Travel Planning Archives - Page 6 of 10

Feb 16 2015

Joe vs. Mother Nature

Update: two hour delay and we missed the parades but we made it!

At some point, you just look outside at feet and feet of snow and you just can’t take it anymore. I reached that breaking point last week. I mean, this is what I’m dealing with:

My tiny driveway is in the foreground. It takes me over an hour to dig out.

I started feeling pretty bummed out by all the weather. At this point, a lot of people would splurge on a flight to somewhere warm – paying a premium to fly last minute and to warm places that everyone from Boston is traveling to during President’s week. I too, decided to splurge, but with points instead.

I was searching for saver award space in coach since we were shooting for domestic destinations but was coming up empty. So for my “splurge” I decided to book us domestic first class tickets – at saver level – but still domestic first class. So, for the price of three one way business class lie flat seats to Europe (150,000 AAdvantage miles), I booked us into three domestic first class seats round trip to New Orleans.

It seems Mother Nature might have other plans for us. The snow has finally calmed down in Boston (we’re due for an inch tomorrow but that’s pretty much a joke at this point). Unfortunately, we’re supposed to transit through D.C. – who are currently getting hit by their first real snowstorm of the season. SERENITY NOW.

So, we’ll find out tomorrow morning whether we can make it to New Orleans or not. And if we do – it’s Fat Tuesday! Which I had no idea about…so it should be an adventure getting to the hotel, which is on the parade route. Haha.

Anyway fingers crossed – it’s gonna be tight. Originally this was going to be a post about how miles are great for last minute travel when you want to get away from it all blah blah blah blah blah but you know what? I just want to make it to New Orleans tomorrow. Stress city!

If you would like to root me on or root for me to be miserable, follow me on Twitter @asthejoeflies!

To wrap up, a picture of my walk with my dog this afternoon just for kicks:

Feb 05 2015

Remember to Check Award Space Regularly: Slightly Discounted Business Class on Asiana A380

Halfway around the world for 70,000 miles in business class (gcmap.com)

Update: Since I wrote this last night, United has actually made their “non-advertised” sale official. See details here (book by 2/28!)

When friends ask me about awards they want to book – the resourceful ones often want to learn how to fish. One thing I always tell them is: keep checking for award space – you never know what you might find. Recently, two separate pieces of information surfaced in the blogosphere that I didn’t even think to connect in my head (though I’m sure many did). But everything clicked when my buddy Dan messaged me today: “Hey I can fly from JFK to Seoul on an A380 for 70,000 miles in business?”

Why, yes, Dan, you can right now! When I first saw that Asiana would be starting a new A380 flight from JFK to Seoul on One Mile at a Time, I didn’t really think too much of it, mainly because I don’t have the Star Alliance balances to book such a flight.

But then when Dan said he saw business class space for 70,000 miles I remembered that I had read somewhere that United was doing another unadvertised award sale. I’m not trying to plagiarize or anything (don’t want to incur PFDigest’s wrath!), but I really do not remember where I saw that.

For the unfamiliar, after United’s devaluation, partner premium cabin awards have become much more costly than awards on United metal. For example, business class to North Asia on United metal costs 70,000 each way, while business class on partners costs 80,000.

The recently devalued United award chart - more expensive partner premium cabins — The recently devalued United award chart – more expensive partner premium cabins

So the business class seats on the Asiana A380 should cost 80,000 miles each way. But for some reason, United has been having these random “sales” where they price partner awards at the same cost of United metal awards – currently it seems like that’s happening for both Asia and Europe. So right now this award is pricing at 70,000 miles each way.

Current pricing - 10,000 miles cheaper than usual in business — Current pricing – 10,000 miles cheaper than usual in business

That’s pretty good news, because in today’s prices that’s a fair (though not cheap) price to Asia in business class.

The even better news is that right now Asiana has released a ton of award space. Here is my July and August search for 4 seats:

Notice that space basically becomes wide open after the A380 starts operating every day in mid-July.

Here is my September and October search for EIGHT seats:

So the bottom line is, there is a ton of award space – even enough to get a family of four to Asia in business class if you have the miles. You get to fly a new plane, on a new route, for a temporarily reduced price!

In terms of the product, it’s a lie flat business class seat – very “Smartium”.

Business "Smartium" class — Business “Smartium” class

Final Thoughts

If you know when and where you want to travel and you don’t see award space at first, try, try again. You’ll never know what you might find – in this case a new route plus an unannounced award “sale” led to a pretty good deal. I’m not sure how long this “sale” will go for, United had one before, it ended (Asia was pricing at 80K when I went last minute two weeks ago), and now it’s on again – but if you know you need to go somewhere, book while it’s hot!

Feb 01 2015

Reminder: You can add a free one-way on United awards

The first segment of this award (red) was essentially free (gcmap.com)

My entire family went to Hong Kong for some family stuff last weekend. While I used my miles to get a good last minute flight, my parents paid cash. Luckily, their cash fare allowed a stopover so they pushed a trip to visit us here in Boston back one weekend to this one.

This post is an illustration of how a proper knowledge of the ins and outs of miles programs can save you money.

My parents original plan

I was so busy catching up when I got back from Hong Kong that it didn’t even register with me that my parents were coming to Boston on a one way ticket. It didn’t occur to me until they were at the airport waiting for their flight to Boston to ask: “Wait, how are you getting home?”

They said they had bought Amtrak tickets. At that point I entered one of those “brain puts pieces together in slow motion” type montages in the movies.

– They’re coming on a one way ticket

– They need a one way ticket home

– They have an award flight to Australia coming up

– LIGHTBULB!

Saving money for the flight home

If you’re familiar with how to use free one-ways on United award tickets, this post is just a friendly reminder and I’m sure you can skip the rest. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, read on.

I took advantage of the fact that United allows stopovers on their round trip award tickets to book my parents a flight from Boston to Newark for $3. A stopover is defined as a stay in a transiting city – generally anything more than 24 hours will trigger this (though it can be as little as four depending on the circumstance).

The idea of a “free one-way” is using stopover rules to give you an extra leg to or from your home city in addition to your “main” round-trip.

Their original itinerary was a simple round trip

My parents had booked a roundtrip flight from Newark to Sydney and back for next month. A regular roundtrip flight does not take advantage of a stopover – you just fly to your destination, hang out there, and then come back.

So what I did was I tacked on a flight from Boston to Newark a week before they depart for Australia. That changed their itinerary from this:

Newark => Sydney (destination) => Newark

To this:

Boston => Newark (stopover) => Sydney (destination) => Newark

Thanks to Platinum status and a free one-way, the flight from Boston to Newark (with a stopover of a week) only cost $3 in taxes and fees

Award space from Boston to Newark was plentiful – it’s only a few days from departure so United is trying to get rid of inventory. My dad is lifetime United Platinum so he doesn’t pay any close-in or change fees, so it was a no-brainer. If you don’t have status, it could cost up to $150 per person so you’d have to weight that against the cost of the train tickets.

With United you can get even fancier since they allow and open jaw and a stopover but I want to keep this short so I’ll end here. United is one of the few airlines where you can still get free one-ways: take advantage whenever you’re booking award tickets (even if you don’t have status you can book your original ticket that way).

Final Thoughts

This post is just another illustration of how you can use points and miles to save money on travel (in this case it was only possible with my dad’s status, but you can still use this principle for non last minute travel and save money). The concept of the free one-way was one of the toughest for me to understand when starting out – feel free to ask questions in the comments. What really helped “free my mind” when trying to understand this concept: don’t get locked into thinking of your home airport as your origin or destination.

Jan 21 2015

Using Miles for Last Minute Travel: An Example

Never thought I'd be on Cathay again so soon... — Never thought I’d be on Cathay again so soon…

I mostly use my miles and points for vacation, but they can also really come in handy in a pinch. Long story short, I need to return to Hong Kong this weekend for some last minute family stuff. Trever might have the energy to go to Hong Kong for 43 hours of fun, but I normally wouldn’t do something like this. But I really wanted to go back to be with my family and so I leveraged my miles and points to get me there. I figured it might be a good case study to outline the thought process I go through when booking an award ticket – especially when against the gun.

Step 1: Make a cost/benefit analysis of whether to go or not

For me, I had to weigh a few factors. Yes I wanted to go back, but I couldn’t realistically take more than three days off of work. Including the weekend, that’d be five days away from home. I’m also just getting over the flu, so I eliminated flying coach as an option (tickets were ~$700-$800 in economy FWIW). I just couldn’t handle flying 20 hours back and forth (no direct flights to HKG from BOS until May) in coach and then getting back exhausted – we got said flu after we got back from Hong Kong two weeks ago and it was a disaster.

Then I had to decide whether premium cabin mileage costs were worth it. This was an easy decision for me, I really wanted to go back so if I could find the space I would go. So I came to the conclusion if I could find business class space or above, I’d go.

Step 2: Take an inventory of mileage balances

At this point I loaded up my mental award wallet and the actual Award Wallet to determine what programs I’d be able to use to get where I wanted to go in the class of service I wanted. I calculated that I could fly roundtrip on Oneworld (with AA or US miles), roundtrip on Star Alliance (with United miles + Chase UR transfer), or one way on Skyteam (with Delta Skymiles). I determined I’d prefer using one alliance to go one way and another alliance for the return – just to keep my miles and points diversified.

Step 3: Searching for award space

This part was fairly straightforward. I searched britishairways.com for Oneworld space, united.com for Star Alliance space, and delta.com for Delta space. I quickly threw Delta out – there was no saver space on the dates I wanted. I was shooting for one connection max, so when searching for Oneworld space I searched for Cathay Pacific space out of ORD and JFK. I figured since AA has a ton of flights between BOS and those cities they’d be my best bet. Cathay releases a ton of premium cabin award space close in, so I was pretty confident. And I was right:

Tons of premium cabin space close in on CX

Originally I wanted to go after work, so I put an award on hold that connected a 605 PM BOS-JFK flight to the 910 PM JFK-HKG flight. That flight, incidentally, includes a stop in Vancouver, but I decided I’d rather miss less work.

Since I found award space for the outbound that I could book with AA miles, I decided to search for a return on United. This too yielded results quickly (it’s so easy to book close in sometimes!).

Since it was all on United metal it was only 80,000 miles in Global First, which is the same as business on a partner carrier would cost. So I had found flights that fit my parameters and I had to decide what to book.

Step 4: Making the call on what flights to book

At this point, my lack of status on either airline gave me pause. Both AA and UA would charge me a $75 close in booking fee for booking an award ticket less than 21 days before departure. UA would charge me if I further wanted to change after that, while AA would allow me to change routing and dates if I needed to. I wasn’t sure if I was going to need this flexibility in Hong Kong.

What I did was I called AA to put the outbound flight on a courtesy 5-day hold. Of course since we were only a week out it was just a 1-day hold but that’s all I needed. At that point I had a kind of “duh” moment. If I booked the entire itinerary with AA, I’d only pay one $75 close in booking fee. Taxes and fees would be fairly comparable, so I’d basically save $75 overall. I also realized that if I wanted/needed to change my routing, I’d be able to do that for free on AA.

So ultimately, I decided to give up the one way on UA and book the flight as a roundtrip. I almost always recommend booking flights on airlines that don’t give you stopovers as one ways – you get more flexibility – but in this case the roundtrip flight gave me more flexibility and saved me money. It’s always important to know all your options. Finding award space home was easy, again, Cathay releases a ton of award space.

Step 5: Dealing with a slight issue

There was one issue with my itinerary. My original BOS-JFK flight was slotted to get in at 730 PM, giving me 1 hour and 40 minutes until my 910 PM departure to Hong Kong. One of the agents I spoke to told me this violated the minimum connection time in JFK, which she said was 1 hour and 55 minutes. I basically didn’t believe her, told her to leave the flights on hold, and called back and got another agent to complete the booking. I found this on flyerguide:

Minimum connection times for various AA hubs

Now it’s totally possible I read this wrong. But what this looked like to me was that for a domestic to international flight (DI) the minimum connection time was 40 minutes. Which, frankly, makes a heck of a lot more sense than 1 hour 55 – JFK is bad but it’s not that bad. The problem was, the agent told me she was gonna make a note in my file. I was like…uh oh. But I figured the computer can’t read notes.

Well, I don’t know if the computer completes ticketing or a human does it, but either she was right and I was wrong (totally possible) or somebody read that note. Because a few hours after I booked the ticket I got an “urgent” e-mail from AA telling me to call them about my reservation. I called in – they had put me on the 245 PM departure to JFK – and completed the booking for real. I received my e-ticket early the next morning.

Step 6: I garden my flights even if I’m leaving in less than 48 hours

I woke up the next day and decided that leaving at 245 PM was pointless. The whole reason for leaving at 605 PM originally was to go to work and to see my daughter. Leaving at 245 PM would allow me to do neither of those things. So I called AA yet again, and switched to an early flight. This is why AA is probably the best frequent flyer program out there right now – changes to times and routings are free. So I’m now leaving in the morning, but I’ll get into Hong Kong earlier and I won’t have to connect through Vancouver. Score.

Final Thoughts

I wrote this post for two reasons: to illustrate how points and miles are giving me the chance to support my family overseas, and to show my thought process in making this happen in as short a time as possible. If I was buying a cash ticket to go to Hong Kong for the weekend, it’d be a lot easier. When dealing with points and miles, it pays to know your stuff. I agree with Matt, there’s no reason to hoard miles, but having a decent balance lying around really helps out in emergency situations like mine.

Jan 10 2015

Some Delta Skymiles 2015 Award Booking Beta Testing: Good and Bad

It's slightly easier to get into these now that Skymiles 2015 is here — It’s slightly easier to get into these now that Skymiles 2015 is here

A couple of things conspired to get me to dust off my old Delta Skymiles login. First, I was searching for award space for a client. It just so happened the day I started, don’t call the airline pointed out that Delta was releasing a surprising amount of partner award space. I’m not sure whether the latter is still going on, though in my research I did see more space than I had in the past. Thirdly, I’ve actually been stockpiling Delta Skymiles in anticipation of 2015 – I’ve never had problem finding space and I wanted the new one way flexibility. Here are some things I’ve learned poking around the website (and calling a few agents) award booking wise for the new Delta.

One piece of good news is that there definitely seem to be more lowest level award seats floating around out there. I found what felt like a lot more than I had found in the past. Which brings me to the other good news – it’s been reported elsewhere but I’ve finally seen it firsthand for myself – the award search engine…works now! There are some crazy things I’ve noticed (crazy because they are functional).

For starters, the website is pretty snappy and responsive which was downright shocking to me. But more importantly, it does a much better job of finding routings and displaying available low award space. If you search flexible dates, you get a nice calendar highlighting the miles required on each day. I’m still kind of amazed having used it myself, Delta used to be so broken. Here’s a 5 week search for LAX-LHR in Business class.

What I’ve found to be unfortunate is Delta is now enforcing routing rules which really restrict your ability to use your miles. In the past, as long as there was low level award space, you could pretty much string together any legs you wanted to get to your final destination. This is no longer the case. Let’s say you wanted to go from LAX to CDG, for example. There is a lot of low level space, even over the summer, to LHR from LAX. Like these flights on 7/14:

For one person it's not too hard to get to LHR from LAX in business class this summer — For one person it’s not too hard to get to LHR from LAX in business class this summer

If you take that top flight, a Virgin Atlantic flight, you could theoretically get to Paris with just one more hop. Doing a quick search for LHR-CDG on 7/15 (first leg is a redeye) yields a ton of award space:

There's also award space on LHR-CDG — There’s also award space on LHR-CDG

In the past, you would be able to string these two flights together in a multi-city search and book the award as one ticket, for 62,500 miles total (low level business award space all the way). However, when I was trying to do that, I kept getting an error message:

delta.com won't do the multi-city search — delta.com won’t do the multi-city search

Finally I called a few times to try to get an agent to ticket the award as one itinerary. I was then informed that Delta has changed its routing rules – you can only route through certain cities to get to certain destinations, and LHR is not an acceptable transit city between LAX and CDG. I wasn’t sure if the agent was making up rules or not, so I decided to do some digging. Unfortunately, it does seem like this statement in Delta’s award rules gives them the right to deny you based on routing:

Boo.

If you don’t feel like clicking to enlarge, it says “Valid routings vary based on the operating carriers of the Award Ticket.” Anyway, not that I’m totally surprised, but this is kind of consumer unfriendly. If there is award space and you’re not like stringing together 6+ legs or something exorbitant, I feel like you should be able to put together itineraries that have low level space on them. I mean, Delta already took away stopovers, but this is essentially taking away layovers. So I was really disappointed to discover this. It seems like to London you need to connect through a Delta hub – ATL, MSP, and SEA all worked.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I’m glad to see that there seems to be more low level space available (even, shockingly, on Delta metal), but losing the ability to create your own routing is pretty big. It’s another instance of Delta giveth and Delta taketh away. Still, I think Delta miles can be very useful, especially to Europe (and especially from Boston – that BOS-AMS flight we took last year seems to have a lot of space). People can keep calling them Skypesos if they’d like, I’ll just keep finding ways to use them. Hopefully my experiences can help some of you out there – let me know in the comments if you’ve found anything else out because I’ve only just started playing with the new system!

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