Southwest Rapid Rewards points used to be worth 1.69 cents each. Starting March 31, 2014, they will be worth about 1.44 cents each.

What is the exact devaluation?

Among the Six Types of Frequent Flyer Miles, Southwest has a fixed-value program. For every dollar of the "Wanna Get Away?" base fare, you have to spend 60 Rapid Rewards for an award ticket.

So a $220 Southwest ticket with a $200 base fare would be 12,000 Rapid Rewards + $5 in taxes as an award.

United scared me a lot on Friday when it tweeted that changes were coming to MileagePlus.

United still hasn't told us what those changes are, but insists we'll like them.

It's very unlikely I'll like them much. It could be a minor enhancement, but there are very few things I would change about United MileagePlus that United would also change.

United scared me a lot on Friday when it tweeted that changes were coming to MileagePlus.

United still hasn't told us what those changes are, but insists we'll like them.

It's very unlikely I'll like them much. It could be a minor enhancement, but there are very few things I would change about United MileagePlus that United would also change.

Update: I got 2 x 36k in the first few seconds.

Southwest is having a big sale on all of its flights that ends today at 11:59 PM ET. The sale is good for travel from August 26 - December 18. Almost everyone benefits from this sale.

Southwest is running my favorite type of its sales--the distance based ones. Oneways of the following lengths are the following discounted prices.

The great thing about these deals is that they are widely available, include two checked bags, and earn double points!

Here are the details:

Purchase by 11:59 PM on Thursday and travel Monday-Saturday from April 3 to June 8. There are city and systemwide blackouts also.

You don't need any special promo code. You can just do a normal search on southwest.com.

Register for the new Southwest Double Points promo that runs until May 15, 2013.

According to this thread on FlyerTalk, Southwest Airlines has started to display bookable AirTran flights on its own website. The first AirTran city pairs offered on Southwest.com are Atlanta <-> Fort Lauderdale and Atlanta <-> Fort Myers. A sample screenshot of the newly available flights is below.

These flights are still bookable on AirTran's website.

According to this thread on FlyerTalk and this thread on Milepoint, Southwest will now start charging a no-show fee for those who fail to cancel their tickets before the flight departs.

Extra fees, especially on traveler-friendly Southwest, are never a good thing. But I am shocked that a fee like this wasn't in place before. Now that it is, I honestly can't blame them for implementing it. It makes sense to penalize when Southwest could resell the seat for a higher price at the last minute.

Last Friday's giveaway was a free oneway anywhere Southwest flies. I said I would pick the winner this way:
I want an expensive award to win, but I also want everyone to have a chance, so here’s what I’ve devised.
I will use a random number generator to select three sub-$170 entries to enter round two. I will take all over-$170 entries to round two. I will then use a random number generator to pick a winner from the entries in round two.
I’ll check whether the winner from round two has award space.