I got a letter from T-Mobile last night saying their free companion flight offer, for which you need to either buy a phone or extend your contract 2 years, was available to their ‘top 5%’ customers. I’m apparently top 5% because I’ve been with them since they were Aerial, then Voicestream, and finally T-Mobile. That’s approximately 40 years.<\/p>\n
I signed up to figure out what the catch is; you buy one ticket and get a second free, it’s good til February 2010 to anywhere in the contiguous United States, and you have to book 30 days in advance. Easy, right?<\/p>\n
The catch is the pricing. They use a zone chart<\/a>. Those prices aren’t even entirely accurate; everything I searched for cost between $600-700 for a single ticket. However, the FAQ mentions a price match:<\/p>\n TLC guarantees that if a fare listed in the Zone Chart exceeds a published rate, on an available flight by 25%, the Zone Fare will be reduced to match the competition, plus 15%. (Example: If TLC’s Zone Fare Chart lists a fare of $250, and you find the same flight for $150, which is 60% more, the Zone Fare will be considered for adjustment. Upon TLC’s verification of the fare and availability, TLC will match the $150 fare plus 15%; therefore, for this example, the zone fare would be $172.50. You can then book the flight, pay $172.50 for the first fare, and get the Companion Flight for Free. The combination of two (2) flights\/tickets through the T-Mobile Free Companion Flight promotion presents a savings of $127.50 or 43%. All standard taxes and fees will apply.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I decided to do some research on that, and came up with an example. MSP-LAX 1\/22-1\/25 on NWA costs $645.20 on the ‘free companion fare’ site. On NWA.com<\/a>, it’s $279. According to their site, they should sell me that flight at $320, and give me a free second ticket. Right? Right.<\/p>\n I’ll be doing more work on this. The only thing I like more than travel is free travel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I got a letter from T-Mobile last night saying their free companion flight offer, for which you need to either buy a phone or extend your contract 2 years, was available to their ‘top 5%’ customers. I’m apparently top 5% because I’ve been with them since they were Aerial, then Voicestream, and finally T-Mobile. That’s …read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vacation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9qt-hg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1070\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/queenofsubtle.com\/cm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}