FFB News Round Up: Air Canada Zone Boarding, HHonors Lifetime Diamond Status, SPG Free Internet and more

Air Canada introduced a boarding by zone process on December 15. (Source Rewards Canada)

American AAdvantage has set out a year long premium
class flight bonus for 2015. Depending on your AAdvantage/Dividend Miles
status and/or the premium fare class you book you can earn anywhere
from to 250 to 12,000 bonus AAdvantage miles on each and every flight
you take in 2015. Find out more here.

Delta SkyMiles Medallion members will now get elite status with Hertz Gold Plus Rewards. Find out more here.

Apparently this launched on November 20th but we didn’t find out about
it until we got an email yesterday from WestJet. WestJet continues to
grow the WestJet Rewards program as they slowly add more partners. Delta
Airlines is now the second airline partner of the program after
American Airlines that you can earn WestJet Rewards dollars on. At this
time there is still no news about being able to redeem WestJet Dollars
for flights on their partner airlines.

The Dollar earning for flights on Delta is the same as American Airlines
and is based upon distance flown and the fare class your ticket is
booked into. As you can see by the chart you will earn anywhere from 3
to 15 WestJet dollars per Delta flight.

It is nice to see more airline partners being added to the WestJet
Rewards programs. The only thing we are waiting for is the ability to
redeem WestJet Dollars on these partner airlines! If that becomes a
reality then the almighty WestJet Dollar will becoming way more valuable
since you’d have access to flights around the globe to redeem for. This
new earning option is also a potentially good choice for disgruntled
Delta SkyMiles members here in Canada because of all the negative
changes happening to that program in 2015.

You can read more about earning WestJet Dollars on Delta flights here.

As of
January 1st 2015 you’ll be able to earn Delta SkyMiles on WestJet
flights. We also didn’t mention that techincally you can redeem your
WestJet Reward dollars on certain Delta flights. Those flights are the
ones where WestJet codeshares on and your ticket is actually issued as a
WestJet ticket (not Delta). Here is the SkyMiles earning chart for
flying on WestJet:

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Hilton HHonors will be rolling out Lifetime Diamond status in 2015. No real details are out yet however. (Source LoyaltyLobby)

If you look closely at the latest email from Hyatt Gold Passport you’ll
see that they are teasing members with their next systemwide promotion.
Stay More Play More will launch on January 15 and we are guessing it
will be similar to Endless Possibilities which ran last winter. Stayed
tuned right here on Rewards Canada in January as we bring you the
details of this new promotion!

InterContinental Hotels Group has agreed to acquire the Kimpton
Hotels brand of boutique hotels. There are few details yet outside of
the actual acquisition but one could assume that the Kimpton brand will
become an IHG Rewards Club earn and burn option (well
hopefully) but there may also be fears that the uniqueness of Kimpton
and the services it provides may be diluted. Only time will tell. Find out more about the acquisition here. (Source: TravelBloggerBuzz)

Starwood Preferred Guest is following in Marriott
Rewards footsteps and will begin to offer free Internet to all guests
who are SPG members and book via spg.com, the SPG app or any of the nine
Starwood Hotel brand websites. This new benefit will start on February
2, 2015. Find out more here.

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