The great poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem "A Psalm of Life" used the line and I quote: and things are not what they seem.
Well, today I was painfully reminded of those words.
It happened this way:
For a long time I was playing at the Fiesta and the Station Casinos because I considered to get 4 x points or 5 x points a good deal. After all, I could use those points to buy travel tickets and, playing at president level, this would be the equivalent of approx. 0.4 % cash back and therefore "seemed" to be a good deal.
However, when I ordered my ticket today for a rental car at Prestige Travel, (the only travel agency I was allowed to use), I found out that the ticket I needed did cost me 1024.32 Dollars, despite the fact that I showed the lady my Internet printout from Travelocity offering me exactly the same car for the same time period for only 405.35 Dollars. She said that's all she could do (I have the receipt and original printouts in front of me).
After scratching my head for a minute and finding no way out of this situation, I accepted the Prestige Travel price because I wanted to get rid of those last Station points I had, and the sooner the better. I said to myself, it is better to have an end with pain than to have a pain without end, because I had to use those points anyway at some time in the future or they would expire and I have nothing at all.
Did I have other options?
Helmut
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