A Couple of Welcome Typos (and 0.8 cents per mile!)

there are those agent mix-ups you don’t want to have to deal with: someone typing in SJO (San Jose, Costa Rica) instead of SJC for San Jose, California, for instance (luckily, has not happened to me). or not reissuing an award ticket correctly so you’re semi-stranded freaking out and racking up a cell phone bill trying to call the US from Madrid (this has). on the other hand, there are those that you want to happen over and over again in your travels.

earlier this year i flew this route round trip for about $152.11, in and of itself an amazing deal at 1.56 cents per mile (divide total cost by total miles earned — i think anything 6 cpm or less is a good deal).

as part of Milenomics‘ Be Your Own Elite program i’m slowly diversifying my earning strategy from my “beloved” United and Star Alliance. to that effect, i’ve started crediting all qualifying flights to [that airline with the Eskimo on its tail], including these. they were on LAN, which is a conglomerate of carriers. unfortunately, only the flights operated by LAN Chile credited properly. i wrote to the Eskimo airline (twice, first seemed to have been ignored?) and i did finally get credit for the flights operated by LAN Argentina and LAN Peru, but to my surprise, i calculated i got 0.8 cents per mile! zero-point-eight cents per mile!

it wasn’t until The Flight Deal (love, love, love them) noticed the typos which explained why i thought this deal was a heckuva lot better than i remembered!

manual crediting for the win! instead of typing in SCL, the airport code for Santiago, Chile, the agent typed in SLC, the airport code for Salt Lake City, Utah, one of the smaller hubs of a major partner of theirs (not naming names!). this welcome carelessness netted me almost double the miles i should have earned!

similarly, earlier this year (actually, i called them from Lima on the above trip during an overnight i had there) due to an agent’s mistake (i assume?) i got bumped up from a low-level economy fare (K class) to one higher up (H) for a fifteen-hour flight from Newark to Mumbai, India. this allowed me to put an upgrade request in, which i hope will clear!

these are the two most recent mistakes in my favor — many more have happened to me over the years. maybe i’m being a softie, but i rarely kvetch and complain when things go wrong (for the most part, i think i’ve been pretty lucky, though, *knock on wood*). i always feel like i’m taking advantage of the system as it is by buying cheap or mistake fares and making liberal use of elite benefits (i.e., entry-level travel hacking) and it’s mistakes like these that really reinforce my feeling that on the whole, i’ve gotten a lot more out of my travels than i’ve lost, and i should be grateful. that’s not to say i won’t fight for what’s right, but if someone forgets to add fuel surcharges to tickets or gives me 8,000 miles for free, who am i to complain? but yeah, overall, i’m fortunate to be able to travel like i do, and as much as i do, so i must remember instances like this every time i’m faced with a travel headache. yes, if they make a legitimate error in their favor i will call them out on it, but think about it — where would we all be if someone called out big business every time they made mistakes in our favor and they fought for what was rightfully theirs?