Award Booking Archives - Page 2 of 10

Mar 25 2017

Easy travel rewards for non hackers

One of my favorite Saverocity personalities, Robert Dwyer, and I both enjoy listening to the Mighty Men of Mouse podcast (Disney stuff). On Episode 306 they had a brief discussion about travel rewards. Their sensible conclusion was that they don’t want to expend the mental bandwidth to keep track of it all. Travel hacking takes a lot of mental bandwidth (otherwise you might make potential costly mistakes), and I’m experienced enough now to know it’s pointless trying to convince people the value they present. But I thought it might be fruitful to discuss some easy travel rewards that don’t require a lot of mental bandwidth.

Travel reward programs can be complicated and confusing. But here are some easy travel rewards programs that you can use to save money on your travel! — If you can handle this, you can probably handle some simple travel rewards

A couple of notes. First, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for people to think they don’t want to expend the mental energy required to keep track of a million award programs. We all have our hobbies. Secondly, the easy travel rewards programs I’m discussing in this post don’t necessarily represent the most monetary value. Instead, they present travelers the opportunity to save money casually – without being insane like some of us.

I’ve split the rewards programs into categories, moving from simpler to more complicated within each category (in my opinion).

One organizational step – get a good password manager

While you can save money on your travel expending very little mental bandwidth, you should really get a good password manager before you get started. I use Lastpass, which will autofill my passwords in for me when I’m logged in – that saves a lot of mental time and effort.

Of course programs like Award Wallet really help too, but the simple easiest thing you can do is use something like Lastpass. That way you don’t really need to remember any of your logins and passwords.

If you’re paranoid about security, you could always make a spreadsheet for yourself, but that will really hurt your bandwidth. Programs like 1Password, which cost money, might be worth the cost in bandwidth saved alone.

Airline Rewards

If you’re flying, I find it easiest to focus on fixed value rewards programs like Southwest and Jetblue. That way you never need to worry about different award levels, demands on space, etc. etc. Each point you earn from Southwest or Jetblue has a monetary value to it. In fact they make redeeming the points a simple matter of clicking on “points” instead of “cash” when you search.

One feature propels Southwest to the top of the “easy to redeem” list: fee free cancellation. You can cancel or change your ticket any time up to 10 minutes before your flight. While you don’t get the money (or points) back to your account, you can apply that credit to future travel on Southwest.

One reason casual travelers avoid airline rewards is it’s hard to keep track of your frequent flyer number and how many miles you have. Solve that problem using the password manager you installed above. With Southwest or Jetblue, it doesn’t even matter how many miles you have since you can pay with cash or points – just try to pay with points every once in awhile and you’ll be saving money! The amount of bandwidth required to do this is only the amount of bandwidth you need to remember to login.

Hotel Rewards

While I’m not a huge fan of the program, I have to admit: hotels.com 10th night free program remains the easiest hotels rewards program. Basically, as long as you book all your hotels through their site you will earn one free night for every ten nights you purchase. Credit towards free nights expire in 12 months if you don’t redeem or stay within that time period.

The value of that free night will be equal to the average of the cost of the ten paid nights. It doesn’t get any easier than that, bandwidth wise. Also, Disney fans – you can book Disney hotels through hotels.com and redeem free nights at Disney.

Orbitz also has a rewards program – you earn 5% back for hotel bookings and 1% back for airline bookings. You can only use the rewards for hotel stays and all rewards expire in 12 months regardless of activity. The benefit of this program lies in being able to redeem more quickly (i.e., you don’t have to wait until ten stays).

When it comes to simple options, these hotel rewards are as simple as remembering to login and remembering to have activity once a year. Minimal mental bandwidth!

Credit Card Rewards

I swear I do not have affiliate links, but I still think the Barclays Arrival Plus card remains one of the easiest cards to use for travel rewards and a great card for travel hacking beginners. However, the annual fee scares casual travelers looking to save money and I get that. But if you think the $89 annual fee is worth the decreased bandwidth, then 2.1% redeemed towards travel will be pretty good for rewards.

Another great option is the Bank of America Travel Rewards card which comes with no annual fee. If you are a Platinum Honors Preferred client you’ll get 2.625% back per dollar spent, otherwise you’ll get 1.5%. Capital One Venture offers 2% back as well but with a $59 annual fee. All three of those cards are easy to use because you just redeem points against your travel purchases.

Of course the best option for the casual traveler? Invest in a 2% cash back card. The Fidelity Visa and Citi Double Cash both offer 2% cash back for no annual fee. But these options aren’t as “casual” because you need to mentally organize your money and dedicate that to your travel. Or alternatively, you can tell yourself to feel better about spending money on travel since you’ve been earning 2% back. Either way, it’s not as “clean” as the travel rewards card options.

Credit cards of course require more bandwidth than either the easy travel rewards from the airline or hotel programs I listed above. You need to keep track of things and you need to pay your balances off in full. What you receive in return for that extra bandwidth comes in the form of more savings, including savings you can “stack” (you can earn 2% cash back if you use your Fidelity card at hotels.com on top of the free night you are working towards).

Car Rental Rewards

One quick note here: it’s worth it to sign up for car rental programs. All you need to do is remember your number and add it to your reservation and you can generally skip the lines when picking up the car. All the different companies have different names but for the most part, have an account with them, skip the line. This even works sometimes for me when I book through sites like Priceline (even though it shouldn’t per terms and conditions). Worth the mental bandwidth especially in a place like Orlando where car rental lines are nuts.

Final Thoughts

Again, while these programs won’t save you the most money, they are some of the simplest programs to use. If you’re traveling a lot, why not at least give it a shot. Every dollar counts – if you save $50 that’s like…ten Mickey bars!

Any other easy to redeem programs I missed?

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Travel reward programs can be complicated and confusing. But here are some easy travel rewards programs that you can use to save money on your travel!

Jan 31 2017

How I decided between the multitude of travel options to Orlando

For some reason, domestic travel stresses me out more than international travel. Booking the travel, that is. The reasons for this are pretty simple – international travel presents way fewer options. If I’m trying to book a premium cabin with miles (which I try to do), then my options really boil down to how persistently I check award space.

Domestic travel between cities like Boston and Orlando, however, can be booked any number of ways:

Cash
Cash Equivalents (ThankYou Points, Ultimate Rewards, Membership Rewards, Flexperks)
Airline miles (fixed value)
Airline miles (region based)
Airline miles (distance based)
Gift cards

As I like to do from time to time, I’m going to break down my thought process and how I decided to book my flights. Surprise surprise, I screwed up! Oh well…

Parameters

I have reached the point in my life where traveling with kids, I now refuse to

a) fly with a connection (at least for destinations within 2-3 hours)

b) leave super early or super late

That meant that there were only four options: Delta, Jetblue, Spirit, or Southwest. Since I try to spend cash last (TM Free-quent Flyer), I dismissed Spirit immediately. This also helped me avoid any carry on bag fee calculations.

For various reasons, I also only needed to buy a one-way flight. That meant that Flexperks were probably out, since the cheapest award you can get is for a flight up to $400. The cash prices weren’t going to approach that.

Checking cash prices

Due to my parameters, I quickly cut down my options. Since UA and AA both don’t have direct flights, I eliminated distance based mileage options (British Airways or ANA). I’m not sitting on any gift cards to any of those airlines, so I eliminated that option as well.

booking travel — Hmm a few days out – these flights must not be too full since the prices haven’t gone up too much

I knew that the majority of my remaining options were going to be a function of the cash price for flights. Cash, cash equivalents, and fixed value points are all tied to the going rate for the flight you want.

So I threw my city pair and dates into my favorite flight search engines (Kayak and Google Flights) and found that the cheapest non-stop flight was around $175 (Delta). Jetblue was going at around $200 and I think Southwest was pricing out at like $240 (I threw this out after looking at the cost in both cash and points so I forget).

Converting cash prices to cash equivalents

Once I had the cash prices in hand, I set about looking at how much those flights would cost if I paid with cash equivalents. I’ve learned to not worry about how much I earned the miles for in general and instead just focus on how much value I’m getting at the time.

So the cost of these flights with cash equivalents was pretty easy to calculate:

Membership Rewards (Business Platinum): 17,500 cents / 1 cents per point = 17,500 MR points

ThankYou Points (Citi Prestige): 17,500 cents / 1.3 cents per point = 13,461 TYP

Ultimate Rewards Points (Chase Sapphire Reserve): 17,500 cents / 1.5 cents per point = 11,667 UR points

The Jetblue flight cost about 15-16,000 points, I can’t remember exactly. Anyway, at this point Ultimate Rewards were looking pretty good but I still had to check region based mileage programs.

Delta Air Lines, Boston’s hidden gem

I shall not continue beating the dead horse. But suffice it to say, Delta’s website showed three award seats available for 10,000 points each. This looked like a better deal to me than all of my other options, so I booked the tickets. I made sure to pay the taxes and fees with my Delta Gold card so that I’d get a free checked bag (a mistake I’ve made in the past).

10,000 points for $175 tickets felt like a great deal – especially since Delta miles feel less valuable than UR points, my next cheapest option. Getting a value of over 1.5 cents per point felt like a real win. Except.

My foolish mistake

At this point, savvy readers probably already know what I messed up. Robert Dwyer, ever the voice of reason, pointed this out to me after I had already booked. Since I have the AMEX Business Platinum AND Delta is my airline of choice, I could have gotten 50% back off a pay with points redemption.

Short version: I could have paid 17,500 points for the flight, but get 8,750 points back for a total cost of 8,750 MR points AND mileage earning. Dooooooooooooh.

Final Thoughts

I’m still shaking my head at myself for missing that. The great things about miles and points are you have a ton of options to save money, but having lots of options means you sometimes miss the obvious one. Hopefully, running through my thought process will help some of you avoid that mistake and help inspire you to think through all your options as you plan travel. And hey, even though I could have saved a few miles, I got a travel related post out of this and fulfilled the bossman’s wishes!

Apr 26 2016

Award Booking Tips overheard at FT4RL

So I made a rookie mistake presenting at FT4RL – too many slides! I had to rush through a few of my points on booking awards so I thought I’d share some of them here, along with a few other tips shared by the group. Nothing earth shattering here, but some good tips nonetheless.

There is coach award space to Europe still available this summer

I didn’t do an exhaustive search, but as far as I could tell there is quite a bit of award space available to Europe this summer. I searched the three main legacy carriers for four people to/from various US cities to various European cities and there was quite a bit of coach availability.

My main point here is this: if you want to travel to Europe this summer with a family, coach is your best bet. People write about flying in the front cabin all the time (guilty) but if you want to travel coach can get you there just fine.

There is even some coach award space to Asia

I searched (again, not exhaustively) flights to Taipei and Hong Kong and I found assorted coach award space for four people at low level award prices. Cool.

Delta is still the best option if you want to fly business class

I’ve spoken about this ad nauseum. Nobody cares, that’s cool. It doesn’t work for everyone, but it works for a heck of a lot more people than care to admit it.

Got a stockpile of Membership Rewards? Believe me about the Delta space?

Then when you find it, transfer your miles over to Air France and book. I think it was Richard Kerr (@thepointsjock) who shared that AF will wait with you online while you transfer miles so you don’t need to worry about the award space from disappearing from under you (Delta will do that too and they eliminated their phone booking fees). Transfer to AF and avoid the pesky excise fee.

Alaska Airlines is good for more than just showers

If you are flying roundtrip, you can use Alaska miles to book that Delta award space. Or book American Airlines coach space. Or book award space on a host of carriers in coach (and sometimes even in business). You might have Alaska miles leftover if you were holding out for Emirates first – no problem! Now you can fly to visit your friends on the other side of the country instead. Or to Europe.

Korean Air is a great option to Asia

OK, so they are adding change and redeposit fees in August 2017. Boohoo. Korean Air has great award space to Asia and you don’t even have to fly in first class. They have coach and business class seats too if you’re short on miles! There are enough seats for your family and they are an Ultimate Rewards transfer partner and they got rid of most of their fees. You can even fly to Mongolia from Seoul to be like milestomemories!

Be creative – lots of award programs have cool little niches

The aforementioned Richard Kerr shared some cool stuff about booking with Etihad miles but I think he’s going to write about that so I’ll just say here that…there is some cool stuff you can do. But the bottom line is, play around with some award searches or read up on some programs and you can find some pretty neat things.

You can use cash to buy tickets

Seriously! And this isn’t an option for all families, but you could always book two award tickets and two tickets with cash. There have been a lot of good deals in coach for this summer, just follow any of the big fare deal sites (airfarewatchdog, The Flight Deal, etc.) and then see if they work for you. You can even offset the overall cost with award tickets if they match up to the same flights.

Hat tip to milenomics for this huge breaking news!

You can use cash to hire someone to do all this work for you

A lot of my talk was about finding balance in our lives as our families get bigger. If I want quality time with my family that means less time running out to various stores, less time blogging, and less time searching for award space (my favorite thing to do).

If you don’t have the time, there’s no shame in paying someone to do the work for you. Go spend an hour playing with your kids instead!

Final Thoughts

I think I will write an entire post on why FT4RL was so freaking fun. But these are just some random award booking tips from the conference. None are game changing, but they all served as nice reminders to me – especially the ones I thought of myself. Always good to go back to the basics…

P.S. – I apologize for all the exclamation marks I am still on a conference high. I will do better next time.

Feb 18 2016

Delta Award Space is better than you think – much better

tl;dr – there’s a ton of Delta award space but our community’s bias against Delta is probably preventing us from realizing that. All searches were for FOUR people ONE way.

Whenever I’m poking around the blogosphere, there’s one airline that consistently gets hated on: Delta. Now I definitely agree they don’t make the most customer friendly moves – hiding award charts, hidden devaluations, etc. Still, they get way more flak than I think they deserve, and only get positive press every once in awhile when there is an award fare sale (BTW that sale extends to some business class fares as well if you’re interested).

Well, I was looking into a long weekend in Europe for my wife and myself this fall, and guess who consistently had the best award space? Delta Delta Delta. I don’t see AA or UA releasing that kind of space.

But before we get to the fall, let’s take a look at this summer. I wrote a few months ago about how Delta had a ton of award space to Europe for Summer 2016 that we used to book tickets to London. Over the past couple of weeks, I decided to take a look and see what’s changed since then, so I did a search for four seats (that’s right, four, for those families out there!) to see what turned up.

Here’s Boston to London in July in coach – it looks as good as it did when I checked in August 2015:

Economy award space for four BOS-LHR

Hmm. Well, that’s probably a fluke because it’s coach, what about in business class?

That’s FOUR seats. Four saver award seats per flight – both economy and business. Now some of those business class days are on Virgin Atlantic, but still. People love writing WIDE OPEN in their headlines – those two screen shots are wide open if you ask me. This is no fluke, take a look at the calendar for October:

These screenshots are getting boring, so you’ll have to trust me: the return award space is just as good. Okay fine, one screenshot:

How about Detroit to London in coach for four in July?

Business class?

Return in business?

Let’s try JFK-CDG:

How about JFK-CDG in the fall?

In business?

OK, so that one isn’t as good, but remember I’m searching for four people.

So I did one final test, LAX-LHR. If there was saver level space in business class I was going to be truly amazed. Unfortunately, Delta’s generous award space had finally met its mark:

Still, the award space is decent in coach:

And remember, if you really want to go in business, you can always find your way to one of those East Coast cities and go from there. Routes worth looking are anything from Boston, anything TO Amsterdam/London – I found good space on most of those routes through the end of the schedule (minus the obvious stuff like Christmas).

Why this matters

OK, so I have my hand fulls at home so don’t have the time to screenshot for days. But this award space is a big deal if you ask me. It means that the demise of Delta awards has been majorly overstated in the blogosphere. I cannot remember finding that much award space on either UA or AA. And remember, UA already devalued and AA is about to devalue – so it’s not like Delta’s prices are that expensive relatively anymore. People keep calling them Skypesos – but I just don’t see it. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!

Also, the ability to find four award seats is clutch for families. And Delta mile earning isn’t going to be affected by the Chase 5/24 crackdown.

Even if you don’t have Delta miles, there are other ways to book this space. One idea that I saw the other day on View from the Wing was using 80,000 Korean Air miles to fly roundtrip in business class. The fuel surcharges and fees are not a joke: I called and it was ~$1000 in business class (just look for “YR” when using ITA Matrix), but its an option. You could think of it as buying a $1000 coach ticket and using 80,000 miles to upgrade to business (it’s not for everyone). Heck, even Alaska still pairs with Delta sort of still! All of that saver award space (30K coach 62.5K business each way) should be bookable with partners.

Final Thoughts

People keep hating on Delta, but I just don’t get it. I don’t care how customer unfriendly you are – if you open up award space for my family to take a trip to Europe in the middle of the summer, I’m going to forgive a lot of your missteps. So next time you’re looking to go to Europe – poke around on the Delta website. You won’t believe what happens next!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Feb 09 2016

Seven reasons I prefer the Alaska Airlines award search tool to British Airways

Update: Proof that I am an idiot. I swear I saw CX space but it must have been in my dreams or something, sigh. Anyway, I’m gonna leave all my stupid text in here for posterity, but I’ve edited the post.

British Airways website has long been touted as the go to award search engine for Oneworld award space. I don’t dispute that, but being that I am looking at flights to Asia a lot (even though the idea of taking a preschooler and a lap infant seems insane right now), I am often searching for ~~Cathay Pacific~~ award space and it’s nice that you can get it on one award using Emirates. I have long used British Airways site to search for Oneworld award space, but a funny thing happened last week when I was searching for Emirates award space on Alaska Air’s site. I realized I much prefer Alaska’s search engine for ~~Cathay award space, or even~~ British Airways award space itself. Here are seven reasons why.

1) You don’t have to log in

Man, do I hate how British Airways makes you log in every single time you want to search for award space. What’s worse, I find they are kind of quick on the trigger to log you out as well. On Alaska’s website, you don’t need to waste that time logging in.

2) It doesn’t take multiple clicks to start searching

There is no reason in this day and age that a website should have a separate search page for paid flights and award flights. It should be as easy as just checking a box that says “use miles”, but it takes multiple clicks to get to the book with Avios page with British Airways. Combined with generally clunkiness, it makes searching for award space pretty frustrating at times, especially when I’m doing hundreds of searches for clients. You can get right to business on Alaska Air’s landing page.

3) It’s easy to start a new search or change parameters

I’ve long found British Airways site super clunky for starting a new search. Finally, finally, they put a “change” button at the top to let you start a new search easily, but it still resets your cabin class to economy every single time. You also don’t need to click through that annoying “do you want a stopover?” page when you are starting a new search. Every click matters!

4) You don’t have to click on every single individual day to search for award space

British Airways claims to show you a week of award space at a time, but that’s not really true, is it? You have to click each individual day to search for space, and it will remember if there was none but you still have to search day by day. Meanwhile, Alaska gives you all that information up front. Compare:

5) Better award calendar

This category isn’t even fair. British Airways only has an award calendar for flights on British Airways metal, and it looks like this:

I mean, that’s pretty useful if you have the amount of Avios needed memorized, I guess? But again, this only applies for British Airways flights so it’s not like I’m getting an overview of CX space with this. Meanwhile, over at Alaska Airlines, as long as you click the “Award Calendar” button:

Look at that, an award calendar for partners that includes pricing and can be filtered by cabin class!

This award calendar is not as great as AA’s, but it’s still way more useful than British Airways – especially if you’re searching for space on Cathay.

6) It’s not as cryptic whether the award is mixed cabin or not

Take a look at the British Airways graphic from #3. What that isn’t telling you is that the award is mixed cabin (coach to Miami). You have to click once again to reveal that, as shown below:

Come on, man! And it’s not like it clicks and pops up – it clicks, loads, then pops up. Meanwhile if Alaska shows some chair emojis, you know it’s mixed cabin (though you still have to click through to see exact details).

7) Alaska is just so much faster

It’s not even close.

Final Thoughts

I find now that I’ve been searching for awards for a long time, I keep going to the same tools. That’s great, because you learn and master those tools, but then you sometimes forget that there might be other things out there that work better. Now obviously Alaska is only going to be better than British Airways in niche situations ~~(searching for Cathay space)~~, but when you are searching specifically for that – do yourself a favor and try it out. You’ll never believe what happens next!