A Cold Shower Turns Into An Important Travel Lesson

On Saturday morning, I awoke to take a shower at the Hilton. After a long night, all I wanted was a nice hot shower. What did I get? Ice cold water.

Photo Credit: http://gettingstronger.org

On my way to breakfast, I sent this tweet:

I meant to say.... "brrrr....no hot water this morning at @hiltonhotels Stamford."

Less than 15 minutes later, I got this response from Hilton Help

I sent them my confirmation number and I got this response:

Shortly after this tweet arrived, I received a call on my cell phone from the on-duty manger. She wanted to explain that the engineers had informed her that hot water was slowly going back to normal levels. I explained to her that the tweet was joke, but I appreciated the call.

In less than 90 minutes from my initial tweet, I got a call from the manager. Even though the call was not necessary, it was cool that @hiltonhelp got management to call me. Hopefully, I could get the same attention when I actually need something.

Most other hotel have twitter accounts as well:

Hyatt - @hyattconcierge

Starwood - @starwoodbuzz

IHG - @ihgcare

Marriott - @marriott

Kimpton - @kimpton

I think its important to follow all of them. You never know when you might need them.

Social Media, how did we exist without you? Oh, that's right, we had to complain in person.
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                                                  Follow us on Twitter @doit4thepoints!

A Look Back: Your and Our Favorite Posts

When we first started blogging back in August, we made a goal to make one post per day, for at least the first month. Now six months and 210 posts later, we are proud to say that in our blogs short life, 6 days went by without posts.

Today, we wanted to share your and our favorite past posts.

The top five posts by page views:

   1) Young People and the Chains of Credit Card Debt

   2) Great Article on Twitter in Posts/Miles

   3) Share a Journey: Win 1,000,000 miles

   4) Exit Hilton, Enter Club Carlson?

   5) Why I (Respectfully) Disagree That A AA/US Merger is All Bad For Frequent Flyers

Now our personal favorite past posts:

JD's two favorite posts:

      1)  How I Became Addicted to the points game.

      2)  Will Travel for College Football - Penn State. Be prepared for more football posts in 2013.

Chris's three favorite post:

      1) It's JD Fault (Someone keeps finding our blog with our search term and I love it)

      1) London Day Two

      2) Perfect Day in Seattle

As a reminder, don't forget to enter our contest (here) that ends tonight at 6pm.

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Follow us on Twitter @doit4thepoints!

Have a question for us? E-mail us at chris@doitforthepoints.com or jd@doitforthepoints.com

Great Article on Twitter in Points/Miles and How it Helps All of Us Learn More

I just read a great article from Travel Summary on why it's important to have a tool like Twitter in the points game. Travel Summary has a great description of why Twitter is important and useful in the points and miles game: "quick information and pictures, with reviews." It's also an easy way to "meet" new people from all around the world who enjoy the same hobby that you do!

A few days ago I was staring to search for mileage runs for next year to try and knock out as much travel at the beginning of the year as I could. I quickly realized that I have a very light knowledge of searching for mileage runs on the ITA Matrix and so I took to Twitter to see if anyone with WAY more knowledge on building mileage runs could point me in the right direction, so I sent out the following tweet:

Do It For The Points@doit4thepoints

Trying to beef up my knowledge on building a good mileage run. Anyone have a good primer that helped them at first?

Quickly I had GREAT responses from people in the miles and points community that pointed me to their favorite blog post on how to construct a proper mileage run. Without Twitter it would have been a very trial by fire experiment on my part. I could have muscled through it and figured out a strategy that worked for me, but that extra bit of knowledge from those who have been doing this for years was a big help in helping me understand how to leverage the power of the ITA Matrix to search for great mileage runs.

In the end it paid off! Yesterday I booked a trip of BWI/ORD/IAH/PHX - PHX/CLT/BWI for around $.004 cents per mile and it currently includes a trip on one of United's 787 Dreamliner, which I have been pining to fly for months now.

None of this would have been possible without the help of social media. It's a great place for everyone to learn from people who have more knowledge and are willing to share it, a place to share successes or ask questions and most of all...a place to meet new people from around the world that have the same addiction to travel as you do.