Frequent Flyer Excise Charge

Wow - long time no blog. I honestly never thought I'd be one of those people who starts blogging then stops all of a sudden, but one thing led to another and... well, let's see what happens. Looks like BGold and Dan are on the top 25 viewed blogs on Weblogs, so maybe I can be inspired.

My post today comes to us from the Sprint Terms and Conditions of Service. So I signed up at www.sprint.com/united for their promotion. I get 6000 United frequent flyer miles (which I can always use since my family lives down in Florida) and I got my welcome package yesterday. Well, I'm pretty deliberate about reading the fine print on these sorts of things, so I looked here:
4.4 Frequent Flyer Excise Charge. If you participate in an Airlines/Sprint Partnership Program, you will incur a monthly Frequent Flyer Excise Charge calculated as follows:
Total Frequent Flyer Miles Earned X $0.0010
For example: 270 total frequent flyer miles earned from Sprint X $0.0010 = $0.27

Are you kidding me?! Let's do the math... 25,000 miles to get a free ticket... 25,000 x $0.0010 = $25.00. Why on earth would I have to pay this? Nickle and dime me to death and soon it's not a free ticket any more. Obviously Sprint thought they could recoup the costs of the promotion by putting a hidden fee buried in the fine print. My girlfriend recently had a really, really bad experience with Sprint on her cell phone. It took her about 90 days to transfer her cell phone number from her Sprint phone to AT&T - meanwhile, Sprint shut off her phone so she had no cell phone for that time, yet Sprint was still charging her. Ugh. Ok, so not the most optimistic blog tonight but I needed an audience for my frustration. Off to Portland tomorrow for some R&R... that will be fun.