A couple of weeks ago, Rapid Travel Chai posted about a flyer who earned distance based redeemable mileage by booking flights through though the Citi ThankYou portal. I wondered if there were other ways to still earn distance based redeemable mileage and discovered one way inadvertently a few weekends ago. Obviously, IRROPs isn’t a controllable situation, but it’s something to keep in mind when you are deciding how to resolve it.
TagAmerican Airlines
Okay it wasn’t as brazen as the post title suggests. But yes, it’s a real life datapoint of asking for an upgrade (that was probably deserved) and getting it!
Back at the end of January, when AA opened up premium award space to Europe pretty widely, I jumped on it to book a business class class ticket to Ibiza, SFO-JFK-LHR, LCY-IBZ as part of a summer Europe trip. My friends were going on the same trip, so I encouraged them to do so as well. Except for the first statement on their Citi AA cards hadn’t closed yet so they didn’t quite have the miles!
I’m doing a lot of mileage running this year with the target of hitting the Executive Platinum status on American, so I had one of those crazy Panama runs booked. But as the date was getting closer, I decided I wanted to go for a shorter period of time, and didn’t really want to go on the weekend I booked.
I knew about American’s schedule change policy, which states that schedule changes over 2 hours will allow you to cancel a flight for free. But as I had booked through Citi with my ThankYou points for 1.6 cpm because I have a Citi Prestige, I wasn’t sure what their schedule change policy was. According to the Citi ThankYou terms & conditions regarding travel:
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.
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:
Due to various sales ex-EU in the past, I have some experience dealing the American Airlines reservation systems for flights from the European Union. American Airlines uses Amadeus for certain countries in the EU (in this case Ireland) instead of their usual SABRE.
I would often book directly through American because either I could only find the best fare on American vs. OTAs, or I wanted to use the hold feature. Google Flights would direct me to the americanairlines.eu.amadeus.com link. And when I tried to search for the same flight on aa.com, I was quoted a slightly higher price due to currency conversion to USD. But when I put a reservation on hold through the americanairlines.eu.amadeus.com website, and later tried to find it on the AA.com site to pay for it, I would get this message “Please call to book your trip”
Hello from the Centurion Lounge at San Francisco International Airport, which has been my temporary home for three of the past four Tuesday nights before a series of mileage runs to Dallas!
Yep, you read that correctly (although despite the fancy shoes, mileage running has nothing to do with actual running).
I write a lot about how I approach travel hacking, which is largely based on evaluating the (opportunity) costs of taking advantage of a particular hack and comparing it to the rewards I reap from it. So it may come as a surprise to hear that I have (not once, not twice, but thrice) opted to pay money to take an overnight flight to Dallas only to turn right around once I get there and arrive in San Francisco before it’s time to head into work.
I’m about as close to an Orbitz fanboy as you can find on the internet. I even signed up for the Orbitz rewards credit card, and I continue to book with them even after they eviscerated their best price guarantee program. That’s why I was supremely annoyed to find this in my inbox as I was sitting down to enjoy a burger at my friend Grant’s ‘meat’-up this afternoon:
For context, AA has been running some $100.60 round trip fares to Dallas from San Francisco. After all the rewards I can get, it ends up costing me about $93 for each round trip, so I decided to book two back-to-back for next week to start padding my Alaska mileage account and re-qualify for elite status for 2017.
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