SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2010 WHAT’STHEDEAL?
This week’s best travel bargains around the globe
LAND lSeveral hotels and resorts in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains are offering fall golf packages. For example, FernwoodHotel & Resort, a 440-acre property with a championship golf course, has a midweek stay-and-play package for $144 per night that includes accommodations for two and two rounds of golf. The package includes a golf cart, greens fees and all taxes. Booked separately, the roomwould cost $86 with taxes and the golf $88. Info: 888-FERNWOOD, www.
fernwoodhotel.com. For a list of other hotels: www.poconosgolf. com. lMexico’sMarquis Los Cabos Resort, an all-suite beachfront property in Baja California, is having a one-day sale on Sept. 16,Mexican Independence Day. Rooms will go for $200 per night vs. the normal starting rate of $326. Add $28 in taxes and a $35 resort fee per night.
Stay through Dec. 20. To book, call 877-238-9399 on Sept. 16. Resort info:
www.marquis
loscabos.com. lMarco IslandMarriott Beach Resort in southwest Florida has an Endless Summer package through Oct. 2 that includes perks valued at $450. Rooms start at $199 per night double, which covers unlimited golf, tennis and sailing; breakfast for two; use of beach umbrella and chairs; admission to the kids’ club for two children; and spa access for two adults. Add $20 per night in taxes. Use promo code ZJL. Resort info: www.
marcoislandmarriott.com. Reservations: 800-GET-HERE,
www.marriott.com/mrkfl.
SEA
lOrbitz has several deals for September and October cruises with prices atmore than half off the lines’ brochure rates. For example, Norwegian Cruise Line’s three-night round-trip cruise fromMiami to the Bahamas starts at $179 per person double, compared with the brochure price of $499. Sail Oct. 1-4 or Oct. 29-Nov. 1. The
KLMNO
cost for two, including all taxes, is $520. Info: 888-656-8184,
www.orbitz.com.
AIR
lVirgin America has a sale on nonstop flights from Washington Dulles to Los Angeles and San Francisco, with one-way fares starting at $109. Round-trip fare, including taxes, totals $239. Book by Sept. 13 for travel through Nov. 17. Info: 877-359-8474, www.
virginamerica.com. lAmerican has fall and winter sale fares to Tokyo from several U.S. cities. Round-trip fare fromNew York’s JFK is $962, including taxes. From Washington Dulles: $1,182. Book by Sept. 14 for travel Oct. 22-Dec. 15. Delta, Continental and United arematching. Info: 800-433-7300,
www.aa.com.
PACKAGE
lTourCrafters is offering off- seasonMarkets of Europe packages to Paris and Nice, France; Sicily;Madrid; and Istanbul, with an emphasis on local color and fresh food.Most
are five days/four nights and all include round-trip air from Washington Dulles, hotel accommodations and daily breakfast. The Paris package, for example, focuses on the Marche des Enfants Rouges in theMarais quarter; prices start at $1,038 per person double. Add about $115 per person in taxes. Booked separately, airfare would run about $710, hotel $525 and breakfast $60. The Paris/Nice and Paris/Istanbul trips have been combined into longer packages that include a free stopover in Paris and up to two free hotel nights on specific dates. Travel Nov. 1-March 31. Info: 800-621-2259, www.
tourcrafters.com.
—K.C. Summers
Submit travel deals to
whatsthedeal@washpost.com. Please include your phone number and e-mail address. Prices were verified Thursday afternoon when the Travel section went to press, but deals sell out and availability is not guaranteed. Restrictions such as blackout dates and advance purchase may apply.
ZOFIA SMARDZ/THE WASHINGTON POST The Philadelphia Sofitel is more crepe than cheesesteak. BY ZOFIA SMARDZ How could someone with a
name like Zofia not adore a hotel chain with a name like Sofitel? I mean, it’s named afterme! Well, not really, but I’ve always
thought that it sounded thatway. (Just read that “z” at the start of my moniker as an “s” and you’ll get my drift.) In fact, when the luxury French chain started pop- ping up a couple of decades ago, my first thought was that itmust be Bulgarian. You know, as in the capital, Sofia. (I was wrong, thank goodness.) I’ve tried to get to the bottom
ISTOCKPHOTO For travelers interested in visiting Japan during the fall, severalU.S. airlines are offering sale prices on their routes to Tokyo.
Bailing out of programs that reward royalty over loyalty THE NAVIGATOR
Christopher Elliott JQuitting a frequent-flier
program looks easy: You cut up your card and donate the miles to charity. And that’s it. But after a recent column in
which I questioned the value of loyalty programs, I realized that there’s a little more to it. Living miles-free in a world that’s polluted with points is exceedingly difficult—and for some, impossible. Vera Finberg decided to toss
herUnited Airlines miles into the recycling bin after a recent trip to Australia andNew Zealand. The carrier had made her buy more miles to redeem an award ticket and denied her priority wait-listing benefits because of a technicality, she says. “We canceled ourUnited
credit card after that,” she told me. “I go to Boston every six weeks and will travel to L.A. this summer. I may even go to Europe in the fall. I won’t fly on United for any of these trips. JetBlue getsmy vote for trips to Boston, and I’mtrying Virgin America to L.A. So long, United!” Problem is, people like
Finberg, a retiree who lives in Fairfax, will now be tempted to join JetBlue’s or Virgin’s loyalty programs, which may work better for her but in all likelihood will just work better for the company offering the incentives. It’s easy to see why people
might be having doubts about their loyalty. Take the issue of seat availability. A recent survey found that from June to October, 68 percent of the United award seats requested were available.United’s numbers are so-so in comparison with those of other carriers. Southwest Airlines ranked highest, with a 99 percent availability rate for the same period, whileUS Airways trailed the pack with just 10 percent. (Neither Virgin America nor JetBlue was surveyed.)
TRAVEL There’s also the value of
points. Airline miles have been assessed as being worth anywhere from one-tenth of a cent to no more than two cents a mile, and not by an admitted skeptic like me, but by the companies themselves. If airlines are calling their
own loyalty points worthless and acting as if they are worthless, is it any wonder that customers are doing the same? AliceWatchke, a teacher
members have earned, but by some estimates, there are several trillion unredeemed miles floating around out there. If you do the math, it’s obvious that travelers are on the losing end of that equation. Air travelers aren’t the only
ones terminating their loyalty program memberships. Anita Lewallen, a homemaker from Plymouth,Mich., threwher HiltonHHonors membership card in the trash after the hotel chain recently revised its redemption levels. But not before she burned up all her points. “We decided that we would
LUCI GUTIERREZ FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
fromMinneapolis, dropped her American Express credit card, which had allowed her to earn Delta Air Lines miles. She says that leaving was easy; the card made promises it didn’t keep. “When we enrolled, the ads
all said, ‘Round trip flights for 20,000 miles,’” she recalls. So she began collecting miles; she amassed 45,000 and her husband earned 62,000. When the time came to cash them in, she was told that she’d have to either pay a $150 renewal fee plus 60,000 miles each for the desired tickets, or buy the miles for an additional $400. Instead, she canceled her card. There’s no telling how many disgruntled frequent fliers and guests such asWatchke are out there. Travel companies do not disclose loyalty program membership numbers, nor do they reveal the number of miles
use up our earned points as soon as possible, before they were devalued again, and that we would stay at aHilton property only if the price was far below the competitors’ , ” she said. “Since that is not likely to happen,Hilton has lost our business.” But the problem, as I mentioned, isn’t leaving. It is instead feeling as if you’re being left behind. If you stop collecting miles and no longer try to earn elite status, you’re doomed to spend the rest of your flights stuck in economy class, and at hotels, you could end up with the worst room in the house: You know, the one between the elevator and the ice machine. How do you live in a world
where you can earn a mile for anything?How do you travel with any dignity when you’re punished for saying no to loyalty programs? The difficult answer is that you must.Until we break our collective addiction to miles and tell travel companies that they can’t play customer-service games according to our loyalty status, nothing will change. If you’re annoyed by those red-carpet boarding areas at the airport and by the way elite fliers are treated like royalty while the rest of us in the back of the plane suffer, just wait.
Editor: Joe Yonan • Deputy Editor: Zofia Smardz • Art Directors: Marty Barrick, Alla Dreyvitser • Staff Writers: Andrea Sachs, Nancy Trejos • Editorial Assistant: Becky Krystal • Travel Advertising: Joseph E.
Teipe Jr., 202-334-6250 • To respond to one of our articles: E-mail
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Call 800.266.2444 to plan your vacation.
wintergreenresort.com
Travel companies are actively looking for newways to segment us, giving their best services to their top customers and leaving the scraps to the ordinary tourists. It won’t be long before there’s a completely different set of rules: one for the haves and one for the have- nots. PeterHansen, a former elite-
level customer, doesn’t want to live in that kind of world.He believes that companies aren’t really loyal to their customers, something he found out the hard way when he retired. “It was truly amazing how
quickly the preferred status turned into forgotten status,” he said. “The loyalty simply evaporated.” To which I say:Why should
travelers wait?
Elliott is National Geographic Traveler magazine’s reader advocate. E-mail him at
celliott@ngs.org.
of this name thing, but no luck so far. One of these days. For now, it was high time for me to stop adoring from afar and see up closewhether the brand’s proper- ties actually liveduptomy infatu- ation with their appellation. Which is how I found myself recently at the Philadelphia Sofi- tel, walking down a somewhat dimly lit hallway, staring at a carpet patterned in squiggly rows of blue and brown squares that was making me feel ever-so- slightly seasick. “This is not your usual opulent
style,” observedmy perspicacious husband, astutely pinpointing my definition of luxe as rococo and gilt trappings, and the glitzi- er the better. Give me a chande- lier drippingwith crystal and silk brocades in rainbow hues. There was none of that in this
hotel, which was all stripped- down modernity and quiet earth tones. The only thing that came close was the striking floral dis- play in the lobby, an abstract confection of rose bouquets and some strange orange plant stretching across a metal trellis. Flowers can’t help themselves, they’re just opulent. They smelled wonderful, too, and they did serve to dress up the tempo- rarily unhappy lobby, which was suffering fromconstruction (well concealed, but still) on a new bar set to open in October. So no. Notmy usual style. And
yet, when we passed through the two-toned-wood door that opened into our eighth-floor room, something came over me. Acertain je ne sais quoi. Literally. The hotel literature promises a blend of French elegance and American style, and the staff strive mightily to achieve it (we heard “bonjour” and “bonsoir” and “merci beaucoup” ina variety of American accents throughout
DETAILS Hotel Sofitel Philadelphia 120 S. 17th St. 215-569-8300
www.sofitel.com Rooms from $200 a night.
our stay). But in the room, some odd decorating alchemy seems to make it happen. Within fiveminutes of settling
in, I felt as though I was back in Paris, in a roomwe’d once stayed in that was oddly similar to this one.Of course, in Pariswe’d had a balconywith a viewof the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe in the distance. Here, our picture win- dow overlooked inner-city Philly rooftops. Not what you’d call expansive. Yet somehow the ambiance
was the same.Therewas definite- ly elegance (and a hint of Japa- nese influence) in the room’s wood accents, the wood-paneled wall behind the bed, the Frank Lloyd Wright-style French doors to the bathroom. And the bath- room: Granite and marble-look perfection. Commodious. A bam- boo shoot in a slender vase lend- ing that touch of class. Huge floor-to-ceiling mirror (knowing the importance of a good mirror —now that’s French). “Sure like that bathroom,” my
husband declared more than once. Hewas as takenwith it as I was with the bed. That would be the SoBed: all hypoallergenic, with a featherbed atop the mat- tress and a fabulous poufy duvet (changed for each guest!) to snuggle under in the (spectacu- larly silent) air-conditioning. A bed to “remind you that the perfect sleep exists,” read the roomliterature, and itwas true. I not only slept like a baby, I dreamed I was . . . in Europe. Honestly. And the next day,when I asked
the front-desk clerkhowthehotel was faring in its faceoff with the new Hotel Palomar right across the street, she assured me it was doing fine. “They’re such differ- ent hotels,” she said. “We tend to bemore subduedinour approach and decor.” Which meant that the other
hotel was maybe more opulent. Moremy style. Ah, but this was the Sofitel. It
may not be named for me, but I always knew I’d adore it.
smardzz@washpost.com
EZ EE
F3 BEDCHECK
What’s in a name? Uh, letme sleep on it.
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