June 2014 - Otis Regrets... or not

“Hope you are well” email intro makes me sick

Here’s an email typical of many I receive these days. It’s to a business account, and it begins:

Otis,

I hope all is well. I’m not sure if you’re attending the Fancy Food Show in NYC on June 29th – the July 1st, but if you are I thought you would be interested in visiting the Crown Maple booth…

Why do so many marketers these days think it is appropriate, and maybe disarming, to inquire about the recipient’s health as a way to start a mass email? What’s it to them? What business is of theirs? If I’m well I’ll attend the event, unless I get run over on the way, and if I’m not I don’t need you reminding me of it.

Note the odd use of “the” above, before “July 1st”, which suggests the writer is not a native speaker. Could this have something to do with it? The French (this is for a maple syrup product, so I suspect un Habitant at work) have the equivalent phrase Comment ça va but that just means “how’s it going?” which I don’t find at all offensive.

I’m preparing a longer post on the general trend toward faux-casual business email but this stuck in my craw so I couldn’t wait to get it out. There. Now I feel better. Thanks for asking.

How to restore lost AAdvantage miles

The other day I wrote about my unfortunate discovery that both my AAdvantage mileage accounts had zeroed out due to inactivity. I also wrote to AAdvantage customer service and received an interesting response which I’ll share for web searchers who might be looking for this information.

First, I received this email:

Because qualifying activity extends the expiration date of all active
miles in the account, there may be an easy way of restoring your expired
miles. If you had an eligible mileage-earning transaction prior to May
26, 2014 (the date the miles expired from your account) and no older
than 12 months, then let’s get that transaction credited. When these
miles are credited to your account, your expired miles will
automatically be restored on the same day! For more information on how
miles are earned, please visit us at www.aa.com/earn. You can also
request missing mileage credit from the ‘Request Air Mileage Credit’ or
the ‘Request Non-Air Mileage Credit’ links from this page.

If you did not have any qualifying activity, we have a couple of paid
alternatives. Let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll be pleased to
furnish details.

Hmm. Unless there’s some coded wink-wink message, the only way I’d restore my miles is if I had done some qualifying activity, it had not been recorded, and I’d failed to report it. Highly unlikely. So I inquired about the paid options and got this:

To get you involved again, we have designed a Re-engagement Challenge – a set of activities created to introduce you to the program and to restore all or part of your expired miles, based on your participation.

First, register for the Re-engagement Challenge with AAdvantage Customer Service and pay the $30 registration charge.

Once you’re registered, you have 6 months from your registration date to complete the requirements listed below:

1. Subscribe to the AAdvantage eSummary™ and AAdvantage Promotions email and remain opted-in to these two subscriptions for the duration of your Re-engagement Challenge
In conjunction with your registration, you are also subscribed to receive these email messages if you haven’t been receiving them already. These helpful subscriptions send you information on how you can earn more miles and provide a monthly summary of your activity and current mileage expiration date.

2. Complete the following mileage earning activity within six months of your registration to restore the desired amount of miles: (for under 50,000 points, which is my level)

Earn 5,000 partner base miles*
OR
Earn miles for 1 round trip flight**

In many markets, a round trip is available for a couple hundred dollars or less. So for a fairly small investment you could earn back as many as 50,000 miles, which are supposedly worth $900. Fair enough. American is also getting you back into the traces with the behavior they expect from an AAdvantage member.

In closing, you may recall I had two accounts–one which zeroed out a few days prior, and the other last October. I wrote customer service separately about each of them. The long-expired account received no response.

My favorite iPhone apps (updated)

Nearly four years ago, I wrote a post after a reader asked me to list my favorite iPhone apps. Since I’m about to make a (maybe temporary, maybe permanent) switch to Android and the HTC One (M8), seems a good idea to revisit it before I go. Surprising how I feel the same about most of these today, with a few exceptions and updates.

Here’s the list, with today’s comments in italics.

1. ZipCar. How cool that I can reserve my car, unlock it, and find it in a lot by making its horn beep…. all from the iPhone. Smartphone as remote controller. Now I have Uber, Lyft and Sidecar for my transportation pleasure plus a PowerUp preorder so I can command my own drone.

2. Zillow. How much is that house actually worth? Ha! As long as I trust Zillow’s occasionally goofy algorithm, I can get the embarrassing answer while I’m standing right in front of it. (Zillow noticed this post and asked me to add the link. Good social marketing at work.)

3. Pandora, as long as you appreciate its limitations. “Guy Clark Radio” turns up new thoughtful songwriters. “Robert Earl Keen Radio” is set to deliver songs about going to Mexico and getting drunk… not the right algorithm.

4. Yelp. Just plain essential if you ever go anywhere and get hungry.

5. NPR news. To this I’ll add aggregators like Stitcher and the Public Radio app.

6. Amazon. The other day I went to Walmart to buy a Smokey Joe mini charcoal grill, found they no longer carry it, ordered from Amazon while I was standing in the aisle. I also like that I can take a picture of something and they will try to find it for me (not always successfully).

7. Tiger Woods Golf. I know, I know. But I have learned a lot of golf by stroking my screen with the tip of my finger. I have weaned myself of this, thank you. Too bad there’s Words with Friends.

8. My bank’s mobile deposit feature. A problem that my bank is not in town. A solution that I can take a picture by aligning the check with the screen and deposit that way.

9. Email. This is actually the killer app for me. I don’t read much email in detail, but I do know when somebody is trying to get in touch so I don’t have to interrupt what I am doing and find a wireless connection for my laptop. This is still true for me.

10. Caterday on YouTube. I said most used apps, not most used by me. For 8 year olds, a few Caterday episodes make a long car ride pass quickly. Then the battery runs out of juice, and that is even better. Obsolete, but the now 12 year old finds plenty of things on youTube to run down the battery.

And now the rant: why is it that location based apps (including several of the above) must find your location before they will load any of the program information such as your search box? It makes for a frustrating experience, often means that by the time you get to use the app you have passed whatever you were interesting in, and it just doesn’t seem necessary. WTF? Mostly obsolete. Location based services are one of the biggest benefits of using a smartphone today.

I’ll update again in a few months, with a report from the other (Android) side.

Thanks, AAdvantage, now goodbye!

AAdvantage unsubscribe screen — *AAdvantage finally asks me for my email prefs… as I’m about to unsubscribe.*

I just unsubscribed from both my AAdvantage email accounts, mine and my teenager’s. I was getting several emails a week and it was pointless to read them since AA does not serve my local airport. But, they’re about to as a result of the USAir merger so I’ve made a point of making an occasional qualifying purchase to keep our combined 50,000+ miles intact.

Or, so I thought. I actually read one of these emails this morning, and discovered the miles in both accounts had zeroed out. (AAdvantage does not bother with real-time reporting, so it showed 24,372 miles in my kid’s account while a couple lines below showing an expiration date a few days ago.) D’oh!

Why in the world, if American wants me as a customer, would they not send me a special announcement that the miles were about to expire and some information on how to preserve them?

AAdvantage Customer Service screen — *Thanks, AAdvantage, now goodbye.*

And why in the world would they continue to flood my inbox with emails when I hardly ever open any of them? A best practice followed by many marketers today is to warn customers they’ll stop receiving emails unless they take some action. But AAdvantage is the original mileage reward program and their policies have likely been around as long as people have been receiving emails. Which is probably also why I get so many emails from them; I can’t remember them ever asking me if I would like to specify preferences, until I unsubscribed today.

So, AAdvantage has done its job, which is to pry loose some miles fair and square. But American Airlines has lost a couple of potential customers who fly frequently and could have been on its ALB routes very soon. I fail to see how that’s a good thing.

P.S. Don’t know if they are still doing this as I am no longer an active member, but United’s Mileage Plus had a promotion they would send to people with expiring miles, asking if they wanted to convert the miles to various subscription offers. I’m sure they earned some nice revenue from this partnership at the same time they kept members up to date on their accounts. Another example why AAdvantage’s assumption of primogeniture–I’m right because I was here first–is actually obsolete and clueless.