FRONTIER Airlines EarlyReturns: Mileage Credit Request!

As of yet I haven't received an actual human response, plus I got the typical corporate double-speak.

Here is where they sent me with their response at Twitter: 

Notice how it says under "How to Request Retroactive Credit" -

#1: Please note that miles take 3 BUSINESS DAYS from date of travel to post.

Yet in the following e-mail auto-response it says 15 Business Days, so which one is it?

At this point it really doesn't matter because every one of the flights I would take to Florida and then back home to Wyoming have no EarlyReturns seats, unless of course I break up the flight into tiny segments, so that the flights to and from Sheridan to Denver, then reversed a month later have to be booked with Great Lakes, which charge an arm and a leg for that short hop. And the Denver to Tampa leg has a seat going east, but the seat going west is double the airmile price.

Anyway I work it it's still no bargain, and basically corporate BS and how to screw your own airline customers.

So Frontier, you've lost a dedicated customer, and advocate for your airlines. But it was you choice to play these Mickey Mouse bullshit games.

Here is the tweet from them earlier today:

 

The link they gave me was to the contact form above that stated the 3 business day timeframe. Oops!

From: Frontier Airlines
Sent: ‎Wednesday‎, ‎January‎ ‎8‎, ‎2014 ‎4‎:‎05‎ ‎PM

_____________________________________________________________________
Thank you for contacting Frontier Airlines. Your request has been received.

Discussion Thread
Auto-Response	01/08/2014 04:05 PM
Thank you for contacting Frontier Airlines EarlyReturns®. Your request for mileage credit has been received. After travel has been verified, your account will be manually credited within 15 business days. If we have additional questions, we will contact you again. We look forward to welcoming you onboard future Frontier Airlines flights. EarlyReturns Frontier Airlines
Customer By Web Form (William Harasym)	01/08/2014 04:05 PM
Well, more then 3 business days have come and gone, but still nothing. What would it be like if people booked flights, but decided to pay you maybe 3 or 5 or 15 business days later, because as I was told, we can do it manually with our abacus any chits of paper? Here is what your help line said: "Your request for mileage credit has been received. After travel has been verified, your account will be manually credited within 15 business days." Travel verified? Didn't they know I was on the aircraft the second we pulled away from the jetway? I did check-in, so? 15 business days? WTF? We are in the 21st Century, aren't we? Do you need me to buy you a computer with a nice bookkeeping program on it? I use to brag about you folks, but you have deeply disappointed me, first with your BS Rewards Program, and secondly with your nonchalant attitude of giving customers there just due. Why is it you are so quick to take our money, but getting reward miles, or even having your miles posted is like getting blood from a stone? Every March for the last 9 years I visited Florida to visit my aging parents, and hang out with them for a month, go to ballgames, go out to eat, etc. So this March, I'll be doing the same thing, but it's even more important as my mom just passed away in December, so my dad is looking forward to my visit. But you seem to be real cheap SOBs when it comes to me being able to use my EarlyReturn reward miles. I can't use it for my entire trip, all booked on Frontier, but only on 1 leg each way, and on 1 of those 2 legs, my only choice is using double miles, and for what, the same seat? I live on Social Security Disability because of an inoperable brain tumor, albeit slow-growing, along with other neurological and physical issues. So this year I had hoped to use my EarlyReturns air-miles to get me to and from Florida as I had enough for a round-trip, or so it said on my account page. And I'd have a little extra geld in my pocket for other things, but noo..., no such luck with that idea! Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, you never get my business ever again, and I will scream from the highest mountain on how you screwed over a veteran who is disabled, and believe me, I have no problems doing just that. And that isn't a threat, just a promise I'd keep. It is truly sad the way airlines have nickel and dimed their customers over the last 2 decades, ever since deregulation, but I thought Frontier was above that, but you are not. You are all the same, just take, take, take, and giving up anything is like getting blood from a stone. Shame on you all!

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Hey Frontier Airlines, Why are my miles from Jan 2, 2014 not added yet?

It's obvious Frontier still uses an ink and paper ledger to manually credit one's AirMiles, within 15 BUSINESS DAYS! I use to like you all, not anymore!

From: Frontier Airlines
Sent: ‎Tuesday‎, ‎January‎ ‎7‎, ‎2014 ‎11‎:‎48‎ ‎AM

Thank you for contacting Frontier Airlines. Your request has been received.

Discussion Thread
Auto-Response	01/07/2014 11:48 AM
Thank you for contacting Frontier Airlines EarlyReturns®. Your request for mileage credit has been received. After travel has been verified, your account will be manually credited within 15 business days. If we have additional questions, we will contact you again. We look forward to welcoming you onboard future Frontier Airlines flights. EarlyReturns Frontier Airlines
Customer By Web Form (William Harasym)	01/07/2014 11:48 AM
I want to book a flight using my awards, but I want all my miles before I do that, but the longer you yahoos take, the more likely that the 1 seat per flight is used up. I use to like Frontier, and spent 7-14% of my Social Security Disability Income each year on a couple of flights to see my aging parents, so now it's time to pony up on your behalf, and basically you've failed. All the dates I wanted are not available (I've been flying down to Florida every March for the last 9 years, and after trying multiple airlines, settle on yours in 2009.) but I'm trying different options. It's like getting blood out of a stone trying to use my air-miles. Thanks for your time. Good night and good luck. William D. Harasym USAF Veteran - Disabled

Energy Reporters Criticize 60 Minutes' "Poor Piece of Journalism" | Blog | Media Matters for America

Energy Reporters Criticize 60 Minutes' & Lesley Stahl's "Poor Piece of Journalism" 

Blog | Media Matters for America 
By JOE STRUPP 1-7-2014

 

A 60 Minutes segment claiming that federal government efforts to encourage clean tech -- the production and use of alternative energy sources and more efficient technology -- have failed drew some harsh disagreement among reporters covering the energy beat who say the negative report ignored many successes and focused too narrowly on a few unsuccessful companies.

Correspondent Lesley Stahl concluded in the January 5 piece that while stimulus spending including the Department of Energy's loan guarantee program was invested in the industry, "instead of breakthroughs, the [clean tech] sector suffered a string of expensive tax-funded flops."

Stahl's segment has drawn criticism from observers who have noted that 60 Minutes focused on Solyndra and a handful of other failed companies whose loans made up a tiny fraction of federal loans and ignored the clean tech breakthroughs and the explosive growth in the sector that have occurred.
The report was only the latest in a series of 60 Minutes reports that have been subject to stinging critiques in recent months. The program has been excoriated by media observers and accused of "check[ing] its journalistic skepticism at the door" by The New York Times.

Journalists who cover the same energy industries took issue with the clean tech report in interviews with Media Matters, noting that it did not take into account the long-term development needs of clean energy and the many ongoing successes.

"I thought it was a pretty poor piece of journalism, frankly," said David Baker, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter covering clean tech and energy. "There are areas of this field that are hurting, but there are others that are doing very, very well."

Baker added that 60 Minutes' error begins with its conception of the story: "The problem really begins when you just talk about clean tech as one thing - it is a bunch of things and a lot of it is energy generation and energy use. In a report like this where you look at clean tech in general, you have difficulty because it is not the same for each sector."

"The other biggest problem with the CBS story is it looked at some of the flops and really seemed to turn a blind eye to the success," he continued. "That is one of the most fundamental mistakes Lesley Stahl and her producers make."

Baker pointed to several west coast examples of successes, including the recently created California Solar Ranch, the largest solar plant in the nation that went online late last year.
"We are going to have a huge amount of power going on the grid from solar," Baker explained. "Some of those projects were funded in part through the Department of Energy loan program, the same one that funded Solyndra."

Ken Paulman, editor of Midwest Energy News, offered a similar critique.

"It seems like they're pretty narrowly focused on a couple of high-profile failure stories that have been through the media ringer a couple of years ago," Paulman said about 60 Minutes. "That is kind of the puzzling thing about the story. We have already covered Solyndra, we already know about that."
Several reporters pointed to the question that Lesley Stahl asked in the piece: "Is clean tech dead?" Stahl included the response of one interview subject who said that "parts of it were" "on life support," while reportedly leaving out of the story another subject's response that it was not. Paulman and others who spoke to Media Matters stressed that Stahl's question pushes an inaccurate notion.
"I would say that is definitely not the case here in the Midwest," Paulman stated. "We are definitely seeing a lot of growth in solar. Mid-American Energy announced recently they are spending something like a billion dollars on new wind farms in Iowa."

As for the future, Paulman added, "I don't see the demand for new technology ever going away, it is only going to increase. If they are trying to establish a narrative that clean technology is a failure, I would say that is inaccurate."

For Kevin Hall, a McClatchy business reporter and president of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, the death knell is also unwarranted for clean tech.

"I don't think it's dead at all," Hall declared in a phone interview. "I think the technology is there. It is correct to say that certain things are profitable at certain prices. It's not dead, but in a free market the lower priced oil is a factor."

Hall also took issue with 60 Minutes and others pointing to government support for clean energy as a negative, stating it ignores the fact that the oil industry has gotten plenty of government subsidies.
"I do think it needs government support," Hall said about clean energy, but added, "it is misleading to say the oil industry doesn't get government support - tax incentives and royalties and a number of things that are done for that. It is misleading to say that oil stands on its own. Oil got where it is because it had been a government policy to promote discovery of and preserves of oil because oil was a strategic need."

Bryan Walsh, a senior editor at Time who covers energy issues, said the clean tech death assertion is "just not true."

"It is not dead by any means," Walsh said. "That is not the case. Just because you didn't fulfill the wildest dreams of Silicon Valley venture capitalists doesn't mean it's dead."

Walsh said of many news reports: "A lot of the focus has been on venture capital and that has certainly cratered, but what you have had is a shake out and the ideas that are good that have shown themselves to be effective in the post-crisis era are continuing and going on. You have seen clean tech change, more about smart companies and smart ideas than manufacturing. We still write about it and still look for a lot of companies that are innovative, it is going to be a growing sector going forward I think."
Walsh acknowledged that the clean energy industry has been "hit hard" by some factors, such as new natural gas and shale oil discoveries. But, he added, "at the same time, there are some definite success stories. Look at a company like Solar City, which has done very well in taking advantage of the drop in prices of solar panels and getting that to as many customers as possible."

He also stressed that "renewable energy is still on the increase. You can see this new sort of clean tech. Instead of manufacturing things, you look at ways to help people become more efficient. Clean tech is doing well. It is fighting a lot of head winds, but those who are innovative are going to do well."
David Shaffer, who covers energy at The Star-Tribune in Minneapolis, pointed to a new "massive" $250 million solar plant in his state that will provide electricity for the local utility, and which beat out a natural gas competitor for the rights.

"Wind has [also] been the big investment that utilities out here have made, it is a good spot for wind," he added. "If you look at nuclear costs around the country, it is clear the cost has gotten too high, it is just expensive."

Ethan Zindler, a policy analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance who tracks energy investment data for the news and information outlet, said 60 Minutes ignores the "most important" piece of the clean energy story.

"The most important story is that clean energy technologies have never been more competitive as they compete with fossil fuels," Zindler said. "We are already seeing situations where wind projects in the United States are able to win power contracts even when directly competing against fossil sources of generation. The most developed technologies for solar panels and wind turbines, the costs have come down tremendously in the last several years."

He also criticized the focus on venture capital investment and loss, noting that of the $281 billion invested in clean energy during 2012, just $8.4 billion was invested in new venture capital.
"There's a lot of venture investment that's gone in, there certainly has been bankruptcies," he said. "But there has been a lot of success stories."

Courtesy of MMFA @  http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/01/07/energy-reporters-criticize-60-minutes-poor-piec/197463

60 Minutes Hit Job On Clean Energy Ignores The Facts!

"60 Minutes & Lesley Stahl's Hit Job On Clean Energy Ignores The Facts!"

                           By Joe Romm on January 5, 2014 at 8:54 pm
"This article was published by the Center for American Progress Action"

   

CREDIT: DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

Clean technology is booming by every key indicator — but you would never know that from Sunday’s absurd 60 Minutes piece touting an imaginary “Cleantech Crash.”
As documented in the recent Department of Energy (DOE) report, “Revolution Now: The Future Arrives for Four Clean Energy Technologies,” the only thing in cleantech that is crashing is the cost of key components. This price crash has enabled explosive growth in wind power, solar power, LED lights and electric vehicles, as shown in the four charts from the report reposted here.

CREDIT: DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

Ironically, this boom is so self-evident that just Saturday the New York Times published a front page story on “the solar power craze that is sweeping Wall Street.” As the article notes, “Solar companies have had the wind at their backs lately.”
It’s true there have been some losers among cleantech companies, but that’s precisely what you would expect in an industry where the norm has become ruthless cost-cutting, which in turn is a great boon to consumers.

CREDIT: DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

But for 60 Minutes, this incredible boon is a bust. Here’s a transcript of a clip from the show:

LESLIE STAHL (over pictures of solar panels, biofuels, wind turbines): “It’s called clean tech. And the new technologies that were developed in the energy sector were supposed to create jobs, and help America break its reliance on fossil fuels. The government supported it, and billions of tax dollars were spent. So how is the investment going?
STAHL (to DOE interviewee): “Solyndra went through half a billion dollars before it failed. Then I’m going to give you a list of other failures. Abound Energy. Beacon Power. Fisker. VPG. Pfff…I’m exhausted.”
INTERVIEWEE: “As I told you at the beginning, the energy business is tough!”

Memo to CBS: Every business is tough! In 2012, the Wall Street Journal ran an informative piece on just how tough the private sector venture-capital businesses is, headlined, “The Venture Capital Secret: 3 Out of 4 Start-Ups Fail.”
It seems at first that this is a secret 60 Minutes is unaware of, since the show focuses almost entirely on the failures. But CBS explains that “the venture capital model is that for every ten startups, nine go under” — except that CBS appears to see that as a bug, not a feature, failing to understand that the successes more than pay for the failures.
Moreover, 60 Minutes is apparently unaware that the DOE Loan Guarantee Program has a whopping 97 percent success rate, while the companies CBS focuses on such as Solyndra and Abound Solar were just three percent of the portfolio.
It’s as if 60 Minutes did a profile of the venture firm Kleiner-Perkins and focused primarily on its failed investments with only passing mention of AOL — and no mention at all of Amazon.com, Genentech, Sun Microsystems or Google! In fact, when 60 Minutes profiled co-founder Tom Perkins several years ago, they called him “the captain of capitalism” and only found time to mention the winners!
Let’s set aside the question of why 60 Minutes chose to do a hit-job on cleantech, which clearly was unwarranted, after producing widely criticized puff pieces on the NSA and Amazon’s wildly impractical delivery drones.
The key point is that the goal of DOE’s investments is not to make money. The goal is to accelerate the drop in price — and increase in deployment — of clean energy in the market, which it clearly has done in industry after industry. A secondary goal was to create jobs in this country, which it also succeeded in doing.

CREDIT: DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

Every major independent review, including one by John McCain’s former National Finance Chairman, found the loan guarantee program was cost-effective for taxpayers. A review by Brookings found “DOE’s loan guarantee program will likely result in minimal costs and large gains for taxpayers.”
In fact, the Atlantic Wire reported last year that this one program successfully shepherded 28 companies with clean energy projects creating over 20,000 jobs — with a net cost to the public that will either end up being very low or zero. DOE projects that all of its clean energy loan programs taken together will generate some 55,000 jobs.
Inexplicably, the 60 Minutes correspondent asserts that according to “everything I’ve read there were not many jobs created” (and they even found an uninformed former DOE official to agree with them). CBS claims taxpayers have little to show for the investments when the data clearly show otherwise.
The whole segment is baffling. CBS asserts that the key cleantech investor they interview, Vinod Khosla, is “known as the father of the cleantech revolution.” He ain’t, and in fact he’s about the last person you’d want to talk to on the subject (see my 2010 post, “Is anyone more incoherent than Vinod Khosla?“).
They even found a Chinese cleantech entrepreneur to say “clean tech is not going well” — even though China is the leader in both solar and wind power. CBS complains that the Chinese have created U.S. jobs using some of the technology U.S. taxpayers supported, as if the only U.S. jobs that count are ones created by U.S. companies. CBS correctly notes that China is willing to take a long term view of clean tech, but never mentions how opposition to U.S. clean energy standards, cleantech investment, and a price for carbon by conservatives in Congress have hurt the competitiveness of U.S. companies.
For those who want the facts of the cleantech boom, a good place to start is the DOE report:

• In 2012, wind was America’s largest source of new electrical capacity, accounting for 43 percent of all new installations. Altogether the United States has deployed about 60 gigawatts of wind power — enough to power 15 million homes.
• Since 2008, the price of solar panels has fallen by 75 percent, and solar installations have multiplied tenfold. Many major homebuilders are incorporating rooftop panels as a standard feature on new homes.
• In that same five years, the cost of super-efficient LED lights has fallen more than 85 percent and sales have skyrocketed. In 2009, there were fewer than 400,000 LED lights installed in the U.S.; today, the number has grown 50-fold to almost 20 million.
• During the first six months of 2013, America bought twice as many plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) as in the first half of 2012, and six times as many as in the first half of 2011. In fact, the market for plug-in electric vehicles has grown much faster than the early market for hybrids.

 Tweets: @climateprogress

 Tags:

• CBS News
• Solar Energy
• Wind Energy

EarlyReturn Reward travel dates? When are they, once a year? [Incident: 140105-000088]

Here is my comment I posted on Frontier Airline's Contact Page.

Why do airlines think you have to use your rewards on their dates, and not when we need to travel. It took me years to build up my miles to finally get a round trip, and I was going to use it to visit my dad in Florida in March 2014, as my mom just died a month ago on December 4th, 2013, and I'm the only family member who has the time to help my 84 year old dad out.

So, I guess they think this person, me, is going to jet off to Cancun for a vacation whenever Frontier decides to give me my reward---NOT!

I live on Social Security Disability (Because of an inoperable brain tumor, and other neurological and physical issues.) and at a few dollars above the federal poverty level. All my trips are about the responsibility to helping one's elderly parents, and not some vacation to Aruba, Vegas or wherever other people with real vacation time travel to have lots of fun and whatever.

It seems to be a constant theme these days for companies to screw their loyal customers over, again and again, and…

I really don't expect a positive answer from these yahoos, but nothing ventured, nothing gained!

From the Desk of:
William D. Harasym

From: Frontier Airlines
Sent: ‎Sunday‎, ‎January‎ ‎5‎, ‎2014 ‎10‎:‎36‎ ‎AM
To: williamharasym@msn.com

Thank you for contacting Frontier Airlines. Your request has been received.

Discussion Thread
Auto-Response	01/05/2014 10:36 AM
We are currently receiving a high volume of emails. We will respond to your email as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.
Customer By Web Form (William Harasym)	01/05/2014 10:36 AM
Hey Frontier, How does one know when they can use their benefits from EarlyReturns? Do you constantly punch in dates, and hope for a date? What good are they when you can't use them when you want to travel? Just another way of the airlines of nickel and dime-ing folks, and screwing them out of their rewards? Why is it only on your dates, whatever they are? and not when the customer wants to travel? It's all BS! Thanks for your time, and I use to brag about you guys, but now, forget about it, and guess I'll go fly United, American, Delta or Southwest now. You might as well hand out KY Jelly when you promote your Rewards program and Credit Card on board the aircraft. It's all smoke and mirrors, with the ultimate goal of F'in the customer! Good Night and good luck! William D. Harasym USAF Veteran (Disabled)

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