness Center, Pool(s), Business Center, and Laundry Facilities (self-service).
If you click the “Book now” red box you will learn more details about the actual hotel. If you scroll down near the bottom of the page, you will see the customer ratings courtesy of TripAdvisor.com.
This shows that the mystery hotel has an average rating of 3.5 out of 5 on the TripAdvisor® website. Take a close look at the TripAdvisor® results and narrow down the star-level, and try to match the amenities and TripAdvisor® rating.
If you are unsuccessful matching up the mystery hotel, try using the website Hotwire® Revealed. Their results page will list all of the current Hotwire.com deals that match your criteria. Once you’ve found a hotel description you like, click the Reveal button to see which hotels it’s likely to be. The higher the match percentage of a particular hotel, the better the match between that hotel and the description you’ve selected.
Here is a sample of a reveal from Hotwire® Revealed.
The final recommendation I have is to use the Bid Goggles website. This website is a sophisticated database of Hotwire hotels. Bid Googles uses information sent to them from other Hotwire users that have recently made a purchase. The website matches the Hotwire description with the description of similar hotels that other travelers have visited.
Here is an example of a hotel search in Victoria, BC. One of the listings is for a four-star hotel for $94 per night. When I hover over the See hotels in this class hyperlink, the popup brings up hotels like the Victoria Marriott Inner Harbour, Delta Victoria Ocean Pointe, and the Fairmont Empress. The amenities for this hotel are also shown in the listing at the bottom.
With the information that you have from Hotwire®, copy the hotel’s amenities, star rating, and location into the Bid Goggles website and the tool will attempt to match that mystery hotel to a hotel in its database.
Reasons why you shouldn’t use Hotwire®
Hotwire® can save you money on your hotel room, but read these tips before you start booking:
Your booking is non-refundable.
All sales are final on Hotwire.com. I always wait until I am sure I will be making the reservation and not making any changes. I recommend booking a hotel that offers a free cancellation policy prior to booking with Hotwire®. This gives you a backup plan.
You will not earn points for your hotel’s loyalty program.
When staying using Hotwire® bookings, you will not earn any loyalty points. This means no points for the stay, and none of the benefits you might have by being a loyalty program member. If you have status in a hotel loyalty program, and want to take advantage of the benefits of that, you shouldn’t use Hotwire as your booking engine.
Hotels have the option to give you status benefits.
As a status member with several hotel chains including, Hilton, Marriott, and Priority Club, I have come to expect free Internet, lounge, and some type of breakfast. Booking through websites like Expedia or Hotwire, it is up to the hotel to decide if I am still eligible to receive these benefits.
Resort fees and parking are not included in the price.
These fees can be close to $20 per day, so they can certainly add up.
Air Canada has developed an app for the recently unveiled Apple Watch designed to make it even more convenient for customers on-the-go to obtain important travel information and initiate tasks such as checking-in.
“Air Canada is excited to offer customers the convenience of our new Air Canada app for Apple Watch. The app will allow customers to easily check their flight status and boarding times. They will also be able to save precious time with notifications that prompt them to check-in and board. The app further advances Air Canada’s mobile strategy of innovating with the latest technology to provide customers a wide variety of options for managing their travel using their preferred personal device,” said Craig Landry, vice-president of marketing at Air Canada.
With the Glance feature, the Air Canada app for Apple Watch readily provides customers with personal and relevant information about flights departing within a 24-hour window. Essential information can be displayed on the user’s Apple Watch and is frequently updated during the day of travel, including Actionable Notifications for check-in and boarding.
The app also includes a hand-off feature to enable customers to begin more complex tasks, such as checking-in, that can then be completed either on an iPhone or Mac computer. The Air Canada app for Apple Watch will be available in the Apple Watch App Store on April 24.
I enjoy staying in nice hotels but I hate paying full price for them! I have been using this website for years.
Priceline.com lets you bid for a hotel room. Priceline® has access to the excess hotel room inventory that hotel chains have. These are rooms that they believe they will not be able to book for a certain date. Priceline® is able to acquire these rooms at a low price, and allow you to bid on this inventory.
This type of booking is called opaque, because you will not see which hotel you are staying at until the purchase is confirmed.
I have some great tips in this guide that will help you get the rock-bottom price for your room. Before I explain some of my Priceline® bidding tips, I wanted to show how the Priceline.com works.
There are three main ways to book a hotel room on Priceline®:
List View
The results of your city search criteria are shown on this view. You can see the name of the hotel, and the exact price is displayed. You are able to sort by hotel name, distance from city center, price, and overall popularity.
Express Deals
The hotels listed on this tab show the price of the hotel, location, ratings, and amenities, such as a pool, restaurant, fitness center, or free Internet. You will not see the name or precise location of the property.
I have discovered that often you can figure out the identity of the hotel by the description and amenities listed. For example, this listing lets you choose your bed type, and based on the specific names of the room, the hotel is likely to be the Delta Vancouver.
If you book a Priceline® Express Deal and find a cheaper rate for this hotel, any time until the day before check-in, Priceline will match that price and give you an additional $25, with some conditions, of course.
There is no bidding involved using Express Deals, so it lets you find the location and amenities you need. If you are not comfortable bidding on a hotel room, I suggest using this alternative, to save some money over the standard room rate.
Name Your Own Price®
This option lets you bid on a hotel room. This option can potentially save you the most on your hotel room. Two main caveats: reservations are almost never refundable, and you do not have choice in the hotel amenities (hotel may not have a pool or restaurant). Additionally, the bids are always for two adults (so you may get stuck with a king-size bed for three adults). I always make sure that if I used the Name Your Own Price option that my travel dates will not change. Do not use Name Your Own Price if you only prefer to stay at Hilton brand hotels, or if your room must have a coffee maker.
When you bid on a hotel on Priceline®, the website will ask you specifically where you want to stay inside the city based on zones.
Here is a sample example of the available zones in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Look carefully at the map, and understand each zone, and how close you need to be to the airport or city center. Staying outside the city may or may not be worth it to you.
Clicking on the detail map hyperlink next to each zone will show a larger view of the area.
You can choose one zone or multiple zones where you would like to stay. As soon as at least one zone is selected, you can choose which star level of hotel you would like to bid for. When you choose a star level, you are bidding on every hotel at that level and above. If you select a zone, sometimes you will notice that not all star levels are available to be chosen. This means the zone does not have any star levels in that zone to bid in.
No hotels available above 3.5 stars in Langley, BC on Priceline bidding.
One of the first questions most people ask when they start to use the Name Your Own Price® option on Priceline® is, what should I start the bidding at?
My experience tells me that I need to see what general prices for hotels are available elsewhere on other websites. I look first at the Express Deals option to see what is available to purchase as opposed to bidding. If the city is full for a sporting event or convention, expect prices to be higher.
I go on Hotels.com to see what the four-star hotels are selling for, and it will sometimes tell me how many rooms are left at certain hotels so that I can see the demand. If many hotels are not available on Hotels.com, this tells me that availability is low, and that I should have a higher starting bid.
Another resource is The Bidding Traveller. This website lets you see the past successful bids for the city you are bidding on. It lets you see what hotels were available at a certain star level, and the price range of successful bids. This is a nice resource to have, as it lets you know the successful bid history for that city for Priceline. It also gives you an expectation of the hotels available for a certain star level in a city, based on past bids.
Another forum that shows past Priceline® successful bids is Betterbidding.com. They have each major city broken down by thread, and help give you a feel of what price you should be bidding.
Typically, if Priceline® does not accept your offer, you can change the star level or area you requested, and try again immediately. Or, you can try your exact same request again 24 hours later.
If you had a successful bid, your hotel will be shown immediately after purchase. Your hotel will be from either a national hotel chain or a preferred independent hotel partner.
Remember, that hotels are non-refundable, non-transferable, and non-changeable even if the reservation is not used.
Bidding Strategy
Even though I am getting a discount for my hotel stay because I do not know what the hotel name, I want to make sure that I maximize my discount.
Before you start to bid for a room, it is best to first do some research. Find out the current retail prices using other websites before you start to bid.
I always start my bid at 40-50% off the lowest Express Deal in the zone where I am looking to stay. As an example, if the Express Deal for a four-star hotel in Downtown Vancouver is $101 per night, I would start my bid at around $60-65, depending on my urgency to get a room reservation. The maximum I recommend bidding is $10 less than the same star rating in the zone that I am bidding on. In this case, I would bid up to $90 per night.
Free re-bids
I have a trick that will get you a free-rebid. Remember, earlier where I showed that not all star levels are available to be chosen in a zone? If you wanted to stay at a four-star hotel in Zone 4 (Downtown Vancouver) and the first bid was rejected, simply increase your bid and add a zone that doesn’t have a four-star hotel in its zone. You can continue this pattern of bidding until you have an accepted bid or you run out of re-bids. If you run out of free re-bids, just wait 24 hours.
Priceline® Change Requests
On one of our first trips together to Hawaii, my wife and I booked a hotel on the island of Oahu, when we were actually going to the Big Island. We called Priceline® to get this exception, but we had to rebid again for the right dates and location. You will typically only receive a refund if you win another bid. We still had to pay a service charge for cancelling the reservation (around $30 Canadian), but it saved us hundreds.
Use a cash back website like Ebates
If you use a cash back website, you will receive up to 5% cash back when you book any Priceline Name Your Own Price Hotel using Ebates.
Triple check your dates. The date selectors on the Priceline® home page tend to get a little bit slippery, and it’s easy to choose the wrong month. Check the month and day on every page, over and over again. You may be booking the right date in the wrong month.
Priceline® tips
Here are some tips before you start bidding on Priceline®:
If you stay at a resort in Priceline®, expect to pay resort fees, which can be around $10-20 per day per person. These fees are not a part of your winning bid.
When looking at the map for a city, pay extra attention to the zones. In Miami, the South beach zone has hotels that can be a considerable distance from the actual South Beach. In Las Vegas, the Las Vegas Strip Vicinity North zone has hotels that can be off the main strip by a fair distance.
Parking is also extra, so be aware that you could pay up to $20 per night, as this fee is not included as part of your winning bid.
Taxes are also not seen until the payment page, and this could be significant in some cities (tourism tax, hotel tax, and general state or provincial taxes).
Priceline® bids are non-refundable, and you must input your credit card information before making a bid. Make sure that you double-check your zones, desired star-rating, and final price on the confirmation page.
If you get a successful bid, place a call to the hotel to confirm your reservation with the type of room and/or bed you want.
Try not to bid below a four-star hotel. I find that the best deals are for four-star hotels and higher. Also, the quality of the hotel can be questionable at the lower star-levels. Some hotels that Priceline considers three and a half star, I consider a three or lower.
