gift cards

Souvenir Sunday: last minute gifts for travelers

Holidays, Souvenir Sunday, Souvenirs, , , ,

Santa

Still puzzling over a gift for the road warrior or frequent traveler on your list? How about a plane ticket?

That’s what a recent poll from Switchfly discovered people really want.

More than half of those interviewed (65 percent) said they would be delighted to receive an air travel gift for the holiday. Thirty-five percent of respondents said they’d prefer a gift of a first-class upgrade, while 31 percent would rather have a plane ticket to a foreign country.

Buying plane tickets for your friends and family can be complicated – and costly – so consider instead one of the travel-related gifts on this list.

Some help travelers be more efficient on the road. Others may improve a travel experience, help someone out of a jam or just serve as a pleasant perk on a stressful travel day.

Best of all, the items here can be purchased on-line and delivered to an email inbox at the very last minute.

Because we know you’re a busy traveler too.

Words and pictures for travel

The classic DK Eyewitness Travel Guides were recently revamped and now have updated itineraries, new content, even better images and improved usability. The books are still a bit heavy for those who need to travel light, so it’s a good thing that most all the guides, along with the DK Top 10, Eyewitness Family Travel and the Eyewitness Back Roads series are now available as e-books.

Rosetta’s Stone’s courses in 30 languages can also be delivered as e-gifts and can help travelers with down-time on long plane rides learn how to order a great meal or close a deal in another country.

TSA-compliant conveniences

Day of Relaxation Gift Set from Minimus.biz

Relying on hotel toiletries can be a hit or miss proposition, so most frequent travelers stuff their TSA-compliant 3-1-1 bags with tiny tubes and bottles of lotions and potions from brands they love or an assortment of items snitched from hotel bathrooms along the way.

The gift of replenishing those minis is made easy with an e-gift certificate from Minimus.biz, a website that carries more than 2,500 travel and individual-sized items (including food) and a nice variety of gift and personal care travel kits.

Another option is a subscription to Birchbox, which will send your favorite traveler a box filled with five beauty and personal care samples for the next 3, 6 or 12 months. (Prices start at $30 for women and $60 for men.)

Birchbox chooses the grooming products in the amenity kits offered to travelers flying in JetBlue’s Mint premium cabin between JFK and LAX or SFO and has a couple of JetBlue discount codes out there that anyone can use for subscriptions and product discounts.

For the hassles

Just about every airline offers gift cards for travel that can delivered electronically. But for those days when a buddy is stuck at an airport due to bad weather, an ailing airplane or a canceled or just-missed flight, a gift certificate for a service at an airport day spa, such as XpresSpa, or a day pass or full year’s entry into a club lounge may be the answer.

“One option for e-gifting lounge access is — if a friend or family member is a frequent traveler, purchasing a lounge membership online for them could make a lot of sense. For example, United offers their United Club membership for $500 per year, while Delta offers their Delta Sky Club membership starting at $450,” said Lounge Buddy co-founder Brent Griffith.

The Plaza Premium Lounge, an independent all-travelers-welcome lounge with branches in London, Vancouver, Hong Kong and 15 other airports, offers e-certificates for gift cards that are good for a package of 5 to 10 visits that can be used by one person or shared around.

Need more ideas? In his Seat 2B column, Joe Brancatelli has a great list of tried and true gift ideas for road warriors.

(My story about last minute gifts for travelers first appeared on CNBC Road Warrior in a slightly different version.)

CheapAir.com & other travel companies accepting bitcoin

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Santa cruz photo

Bit by bit, fans of bitcoin—the virtual currency currently experiencing wild fluctuations in value—are finding ways to use the digital dollars for travel.

On Thursday, November 21, on-line travel agency CheapAir.com announced it would accept bitcoin as payment for flights booked on its website. Soon the company plans to accept bitcoin for hotel reservations and flights via its app as well.

Scroll through the Bitcoin.Travel website or Facebook page and you’ll find an eclectic listing of other real-world cafes, transportation companies, hostels and tour companies around the world advertising the fact they’re willing to accept bitcoin payments.

Among those is New Jersey-based A Class Limousine, which provides sedans, limousines, vans and shuttle buses for airport and point-to-point travel in its region.

The company has been accepting bitcoin payments since January “because it is cheap, quick, and virtually risk free,” said accounts manager Aaron Williams, “and because it helps us grow our client base.”

The benefit to travelers, said Williams, is that bitcoin is now an internationally accepted currency “so there is no currency to exchange before getting in your car or credit card forex fees. The long and the short of it is that people spend it and we want them to spend it on our services.”

In and around Santa Cruz, Calif., travelers are welcome to use bitcoin to pay for airport shuttles, wine tours and other services (even weddings) offered by Santa Cruz Experience or one of the other companies operated by Norcal Transportation Corporation.

Company CEO Austin Twohig said he added the bitcoin payment option in part because the fees charged to merchants are lower than those charged for credit cards and because there are no worries about charge-backs.

So far, though, he’s had no takers. And even though he’s been watching the value of bitcoin fluctuating wildly, “if someone called today and wanted to pay with bitcoin, I would not hesitate at all.”

Mike LaGrotta, CEO and co-founder of New York- and London-based Techno Tourist travel company is also a big fan, mostly because bitcoin helps avoid bank or credit card fees that can hover around 10 percent for clients sending payment from places such as North Africa and Eastern Europe.

“In terms of speed of payment and accessibility for people to use it to pay us, it’s just easier in every single way imaginable,” he said.

“It’s just a no-brainer for us to offer customers this option.”

Road warriors have another option for turning bitcoin into travel: gift cards.

Among the more than 150 brands of gift cards available through online gift card company, eGifter are cards from American Airlines, BedandBreakfast.com, Carnival and Celebrity cruise lines, Hyatt and Marriott hotels and the Global Hotel Card from Orbitz. Gift cards for meals, gasoline and other consumable travel items are also offered.

“One of the advantages to accepting bitcoin is that it has attracted a whole new market of early adopters,” said eGifter CEO Tyler Roye. “There aren’t a lot of places to spend bitcoins now and we provide a whole bunch of options in one move.”

The company has been accepting bitcoin since August through Coinbase, a company that creates a digital wallet for users and a secure way for merchants to get their cash at service charge rates below what most credit card companies charge.

“They accept the bitcoin and convert them to cash so that we never have to touch the bitcoin or figure out what to do with them,” said Roye.

The pass-through shields the company from market fluctuations and other risks associated with taking bitcoin.

“It’s just a no-brainer for us to offer customers this option,” said Roye.

(My story about using bitcoin for travel first appeared on the CNBC Road Warrior)

Swap unwanted gift cards for miles on United Continental

Air Travel, ,

Even novice players of the airline mileage-program game know how to earn extra frequent flier miles through shopping, dining, hotel stays and car rentals.

Now there’s one more way to feather the free-trip nest: On Monday, United Continental Holdings launched the MileagePlus Gift Card Exchange, a program that allows members of United and Continental airlines’ MileagePlus program to swap unwanted gift cards from more than 60 major retailers for miles.

“The program enables members to get value out of gift cards that they normally wouldn’t use or didn’t want,” said United spokesperson Charles Hobart. The airline claims the program is the “first of its kind.”

To swap cards, MileagePlus members log into their accounts and enter the value and other information from an unwanted gift card. The site will verify the card, make an exchange offer in miles and, if the offer is accepted, “take” the card and, within about five days, deposit miles in a member’s account.

There are some restrictions: Cards with balances below $25 will not qualify, nor will cards that have expiration dates. And not all cards will be accepted or exchanged for face value. “Our rates are determined by market pricing, which is affected by several factors,” the program rules state. Those factors determining a card’s value aren’t fully spelled out and the rules note that the mileage offer displayed for the same gift may fluctuate over time.

“This looks like a modest win for MileagePlus members, who now have yet another option for using their miles,” said Tim Winship, publisher of FrequentFlier.com, a site about airline-mileage programs. “But without a set exchange rate when converting card balances into frequent flier miles, it’s impossible to assess the real value of such exchanges except on a case-by-case basis.”

Winship says that floating exchange rates will likely detract from the new feature’s popularity, as could the 7.5 percent federal excise tax he suspects will show up as a reduction in the number of miles members receive for any exchange.

“If the exchange rates are generous enough, the tax hit may not matter,” said Winship. “But for those drawn to the program for its convenience, it’s probably a non-issue” and will likely be a feature other airlines and hotels may soon add to their programs.

(Note: an earlier version of this story appeared on msnbc.com Travel’s Overhead Bin)