Just a small detail, but I’ve been playing around with the United award search tool for the last couple of days and have been noticing that they have been playing around with some UI changes with the award availability calendar.
The new UI that they rolled out sometime last year looks like this:
Days with only Economy availability were yellow, days with only Premium economy were Blue, and days with both were green.
A lot of hoopla has been made over the fate of the Fidelity Amex card, whose portfolio was bought by Elan Financial Services (a US Bank subsidiary), with the cards being reissued as Visas. In particular, many wondered and speculated that the card would earn (or be convertible to) Flexpoints, US Bank’s pseudo-fixed value rewards currency. Doctor of Credit has a great explanation of them here, but I’ve included the award chart for reference:
Before I dive into what is (intentionally) a controversial topic, I just want to take a second to welcome all our new readers who found us through Doctor of Credit. We’re super excited to have you, and hopefully you’ll find that we have an interesting thing or two to share. And of course, I’d be remiss to thank all of our existing, long-time readers (dad, I’m talking to you) for supporting us and valuing our voices. As we close in on the anniversary of our starting the blog, I couldn’t be happier with how it has turned out, and I know Esther and Michael feel the same way. We’ve managed to break some deals, share some different perspectives on hacking, tell some funny stories, and extend our hobby with our friends in family. What more could we want?
My buddy sent me this award he recently booked on United, and commented that it was awfully cheap. Originally, he had booked an open jaw, SFO-SIN (on the new 787 nonstop!), TPE-SFO and it had priced out at 75,000 United miles, but he decided to see if he could complete the round trip and booked a new trip with the same itinerary, but added a leg on EVA from Singapore to Taipei.
And mysteriously, the award only priced at 60,000 United miles. This makes no sense at all, given that a one way Asia award should be *at least* 35,000 miles.
As a follow up to the guide on how to get to Asia using your transferable points, Adam from The Jet Set Blog commented that he also had a comprehensive guide for Europe. He’s also planning to add guides for each major region, so I’d give him a follow.
I’ve got some reading to do! And now that I will have 100k extra MR points, Alitalia is looking like an increasingly attractive option for business redemptions.
I stumbled upon a very nice and comprehensive guide on how to effectively use your Chase UR, Amex MR, and Citi TYP to redeem for flight awards to Asia the other day. Given that I love travelling to Asia, this was perfect.
What Adam at the Jet Set Blog has compiled is a guide on the cost of awards from North America to Asia as well as details on how to book for every single airline transfer partner for each program. I haven’t found a guide this comprehensive before, and certainly not for the 3 major programs (excluding SPG). I personally got a lot of value out of the Membership Rewards part, as I hadn’t yet figured out what to do with the 50k I received for my PRG as well as the upcoming 100k from the Platinum card I just applied for.
It occurred to me as I was writing some blog posts that as much as I talk about various individual hacks, I’ve never actually detailed a real set of redemptions I made, how I constructed a trip, and the final costs. I think it’s because they aren’t the most fun to write (because usually they’re not all that novel), but they can actually be pretty fun to read because they demonstrate what’s really possible with travel hacking.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post that looked at my travel spending in 2015 with the goal of “keeping myself honest,” and see if I could notice any patterns of spending that I could reduce or eliminate as I progress into the year.
In it, I remarked that, unlike most people, I don’t actually net out my cash back rewards (or equivalents like Capital One Venture ‘Miles’) against my travel expenses, because cash is fungible with all other cash and doesn’t change the fact that I spent the money in the first place.
The second leg of my outbound to Europe was in Business class on American Airlines’s newly retrofitted 767-300s. It’s a two-class plane (i.e. no First class), with eight rows of seats in a 1-2-1, staggered configuration. Basically, this results in all the seats being forward-facing, with cut outs for your seat in the ottoman of the seat in front of you. My seat looked something like this:
Well, it looked exactly like that. I was seated in 4A, which is a window seat on the left aisle. This gave a really private feeling, as there was a table between me and the aisle which minimized disruption as the flight attendants walked up and down the aisle.
Hello from Milan!!! I’m here (well, in Europe) for a week visiting my sister, and for the first time, I booked all of my travel into premium cabins! I’m not usually one for trip reports (here was my first admittedly pathetic attempt at one), but I want to say that’s mostly because no one wants to hear me talk about how comfortable my economy class seat was or how the person next to me had bad body odor (hey, I call it as I smell it). Anyway, here goes:
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