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.
Last month Jess and I left Baby M at home with her grandparents and took a week long trip to Bora Bora to celebrate our five year anniversary. Due to our anxiety about leaving the baby for too long, we ended up postponing our flights by a day (you can change award ticket dates for free on AA). This was great for our family but made for an annoying routing that was compounded by some bad weather – leading to some stress on the domestic legs! I wanted to share some thoughts since it was my first time flying cross country on US Airways in domestic first and also my first taste of the new Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX.
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.
Building Up Mileage and Points Balances Quickly: Introduction
Building Up Mileage and Points Balances Quickly: United
Building Up Mileage and Points Balances Quickly: American Airlines
Building Up Mileage and Points Balances Quickly: Delta
Bulding up Mileage and Points Balances Quickly: US Airways
One of the most frequent questions clients ask me is “How do I get a lot of _______ miles quickly?” Not everyone is a points freak like me, so often people are looking to build up a bunch of miles in a particular program so that they can take one trip – honeymoon, anniversary, trip of a lifetime, whatever. The good news is, if you have six months to a year, you can totally build up a large enough balance to go wherever you’d like – sometimes even in business class! In this introduction post, I’ll review the mileage costs for awards for the different programs, what areas of the world work well with which programs, and special award ticketing rules to be aware of.