When I get the itch to book an award, I generally tend to get pretty obsessive about it. Since my family’s schedule doesn’t allow us to book tickets a few weeks before we travel or less, I’m often stuck booking tickets 11 months in advance (right before travel or super far out are the two best times for award availability, more on that later this week in Part II of my DIY Award Booking guide). Well, my obsession for the last two weeks has been getting my wife, daughter, and myself to Asia and back next Christmas holiday. And that obsession has paid off – in spades!
The DIY Guide to Booking Award Tickets – Part I: Know Why Award Tickets Exist
People have different opinions when it comes to booking award tickets with frequent flyer miles. I, for one, love booking award tickets and enjoy the challenge that comes with doing so. Booking award tickets are like puzzles to me and I love solving them. Other people hate booking award tickets, consider them too much of a hassle, or even go so far as to believing their frequent flyer miles are completely worthless. I’ve decided to put a guide together for those of you who fall in between – people who want to book award tickets themselves but feel like they need some pointers. This guide will assume some basic knowledge, namely, that you know how to log in to your frequent flyer account and check your mileage balance. Other than that, the guide is here to help you through the process – hope you find it useful! Feel free to refer to the index at the bottom of the page for other entries.
In Part I of this guide, we will talk about the reasons why airlines offer frequent flyer miles and tickets. Though there is very limited practical information to go over at this point, understanding the business reasoning behind award tickets will help us to determine how to get the most value out of the system that airlines have created.
Getting to Europe this Summer Before the United Devaluation
Hello, I’m back from the dead (temporarily at least). As most of you know, United award redemption rates go up significantly on February 1st, 2014, with partner rates on premium cabins really going up a lot. Many people have been scrambling to beat the devaluation including some clients of mine who wanted to go to Greece this summer. There is still some space to Europe hidden away for summer travel, so I wanted to share my process in the hopes that you will be able to get to Europe on miles this summer too! (And hopefully you can redeem before 2/1!)
How the US Airways/American Merger will Probably Affect Award Travel
So the Department of Justice officially gave US Airways and American approval to go ahead with their merger. The two airlines announced that reciprocal elite benefits will begin on 1/7/2014 though they didn’t go into detail about what that would mean. Here are some of my predictions about what we can expect to happen next, focused mainly on award travel since that’s the bulk of what I do.
United Award Ticket Devaluation Blog Roundup
In somewhat of a surprise move (not really), United majorly devalued their award chart last week. The upshot is, all international redemptions cost more miles, but what was more surprising was UA split their award chart. Essentially, travel on Star Alliance partners is now going to cost more miles than travel on United metal – a lot more in some cases. Anyway, this is just a reminder to earn and burn. I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here since a lot has been written on the matter, so I just wanted to share some of the most interesting posts I’ve read.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 74
- 75
- 76
- 77
- 78
- …
- 91
- Next Page »