Back in June, I wrote about passing on the Jetblue/Virgin America mileage run deal. Basically I said it wasn’t worth the time or extra effort.

Oops.

I’ll blame @robertdwyer for corrupting me and convincing me that the deal was indeed worth it. In the end, I earned 75,000 Jetblue points and 50,000 Virgin America points for 20,000 SPG points, 25,000 TYP points, and $150. Time will tell whether it was worth it, but what’s done is done and I can’t go back!

In other news, I took the first mileage run of my entire life this morning! We found a $114 fare from Boston Logan to Nantucket, MA. The outbound departed at 6:35 AM and the return departed at 8:00 AM.

Since this might be my last mileage run ever, I thought I’d share some thoughts on what many people often fuss about.

The whole concept of mileage running is kind of weird

Robert and I were joined by Nelumbo from the Saverocity forums, a much more experienced mileage runner. I found the whole thing a little bit surreal.

I woke up at about 5 AM, was out the door at 5:15 and at the gate by about 5:45. It’s pretty surreal to go through security without a bag since I didn’t need one for such a short mileage run. I also decided to use a mobile boarding pass for the first time, which was neat (I sound old).

Still, I found it weird to board an airplane for the sole purpose of boarding the airplane. I guess this experience proved to me that it really is about the destination for me, I don’t really enjoy flying for the sake of flying.

Mileage running is better with friends

I joke that I was peer pressured into this, but the reality is, I probably wouldn’t done this if I was going to fly alone. It’s tough to justify getting on an airplane completely by myself, both to my wife and also to myself.

Flying with a companion gave me a chance to catch up and talk shop. So I kind of viewed my three hours this morning as a mini miles and points meetup that happened to be on an airplane. I thought that made things much more enjoyable.

As an aside, it is super refreshing to fly without bags or kids (or is that the same thing?).

I was tempted to stay in Nantucket

Simply put, Nantucket is now on my list of things to do next summer, especially if the airfare remains that low. From what little we could tell in the air, Nantucket is a picturesque New England town. I’ve done Martha’s Vineyard multiple time; I think it’s time to check Nantucket off the list.

Also, if you’re a Boston resident, flying to Nantucket via Jetblue or Cape Air is worth looking into depending on your needs. It’s a twenty minute flight!

I’m probably not doing this again

This was a unique experience, but one I’m not likely to repeat. This Jetblue promotion was really a special case: the 75,000 points should cover our next 1.5 trips to Disney World or so. The 50,000 Virgin America points should be able to cover a nice weekend away for my wife and myself. So that’s worth the points and $150 for me, and I was back in my home within four hours.

Much respect to everyone who mileage runs on the regular, but it’s just not for me, especially for status. If another “promotion so good someone might get fired” comes along, I’d consider, but the 20 minute Boston-Nantucket flight really was the perfect storm!

Update 2: I am weak.

Update: This deal is getting more and more tempting, especially since Jetblue is strong in Boston and we fly a lot of coach. Here’s a nice analysis of the value you can get. Also @robertdwyer is really doing a great job of peer pressure on Twitter! Will I remain strong?!?!? I want to chase so bad! Ahhhhh.

There is a really good deal going on right now. As always in the blogosphere I have no idea who reported it first, but I first saw it on Angelina Travels so she gets the hat tip. Just keep an eye out for affiliate links though.

Anyway, that’s not really what this post is about. If you’re not familiar with the deal, basically Jetblue is trying to steal customers away from Virgin America. Depending on how many miles you have with Virgin America right now, Jetblue will give you a certain number of miles in its own program – provided you fly a flight roundtrip with them by the end of the summer.

Figuring out how to leverage this deal is pretty easy:

I'm in a city with 0 Virgin America & 2 JetBlue destinations w/ poor connection opportunities. So of course I transferred 40K Starpoints.

— Amol (@PointsToPointB) June 24, 2016

You can turn 40K Starpoints into 50K Virgin America points, as long as you fly the roundtrip and have 50,001 Virgin America points they will give you 75,000 Jetblue points. Or 100K TYP can get you the same deal. If you find a cheap roundtrip flight (let’s say $150 but I’m sure you can do better), you are getting 75,000 Jetblue points and 50,001 Virgin America points for the cost of the miles you transferred plus the roundtrip flight.

That is a pretty great deal. INCREDIBLE, even. But is it worth chasing?

For me, the answer is no way. For starters, I’m going to have trouble finding the time to do what essentially amounts to a mileage run. We’re also completely booked for summer travel so I’m not going to be able to go anywhere with my family either.

Secondly, even though I get a ton of points and value from the match – I only get the value if I use them. Having lots of points in different programs is great, it can offer flexibility. But it also can be a source of stress if you are trying to figure out how to get rid of those points constantly or if you are hamstrung because of your need to burn them.

I fly five or six times a year. Maybe ten in a good year. Even then, I’d probably be hard pressed to get rid of those points! I know because it’s happened to me time and time again. Chasing these deals takes energy in two places: on the front end while earning (I’d need to make the mileage run) and on the back end while redeeming (I’d need to figure out a way to use them).

At my current life stage, that’s just not a good option for me.

Another example. You know what else sounded like a great deal? The 8X Ebay Bucks deal I jumped on to buy $450 worth of Staples gift cards. BTW, that IS a great deal: if you have the time to work it and track everything. But I still need to get rid of the Ebay Bucks before I lose them forever and I only was able to get rid of the Staples gift cards because someone hooked me up with a buyer. Otherwise it just would have created a lot more stress, for what…$40 and whatever I earned from the portal?

Here’s the bottom line: in the past, every time a great deal came around, I chased it. But even then when I didn’t have any kids, chasing every single deal meant that my time, energy, and game was stretched. It’s like pushing too hard in a lane in Dota (video game analogy), pressing too high on the soccer field leaving space behind for your opponent to exploit (sports analogy), or trying so hard to make the perfect birthday party for your kid that you end up creating more stress than fun (parenting analogy).

Now that I don’t chase every deal, I definitely don’t get as much value as I could out of my points. I’m not going to turn 40,000 Starpoints into 125,000 points anytime soon (like > $1000 worth of travel).

But that’s okay. If the big headlines pressure you to jump on this deal, just take a step back. If you know what you want to redeem the points for, go for it. If you’re not sure? Discretion can often be the better part of valor.

 

 

There has been a lot of hubbub about the mommy blogger rant that’s gone viral in the past few days. I credit Dia for bridging it into the miles and points world (at least out of the blogs I read). Apparently it was in Time magazine or something? I only read that at the doctor’s office and that’s only after I’ve done all the searches in Highlights magazine.

Commence rambling!

I enjoyed the rant. I enjoy TBB’s rants. I think they are important and remind us to keep everything in perspective. More importantly, they are reminders to us that we need to be intelligent consumers. Shady schilling and shameless promotion definitely get me worked up from time to time.

But let’s be honest here: advertisements and promotions have been around since, I don’t know, the birth of capitalism? Why single out sellout mommy and point bloggers?

The Philadelphia 76ers just announced that they are going to be the first NBA team to place advertisements on their jerseys. Outrage has ensued on Twitter. But European sports leagues have had ads on their jerseys forever. It’s only a big deal to us because we haven’t seen it in the NBA before. But it’s not like the NBA and its affiliates haven’t been trying to sell us on products all this time.

Do people get outraged about ads on TV? Billboards? The subway? Those new monitors they put in at gas stations talking about products?

This is the realization I came to when reading the momrant. Everyone is trying to sell something! I’m too old and too busy to get mad about it anymore.

Now, I wish this world were more ideal. That people would get paid to talk about products they love and that those connections would happen organically. If someone (Disney) paid me to go somewhere (Disney) and write about how much I loved it (Disney) I would happily take that money (Disney gift cards are an acceptable form of tender). Would what I write be objective? Probably not! But my writing about Disney is already subjective. It would be whether they let me into their parks for free or not. It would definitely change, but since it’s something I already love, maybe not that much.

I also wish this world were ideal in the sense that, when people no longer believed in products, they would no longer promote them. But that isn’t the world we live in.

Do all these podcasters really use Squarespace? Or buy mattresses? Or order from Blue Apron? I doubt it (though Blue Apron is great in a pinch). But I’ve spent my entire life not getting mad about freaking 1-877-KARS4KIDS commercials, why am I gonna get mad about a 2 minute spot in a podcast?

Podcasts cost money to produce. The Saverocity Observation Deck runs at a loss every year because we don’t have ads. We’re okay with that (for now, at least. We’ve never even brought up the idea of looking for sponsors, for the record).

There is a podcast I really enjoy, and one day they were like: “We really enjoy making this podcast, but it’s becoming a bit of a burden. We’re looking for a sponsor, we’ll charge $20/month, the amount it costs to run this thing, e-mail us.”

The next episode they had two sponsors, and you know what, I don’t begrudge them at all for it. Some people won’t listen to podcasts that have ads, and that’s cool. But it’s possible they are missing out on a lot of good content just because they doesn’t feel like fast forwarding two minutes.

The internet has tricked us into thinking we can get all this information for free, but we can’t. And the information usually isn’t created for free, people are putting a lot of work into things. Every time one of Freequent Flyer’s tweets sends me to Wikipedia (though I should have remembered the Turing test), someone at that company had to put in work to make sure there is nothing egregiously wrong on the page. Gideon himself works off a subscription model, which I think is great – he has cut out the middleman and we pay him directly. He works for us! But everyone putting content on the internet has got to pay the bills somehow.

I guess my point is this. For me, personally, ads are annoying and can be offensive when they are particularly devious, but they have always been. Like since I was 5. Blogs and “new media” have just found a new way to make them annoying.

But just like I learned to go fix a snack or fast forward through commercials on TV, just like I learned to switch the station when 1-877-KARS4KIDS comes on (did you know it’s a 501c3 charity they don’t repeat it a million times in their spots at all no sir), there are ways to get around ads on the internet and in podcasts.

If you don’t like ads, install an ad blocker. But if you don’t mind them and you want to support sites like Saverocity and especially a guy like Matt who made a decision not to try to sell credit cards to you for personal gain; then let the ads stay and take that small annoyance as the “cost” of the great work Matt has done into creating the forum and our network.

(Aside: 80% of the ads I see when surfing around Saverocity are for Disney. Hmm.)

(Aside 2: Just inserted an ad into a post complaining about ads. The new meta.)

If you don’t like “influential promotions”, bloggers writing about stuff that in a way that is trying to sneakily sell you something – don’t read those blogs! Decide for yourself whether the good content outweighs the bad and then move on. Make your own “Blogs to Ignore” list and then enjoy all your new free time! Vote with your dollars and clicks, and don’t worry about the rest.

People have been selling snake oil since Biblical times. Just don’t buy it.

“Think on the end before you start.” – Fortune Cookie

In my presentation at FT4RL, a good portion of my talk was dedicated to hammering home the point that it is important to have clear goals in this game and to be focusing your time on meeting those goals – especially if you have limited time.

Goals look different at different stages of life of course: realistic goals change after you get a dog, or a spouse, or start taking care of a kid(s). That’s why I find it important to review and revise our family’s travel goals from time to time.

Shawn from milestomemories related a sad (to me) fact at the conference: he’ll get way more hits on a post about saving literally a dollar or two than any of his trip reports (or awesome videos). Now I get it, people don’t really enjoy reading trip reports about the same places over and over again, but sometimes I think it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that we’re in this game to travel, and trip reports can inspire us to do so even if travel hacking is 99% just about bragging rights.

(OK, maybe not everyone is in the game to travel, some people are just making money hand over fist. But I’d like to believe a lot of people are doing this in order to get to places beyond Walmart).

Let me offer a few suggestions about how to ensure you are meeting your goals. None are perfect, nor do I practice them all, but I think the important thing is to be thinking about whether the miles and points you are earning are purposeful enough for your needs or not. Remember, the value of an unredeemed point is 0 cents.

Determine your travel hacking goals

Everything starts here. As I said in my presentation, despite what Matt would have you believe, traveling for freee (™ by Saverocity) is mostly a myth. If you’re single and have lots of free time, then you probably can fly around the world in first class every month. And that’s awesome and I’m genuinely envious.

But there are lots of different motivations for travel hacking, subsidizing the cost of travel, moving up one cabin, etc. Make sure you determine your goals before going about earning miles. If you are unclear about your goals you are going to end up earning miles that you don’t know what to do with.

It’s also important to familiarize yourself with the currencies you will be earning – where can your miles take you? How much will it cost? What does availability look like? If you’re new to this, don’t assume you’re just going to earn miles and freee™ travel will suddenly happen, it usually takes work and experience (and a degree of failure) to truly start optimizing your travel hacking.

Create a demand schedule to determine your travel goals

Way back in 2013 Milenomics wrote about demand schedules and using them to target earnings. Basically, it is a working planner for all of your flights divided into one way segments. He has a working document that you can copy and edit as you see fit, but essentially it includes dates, classes of service, and costs (in miles or points). I have a simplified version that takes into account lodging as well; we used it as a worksheet at the conference so you could fill it out in 5-10 minutes if you want something simpler.

As my time has become squeezed more and more and my margins have become tighter and tighter, the demand schedule has become more and more important to me. I need to know where I want to go in order to earn in the right programs; gone are the days where I can blindly chase the sign up bonus for the Hawaiian Airlines card without any use in mind.

Even if you don’t completely fill out a demand schedule, I highly recommend reading Milenomics’ posts and then thinking about your travel goals. Then make sure the miles you are trying to earn match up with those goals, otherwise you’re just leaving money on the table. There’s no point in buying discounted Southwest gift cards if you have no reason to fly Southwest.

Take an honest look at whether you are meeting your budget goals

While this post was in draft I saw an interesting pair of posts over at ‘dem flyers. In it Daniel outlines how he tried to calculate the amount he spent on travel last year and then a reevaluation of his initial evaluation. I found it interesting to see how people keep track of their travel budget, especially as someone who isn’t too detailed in budgeting myself.

Whether you do something similar to what he did, or whether you look at every purchase/MS/resale/flight/hotel blow by blow (not my personal recommendation but to each his or her own) – at least get a general idea of whether you are saving money or spending more money on travel with all your hacking. Then you can make sure that idea squares with your overall goals and motivations determined above.

For example, I personally am happy paying for travel, but I like to use miles and points to make my travel more comfortable and luxurious (or as Matt would say, I travel to passive aggressively tell “family and friends how inferior their lifestyle is”). I’m currently considering whether to make a run at requalifying for Hyatt Diamond status for next year.

This is where I need to be brutally honest to myself about my budget goals. With my current travel plans for the year, the number of mattress runs I’ll need to requalify goes beyond my budgetary goals – I’d end up spending more money than diamond status is probably worth for my 2017 travel needs. So if I end up making the run, I need to at least be honest with myself that I am paying extra for luxury.

However you make your own evaluations, make sure you are honest about whether you are under, meeting, or exceeding your budgetary goals.

Evaluate whether your travel and budgetary goals are meeting your overall family/spouse/pet hedgehog goals

I went to this more in depth at the conference, but your family goals are going to dictate your overall travel and budgetary goals. Make sure they evolve as your life situation evolves; the less time you have the more efficient you have to be.

Get rid of points that have no value

I joked about the Hawaiian card above, but that is borne out of a true story. I signed up for the card and planned on converting those miles plus a bunch of miles I transferred from AMEX to book some AXON awards right before they were about to be devalued. But it turned out I couldn’t transfer the Hawaiian miles that were originally AMEX points to Hilton! (it’s against the terms and conditions to convert sign up bonus points). The result? A bunch of Hawaiian airlines miles I had absolutely no use for.

Pro unclutterers have a rule of thumb: if you haven’t worn an article of clothing for a year it’s time to throw it out or donate it. Lots of airlines have a decluttering rule already built in: your miles expire in 12-18 months.

I’d suggest getting rid of any of this points clutter (and making sure you only earn miles that fit your demand schedule in the future). Freequent Flyer has a lot of great ideas for how to get rid of them. None of them really approach the “1 cent per point” value people are always talking about, but they are better than the zero cents per point you would get by not getting rid of the points at all or letting them expire.

Remember – regardless of how you earned your points, that cost is sunk. You’re not saving anything by redeeming at a bad rate, you’re just unloading product, to borrow a reselling term (or a term I assume resellers use at least).

Seriously consider ditching those points you’ve been holding on with no real plan for – you’re just not that into them.

Final Thoughts

Think on the end before you start. Figure out what your goals are – travel-wise, budget wise, family wise – and make sure the time you’re spending accurately reflects those goals. The above are just suggestions and ideas, throw them out if you’d like but at least spend the time to think about what you’re doing (I’m talking to myself here). Boasting about 2 million point balances might feel great, but if deep down you know you’re only redeeming 20% of them…why did you spend so much time earning the other 80%?

References

I referenced a lot of posts that have been very valuable to me in my thinking about this miles and points game. They’re all linked in the post but I feel like they’re all worth reading so I’ve put then down here for reference as well. Consider this an academic paper 🙂

What Travel is Really About – milestomemories (a must watch for any family traveler)

A More In-Depth Look at Demand Schedules – Milenomics

Using Demand Schedules to Target Earnings – Milenomics

Introducing the world’s most amazing advice columnist – PF Digest (OK this is just a classic)

Honesty Revisited – ‘dem flyers

Love and Hate in the Land of Travel Blogging – Saverocity (not completely relevant to this post but one of the first posts with freee™ in it)

Earn the miles you redeem, redeem the miles you earn – Free-quent Flyer