Travel Planning (from Hell)

[Matt]

Travel Planning has been backburnered recently, but we have deadlines looming, here’s the state of affairs.

Booked

• Trip 1 NCL Escape from Miami (Dec)
• Trip 2 Aruba (Feb)
• Trip 3 NCL Epic from Barcelona (Apr)
• Trip 4 UK (Aug)

Out of this, only the Escape is really ‘booked’.. hence the travel planning:

Aruba


I booked 2×2 Nights at the Radisson, now Hilton pre devaluation. We have an outbound non-stop on JetBlue from NY. The return is prohibitively expensive on points:

• 23K JetBlue per person (plus $55 taxes or a revenue ticket of $290)
• 17.5K Delta per person (plus $55 taxes or a revenue ticket of $290)

We’ve also toyed with the notion of coming back via Miami, stopping there for a few days. From memory, it would be 17.5K AS or BA to include the stopover. Based on a mix of current balances, and future strength, I think BA would be smarter if we went that route.

Delta is a good price (in points) for a nonstop, but I’m down to about 10K so would require transferring in Membership Rewards to make that happen, and they are loosely earmarked for the next trip, Barcelona….

Barcelona Cruise


Very excited about this one, but haven’t yet managed to get points up high enough to secure 3 biz tickets in RT. Current balances are:

• 160K UA
• 160K UR
• 40K UR
• 75K AA (total)
• 60K SPG
• 40K MR (her)
• 35K MR (me)

Since creating the UA pts from Marriott pts the tendency is to go with what I know.. and focus on earning enough UR to transfer in. But if you step back and think about that, its a terrible program. UA round trips in business to Europe are often 160K, whereas other programs offer the same journey for half the points.

I’m particularly interested in Korean air right now, and would be able to source them from UR or SPG. 3 tickets (if they could be found..) would only cost 240K. However, I have seen a lot of space on Delta metal, especially compared to United and American, so I’m hopeful.

This is a measure twice, cut once situation. While i’m ‘almost’ ready to book Delta from Aruba, I’m also wondering about whether I might want to do something else:

• Transfer 60K SPG for 75K Korean
• Transfer 85K UR for 85K Korean
• Transfer 130K Membership Rewards to Delta

The process would be:

1. Create family account with Korean
2. Hold tickets if available (they hold without points)
3. Check Delta space (again)
4. Transfer Membership Rewards, Ultimate Rewards and SPG respectively
5. Try to book Delta seat (a spell available on the dark web helps, it involves chicken blood and invoking the olde gods)
6. When the Korean points hit, buy those two seats
7. Travel on split PNRs

This is just one approach.. the value of this one is that it leaves enough points sitting around to add on a couple more nights in Aruba, perhaps at the Hyatt there (if I ever make Diamond…).

Cards applied for to achieve this:


I just added the Amex 75K BRG, and 2x 30K EDPs. With spend from the past month or two, the bonuses earned from these would be 200K MR. I’m hitting a wall with Chase, but did apply for a few more AA cards for the next trip…. note that they don’t obviously achieve the spend, but the theory is that I need to start hovering around the 300K mark in a program in order to have a plan B.

London


I hopped on open award space to LHR in August, but haven’t yet figured out a way home. My theory here is to top up the AA miles via another 100K, and book out 3 more seats to return. If we can find a smart way to do it, that could include coming back from many different locations, the goal being nonstop on oneworld. Seats are incredibly sparse, which does reinforce that the entire travel hacking game is fast coming to a close in its present form.

Leftovers


If the plan goes ahead as outlined here we should get everything booked without touching United, having depleted URs and AA. We’d have major travel booked until next summer (though we both want to go to Asia) and we would have a new stockpile in Membership Rewards.

Measure twice, cut once


At this point in the plan I’m just looking and calculating still. While this comes with a risk of losing space, jumping on space without thinking about how everything interlinks will cause more work in the long run. This, of course, is my own self made hell… as I like to keep low balances. All I’m doing for now is earning more ultimate rewards, and submitting my documents to Korean so that I’m ready to action this when the time is right. This also means that I’m not committing to transfer those SPG today, as I might have earned enough URs by that time.. it’s all about options, until, it is too late and you have none!

Stress and strategy


I do find that if I don’t get something done it stresses me out a bit, as I don’t like loose ends, however, acting fast isn’t always the best solution when things are irreversible. Instead, I think it can be better to act fast to write things out like a plan, and then revise. I’ve been asana, and blog posts for this

If you have any thoughts on how to better plan these trips, please let me know!


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[EightBall]

In regards to London, I was recently in a similar situation. Last winter, around the holidays, I traveled there with my wife and lap-infant eligible son. We had already secured award tickets there, but I still needed to book the return. We wanted direct flights back to New York but were willing to travel in either 2 biz seats or 3 coach seats. The UK air passenger duty which is charged even on award tickets (and is higher for premium cabins) encouraged me to look outside the UK for possibilities for my flight home.

I ended up booking 2 biz class on Brussels Airlines on the direct flight BRU-JFK. I booked using Aeroplan miles (xferred from MR). Each ticket cost 45k miles and Aeroplan has a great lap infant program ($50CAD or 5000 miles in econ, $100CAD or 10000 miles in biz, and $125CAD or 12500 miles in first). In total the return cost 90k miles, $142 in taxes, and ~$89 for the lap infant.

To get from London to Brussels we took the Eurostar train through the Channel Tunnel. If I recall correctly, I believe the trip was less than 3 hours. Obviously, we needed to buy a pair of tickets for the train, but this was more than offset by the savings of not having the pay the UK departure tax, making the extra stop essentially free.

Even if Brussels and vicinity is of no interest to you, you might also check out other cities that would be reasonably accesible by train from London (Paris, Amsterdam, etc). In many cases, the train ticket may be essentially free when coupled with the savings for avoiding taxes or fuel surcharges. This could give you more options in other alliances and programs for planning the return.

 

[Mountain Trader]

Measure twice, cut once-that's just great. Feels like I'm talking to my dad's relatives decades ago.

I book the long hauls first, then sort the locations and days out. After that I go back and set-up the intra-trip travel. As long as there's six months or so to go, I almost always get good prices on the in betweens.

Good advice above to check other European gateways for return from London. I prefer the train too, but don't ignore flying into a place on a cheap LCC, then heading out fron there to get home. When I do this, I always go into the gateway the night before since with two PNRs, you get no protection if the LCC is late.