Sometimes I lose perspective of things. I’ll often joke that my Optempo of travel gets in the way of my manufactured spend. This morning I had a bit of a wakeup call. My wife needed to get up to Hartford, CT for the weekend. Short notice, holiday weekend, you’d think – wow, that’s going to cost a pretty penny, right?
It cost $5, and 18,000 miles (and only that because her flight home is in First Class).
Great value, sometimes overlooked
British Airways’ Avios points are sometimes overlooked because of the high fuel surcharge that BA charges on their own awards. For partner awards, especially domestic or short distance awards, they are great, because it’s a distance based program.
How this worked out so well
So, I happened to look the morning of the original flight (due to Hurricane Arthur, best laid plans didn’t work out perfectly, but still well enough), and saw the following availability:
Availability the morning of.
For flights back, there was much more availability but only available up front (which, of course, increases the amount of miles required for the award).
Returning flights, on short notice.
All told, the entire itinerary amounted to:
Total itinerary, booked last minute.
I don’t know how you can beat that.
Conclusion
So the message is clear, at least for me. Even though I spend copious amounts of time looking for and flying awesome premium cabins, the reality is, that there is a whole lot more to life, than expensive champagne, layflat seats and pajamas that may or may not shrink in laundry.
For me, it’s time to start looking at my bucket list. (not to say I’ll stop flying awesome premium products — flying Emirates First on the A380 in August!).
+1 to all of this. Avios are a real life saver!
That they are! I am usually looking 15-24 days out, let alone 11 hours out, and in this case, they really came through. They’re also fairly easy to generate, I think Chase’s BA Avios card earns 1.5 points per dollar… (and it has 10% off BA flights which earns its annual fee for me at least!).
So, the real questions are…
1) what was the cost of the last minute ticket if you were paying cash
2) How much did you spend to accumulate the 18,000 avios
3) How much cash would you have made if you used a 2% cash back card instead of the british airways card
4) would that cash would have covered the cash price of the ticket
If it would have you would have accumulated miles on the flight and had greater flexibility.
Hi TLM – Thanks for your comment! In response to your questions:
1) Honestly, I didn’t bother looking, but I’d say it probably would’ve been north of $500, even more considering 1 leg was in First (but lets be clear, if I was buying, I wouldn’t buy First).
2) I got these from the BA 100k offer a year or two ago (just never had a good reason to use them before). If I were to do the math, the cost per point, was probably somewhere in the realm of $0.00122 per point ($3.95 x 40 for the $20k spend). So ~21.87, which is especially low, as I do the math.
3) So, going with the $3.95 x 40 (for $20k spend), you’d get $242 after costs if using a 2% cash back card.
4) Nope.
Bottom line – the key here was that I had a significant sign-on bonus, that really shows the math is in favor of burning.