Helping you and your family save money on your vacations to Disney and beyond
Here we go again. American and US Airways both introduced some changes to their awards last night. While they aren’t major, they are probably just a portent of things to come. I think the most worrying thing about these changes are that they were announced without warning and are effective immediately. That’s bad customer service in my book – United and even Delta gave fair warning. Here is a quick summary of changes and the way to deal with them.
One year ago, we were waking up every 3-4 hours with a newborn baby in the house. One week ago, we were jumping off the deck attached to our overwater bungalow in Bora Bora while grandparents were watching our one year old. Believe it or not, situation one was integral in enabling situation two to happen. Jess and I spent a week in Bora Bora over President’s week – here’s how we made it happen.
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 this installment, we will take a look at the three main types of airline specific award miles you might have and get a better understanding of which types of miles are best for what situations. While this is by no means meant to be completely comprehensive, it should serve as a base to help you evaluate what type of miles you should use (or need to get) to find your perfect award redemption. I’ll also include some links to award charts to help you figure out which awards will cost what prices.
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.
A friend asked me if I could do a post on using British Airways Avios for flying on American Airlines flights. It may seem counterintuitive, but there are times when you want to use one type of airline mile to fly on one of its alliance partners. In this case, British Airways and American are Oneworld partners, and you can save some miles by using BA Avios in the right instances. Here’s how: