How to get upgraded on Air Canada

Posted on February 26, 2012 by Thomas Purves

It’s that time again. The last few days of February. The season where Canada’s favourite national airline rewards its loyal fliers by deleting all their accumulated upgrade points. Use them or lose them. So here’s my guide to burning those AC e-upgrades anytime or especially timely this time of year.

  1. Step 1: Collect air Canada eupgrade points. You’ll earn a token few when you make status and more as a threshold gift each time you fly another 20k miles or so
  2. Step 2 It’s time to use those points. First status check. You’ll want to be AC E (Elite) or SE (Stupid Elite). Upgrading at prestige status? Hahaha no.
  3. Step 3 Fork over $99 for an annual membership at expertflyer.com to get access to data that AC should have made available to you anyway, importantly the number of upgrade seats still or ever available for any given flight. Put in the day you need to fly, search for “R” class seats on Air Canada. Find a flight on your day that has any R seats available (many flights wont!)
  4. Set a reminder exactly 4 days + a few min (Elite) or 10 days + a few min (Stupid Elite) before your flight.
  5. Time passes.
  6. At last! upgrades are opening in just a few minutes
  7. But wait. Check expertflyer again. Curse that your flight has suddenly gone to 0 R-class seats. But don’t worry, the one an hour later still has 3 left.
  8. Change your flight to the one an hour later. Explain creatively to your spouse, agent, coworkers, boss etc.
  9. Ok we’re ready! time to fire up your e-upgrades account. Of course, you can’t use the e-upgrades site without logging in to your aircanada account first. You can’t actually log in from the e-upgrades site without being immediately re-directed to the aircanada homepage. There’s absolutely no obvious way how to get back to the e-upgrade site from the aircanada homepage. So we follow the standard procedure…
  10. Navigate aircanada.com. log in.
  11. Now close your browser tab.
  12. Enter “Air Canada E-upgrades” into Google, punch I’m feeling lucky.
  13. Congrats! You are now on the e-upgrade site. You’ll still be logged in to your AC account and the site will greet you with your name and aeroplan points balance.
  14. You forgot to have ready your booking reference didn’t you? More gentle cursing while you contemplate of an airline website can somehow know exactly who you are but not what flights you have booked imminently under your same name and aeroplan number.
  15. Alt-tab, dig past 600 more recent messages in your inbox to fish out the godawul-pdf-formatted travel itinerary for your airline booking reference invariably printed in mice-type on page 3
  16. Cutpaste booking reference and, at last, wait while AC spins the epugrade roulette wheel for what number of points the upgrade will cost this week (which may vary widely from month to month upon whims of AC promotions and random top-tier policy “enhancements to serve you better”)
  17. Your points haven’t auto expired, there’s a seat left, you are not waitlisted…. Victory!
  18. Now relax, fly in style, and laugh at the plight of those savages in the back suffering the ignominies and inconveniences of flying standard economy.
Posted in air canada, Archive | 2 Comments

Tom’s Best of 2011 Music Mix!

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Thomas Purves


It’s back! Thomaspurves.com’s traditional regularly irregular mix of awesome and slightly irregular music. Basically here’s a track from all the bands that kept my earbuds spinning this long year. As usual the list is autobiographical more than canonical. I’m never one to color perfectly amongst the lines. It’s already a few days past 2011 and there may have even been a few songs snuck in from the last days of 2010 but lets not be picky, let’s just rock out. DL the whole set and listen in playlist order, or just mix them up.

Special thanks to CBCRadio3, NPR, KEXP, Rdio, eMusic and various friends for most of these discoveries. Do let me know what I missed. And let’s bring on 2012!

01 M83 – Midnight City
02 The RAA – Barnes’ Yard
03 Salteens – If Love Is Gone Where Do We Go from Here
04 Austra – Lose It
05 Young Galaxy – We Have Everything
06 Emm Gryner – Ciao Monday
07 Lightning Dust – Never Again
08 Teen Daze – Let’s Fall Asleep Together
09 Active Child – Hanging On
10 Washed Out – A Dedication
11 Tycho – A Walk
12 Cut Copy – Need You Now
13 Holy Ghost! – Wait And See
14 Beach Fossils – What a Pleasure
15 Hey Rosetta – Seeds
16 Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues
17 One Hundred Dollars – Ties That Bind
18 J Mascis – Not Enough
19 The Dodos – Black Night
20 Craft Spells – Party Talk
21 Braids – Lemonade
22 Timber Timbre – Black Water
23 Low – Try to Sleep
24 Bon Iver – Calgary
25 The Antlers – No Widows
26 Alexi Murdoch – Slow Revolution
27 CYHSY – Same Mistake
28 Tapes’s ‘n Tapes – Freak Out
29 The Fires Of – Pulse

enjoy!

http://thomaspurves.com/media/Bestof2011/Bestof2011.zip

Posted in indie, music, podcast | 1 Comment

Book Review: the Impulse Economy

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Thomas Purves

Korean subway mixed reality

Nevermind the hype, the ongoing explosion of mobile could either be the best or worst thing to hit ordinary retail business since the internet.

Imagine you are in the business of selling things at retail. What does it mean when you see your customers predaciously roaming the aisles armed with smartphones and suddenly better informed about the competitive quality and pricing of your goods than even the store manager. What does it mean when you see a competitor like Tesco do away with goods altogether and light-up mixed-reality virtual aisles the length of a subway station? According to Paypal, this year’s black Friday saw a 516% jump in mobile commerce. Meanwhile, savvy ecommerce vendors are using mobile apps and offers to cherry pick customers out of busy store lines. Or how to respond when you hear that apple has a new almost-magic in-store mobile experience that does away with checkout queues entirely?

Ever since the first ecommerce boom more than a decade ago, many brands out there still wrestle with tensions between direct/online and retail channels. That’s going to get a lot more complicated.

With mobile there is no separation anymore. Mobile means you can’t keep the internets in the tube. With the separation of channels eroding, physical retails are at last feeling the full brunt of online competition. As they say, bestbuy is now Amazon’s showroom. Depending which side you want to be on, there’s enormous promise and disruptive risk from mobile and the convergence of commerce.

So it’s very timely that my friend Gary Schwartz is out with a new book on m-commerce: the Impulse Economy. This is the most useful and thorough book I’ve seen yet on the current state of the nation of m-commerce, how we got here and what may lie ahead.

If you are new at mobile commerce you’ll find a good overview of all the current technologies and players from tags and texting to mobile wallets and telcos. Most useful for me were Gary’s insights into the behavioral aspects of mobile. Done right, mobile isn’t just about imposing new payment interactions or hurling coupons at consumers for the same transactions they might have consummated anyway. Impulse Economy argues that mobile done right is about dropping consumer frictions and resistances to buying.

Another takeaway, targeting and relationship value. “The physical store is limited aisle, online is limitless aisle, mobile is targeted aisle”

For consumers, mobile promises not just more convenient checkouts but also the opportunity make better informed, more confident purchase decisions.

For merchants, mobile offers new ways to reach, increase engagement and deepen relationships with customers. Mobile is a chance to provide more information, more services attached to products or tell stories and deliver digital experience that enrich the value of a brand. All of which could drive consumers to pay a premium. Especially if the payment method is easy and impulsive. Rather than just being a vector for discounting, mobile could give merchants more power to grow ticket size or better price discriminate by tailoring pricing and product offers individually to customers.

Of course there’s more to mcommerce than physical retail. There’s commerce through content, there’s turning marketing channels into actionable sales channels, there’s tablet and couch-based commerce. But I won’t give away too many spoilers.

Now, there is some irony in packaging a very emergent field onto static sheets of flattened would pulp. You best pick it up now, as any book like this will only be up to date for so long. Although the book offers a good number of relevant examples, much of the promise of this future impulse economy is still yet to be invented. I guess to help with that, the book comes bristling with all manner clever tags linking you to an official blog, which I hope he’ll be keeping up to date.

But for now, anyone grappling with the potential disruption or opportunities of the new digital commerce, the Impulse Economy is a great place to start.

LINK: The Impulse Economy Blog

Impulse Economy on Amazon

Posted in Archive, augmented retail, mobile | 1 Comment