point fu

Well, I just had my $550 Amex Platinum annual fee hit my account. I'd read online that people were getting retention bonus offers so I thought I'd give them a call and see what they said. Long story short: they're giving people 50,000 point retention bonuses since Covid has really negated most of the card's perks, but because they gave me a retention bonus last August , I'm not eligible. Furthermore, they told me if I canceled or downgraded the card, I'd forfeit those 50,000 points since they were considered a "bonus for keeping the card for a whole year". Well, you win some, you lose some.

In early January we bought tickets for an April trip to Australia through American Express Travel. With all of the Covid-19 lockdowns around the globe, it slowly became clear our trip wasn't going to happen. Given that half the planet was trying to call in and cancel or move their trips, I decided to wait until about a week before my trip was scheduled to begin. Amex's phone lines were an absolute mess. I waited over an hour only to be disconnected. Twice. I tried using their web chat client and the people staffing it weren't allowed to do any kind of booking-related changes. I was starting to get nervous because Qatar was still operating a few of its flights but I knew Australia had closed its borders . I was afraid that if Qatar didn't actually cancel the flight, I'd be on the hook for it and not get my money back. At some point I noticed that my email confirmation had an entirely different phone number to call than the website. I'd been calling 1-800-297-...

Got some sad Covid-19 news from Australia last night: they're closing the borders to incoming visitors . Earlier in the week, they'd already banned Australians from traveling abroad, but this latest move was somewhat unexpected given the government's statements to the contrary earlier in the day . I've not written much about our impending Australia travel largely due to the risk that this could happen. Obviously there are people with much bigger problems than us, but it's hearbreaking to know that our friend who wanted to weather the quarantine with us has to do so by himself now. I can handle my own loneliness just fine, but knowing he's hurting and lonely is really fucking tough for us. I now have the lovely pleasure of another six hours of holding for Amex Travel to actually try and cancel my tickets. Can I just say, they're utterly unprepared and that their handling of this crisis has been an unmitigated disaster?

Some great news from JetBlue today – they're expanding their existing partnership with Carbonfund.org to offset the CO2 emissions from all of their domestic flights. The new initiative – comprised of forestry, landfill gas capture, and solar and wind power – will mean offsetting 7 – 8 metric tons of CO2 per year. Futhermore, they're going to start flying with sustainable jet fuel from Neste on flights out of SFO mid-2020.