Triangle Trip

How much is 10,000 United miles worth to you?

Are you willing to sacrifice three stays toward status at your favorite hotels (Starwood, Marriott, Hilton, etc.)?   Are you willing to forgo your free weekend nights at Starwood or free golf club offers from Crowne Plaza?  Are you willing to experience a motel for business travel (ghetto it up!)?  If so, here’s a deal for you!

Wyndham Hotel is offering 10,000 United miles in exchange for three stays at three of their hotels.  You will need to register or enroll (link to registration page) for a Wyndham account. After you have enrolled/registered, you must choose to earn United miles for your Wyndham stays. To get the 10,000 United miles, you will need to complete THREE stays at THREE DIFFERENT Wyndham branded properties. This means you cannot have all three stays at a Wyndham. Below is a list of the Wyndham family of hotels for you to choose wisely:

You will have to complete your three stays at three different brands between May 15, 2009 to September 10, 2009.  Unlike the Crowne Plaza offer which doesn’t allow you to have Priority Club points for your free nights, Wyndham will allow you to earn normal United miles for the three stays.  You should see your 10,000 bonus United miles in November or early December (6 to 8 weeks after the end of the promotion).

Aside from the Wyndham (which I have stayed at 2 to 3 times), all of the hotels on the list are like motels at best. I am not sure if I would stay there for business – maybe Ramada (and that’s a stretch). I have stayed at a Knights Inn and Travelodge when I was traveling as a college intern but that was years and years ago.  You might get lucky with Hawthorn Suites.  I have driven by a few and they looked new, especially the one’s near the airports.

As a member of (Fly) Clear, I given free Gold membership to Regus – the virtual office company. As a Regus Gold member, you can access to Regus location’s business lounges and get complimentary Internet access. Gold membership is generally $300 per year.

Here’s the link to register and get your free Gold membership. Enter “CLEAR” as the Activation Code.

The registration process is pretty painless. Just fill in some personal information and the gold card will be mailed to you in a few weeks. We’ll be visiting a few Regus locations and will provide some reviews in the near future.

Seeing the promotions about Virgin America (VX) Wi-Fi aka: Gogo, I had to test it out its on-board Internet service.  The first thing was to book a Wi-Fi enabled flight.  Fortunately, the majority of Virgin America’s flights are Gogo-enabled, and Virgin America’s aim is to enable all their planes by the end of summer 2009.

The cost plan for Virgin America Wifi (Gogo) is as follows:

• $12.95 for flights of 3 hours or more
• $9.95 for flights less than 3 hours

Now for actual speeds, I ran a couple tests from different sites:

Realistically, I browsed a few sites for my own testing purposes.  Virgin’s WiFi download speeds are great.  ESPN and CNN loaded within a few seconds.  Hulu and Youtube could stream video without any interruption.  Upload speeds on the other hand were slow, I tried to upload a 2MB file, and I had to stop it because it took long.

Overall, the Gogo connection is good.  I would pay for Virgin’s Gogo on-board Internet service for a longer flight.  My flight was only an hour and only about 30 minutes of actual use, but anything longer than 1 hour of actual use, I would consider to pre-occupying myself on a Virgin plane.