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.
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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:
I was doing some bookkeeping on Mint tonight, and I decided it would be both fun and educational to look at my travel expenses from last year and do an accounting.
Let’s start with a graph:
$4,473. That’s a big number.
Granted, I got a ton of trips out of my $4,473 (Phoenix, India, Japan, Chicago, the U.S. Southwest, Bogota, Bali, Vegas, LA, and NY x 3), but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a lot of money.
It’s pretty common knowledge that (at least among major airlines, excluding budget airlines and the likes of Southwest, Jet Blue, and Virgin America, which tend to charge by segment) that one-way flight bookings are usually more than half the cost of a round-trip. This is basic microeconomics: the one-ways are targeted at people who have some weird or unexpected plan that requires they be somewhere by a certain date or time but not necessarily back (or with a return from a different location).
In the spirit of Travel is Free and my earlier compilation of an award chart for Virgin America, I decided it would be fun to document my findings for Virgin Atlantic (VS) to see if there was any good value to be had.
(For whatever reason, I spend a lot of time combining the Virgin award charts. I think I might be the equivalent of a travel-hacking hipster, playing with programs and credit cards because they’re explicitly not in vogue).
Hello from Queenstown, where you get to wake up to this every morning:
Unfortunately, it wasn’t all rainbows and butterflies getting here due to a snafu we had at the airport with our checked bags. To put it simply, we ended up shelling out $120/bag per person as the result of a series of mistakes we made.
Let’s start at the beginning. We purchased our tickets through Amex Travel, and we bought them for a Virgin Australia codeshare operated by Air New Zealand. At the time of ticketing, there was a notation saying that checked baggage fees were not charged at the time of booking, but as far as I’ve seen it says that for all tickets, and since it was an international flight, we assumed that a baggage allowance was included in a ticket. Furthermore, Michael has Star Alliance Gold status through a status match to Copa Airlines, which theoretically entitles him to an extra checked bag. So we were doubly good, right?
Hello from Sydney!
I just got this email from American Express offering a 30% discount on Membership Rewards redemptions for paid international flights through amextravel.com. This yields a redemption rate of 1.43 (1.0/0.7) cents per point, which is better than the rate for both the Chase Sapphire Preferred and Citi Thank You Prestige (unless you redeem for AA flights, for which you’d get 1.6 cents per point).
Greetings from Sydney!
At long last, the whole DEM Flyers crew is together in one place traveling for two weeks, and we could not be more excited. Unfortunately, Michael and I are still sitting on the tarmac at Sydney as we wait for a truck to tow our 747 the last 500 feet to the gate. So close, yet so far….
I don’t typically write trip reports, but I figured this occasion was significant enough to warrant it. And besides, I don’t have anything better to do ????
Now that I’m 24 hours removed from my mileage run to Dallas and have no further runs on the books, I figured it would be a reasonable time to reflect on my decision to do the runs in the first place, add some context where I omitted it, and decide if it makes sense to do again in the future.
For some context, see my post on The Case for Mileage Running, in which I outlined my initial rationale for spending three nights on a plane for no purpose other than to get on a plane in the opposite direction two hours later. For those new to travel hacking, also see here for a description of the difference between redeemable miles and elite qualifying miles.
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