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So if you spend $1000 dollars on lyft, you're ~1/30th of the way to a free domestic flight. Seems like a better deal would be taking the cheaper of lyft or uber
by tmh79 9y ago
So if you spend $1000 dollars on lyft, you're ~1/30th of the way to a free domestic flight. Seems like a better deal would be taking the cheaper of lyft or uber, not chasing the miles. I think a more useful partnership would be with the drivers, because they're usually racking up a lot more money & time with these services than the consumers are, and it would be difficult to get something useful out of this when you're getting a ~1% reward (miles valued about 1c/point) without doing a lot of volume.
- viraptor 9y agoThere's rarely any airmiles offer that's worth chasing. (If you weren't interested in the first place) Most are just to tempt you. But it's nice as a bonus.
- cft 9y ago$25,000 spent on Lyft gives you one domestic roundtrip. Assuming $10 per ride, it's 2500 rides, or 10 years to earn a ticket if you take Lyft 250 days per year.
- tootie 9y agoIf you're the kind of person who gets elite status on Delta, you're probably traveling a lot and taking a lot of taxi rides. I only travel a few weeks a year, but I can easily rack up a few hundred dollars of Lyft fares spending a week away from home base.
- malandrew 9y agoIf you're racking up a lot of flying miles, you probably would want this feature for Uber instead of Lyft since Uber operates in cities outside the US. Only someone who only frequently flies delta only for domestic travel would find utility of this from Lyft and event then Uber is comparable domestically.
- hkmurakami 9y agoThis might play into one of those corporate reimbursement principal agent problems where the employee gets to keep the points but doesn't pay the fare so they will choose options with the best bonus points.
- xapata 9y agoWhich is largely the reason hotels cost as much as they do.
- ghaff 9y agoCitation needed. Lots of hotels with no or very limited loyalty programs are similar in pricing to the big chains. You could equally argue that loyalty programs help fill rooms and improve yields.
- hkmurakami 9y agofwiw most large companies get steep discounts at said major hotel chains.
- xapata 9y agoI'll cite my personal experience. I've paid hundreds of dollars for a hotel night when on an expense account. As a tourist in the same city, I'll pay much less. The loyalty programs are irrelevant for this issue. There's a bit of cartel behavior going on. So long as no one drops price dramatically, all the "business" hotels can stay roughly equal. The "cereal wars" of the late 1990s show what can happen when an industry competes on price -- demand stays constant and revenues drop. Maybe hotels are different, but I'd suspect that's only for tourism. Business travel is likely inelastic with respect to hotel costs.
- ghaff 9y agoIt depends a lot. I have pretty high elite status on United and I take very few taxis/uber--maybe10 or fewer a year. I do get cars to the airport but Lyft/Uber aren't useful to me for that.
- dillondoyle 9y agoI don't drive and get 'corporate' uber (spoiled me). With my monthly spend 1% could get me to my favorite place business class (DEN - GUA)! Wonder if it has a cap though - many 1% credit card cash back offers I've found cap at just a few hundred a year.
- astura 9y agoI don't know about Delta's policies specifically but miles usually expire after 2 years or so of inactivity. The really nice thing about this is that earning 5 miles on a Lyft ride is "activity" and resets that 2 year (or whatever) mark. So if you aren't travelling for a couple years (injury, job loss, newborn?) but want to not worry about your airline miles expiring. I lost a whole bunch of miles I earned on work travel due to inactivity. My job stopped sending me on travel and I wasn't ready to use them yet.
- jressey 9y agoI think the best economic play is to almost always avoid loyalty programs. They exist to prevent the consumer from having the opportunity to price compare on a per instance basis.