Tag Archives: frequent flier miles

Here’s Why Your Family May Want to “Pool” Your Airline Miles

More and more airlines are allowing passengers to “pool” their miles in a shared account. What does this mean? It’s a quicker path to award tickets, particularly for families. If two parents and two kids each have 15,000 miles in separate accounts, those miles aren’t particularly useful. But a combined pool of 60,000 miles can probably cover at least one person’s flights on the family’s next trip.

Here’s how it helped me snag two free seats: My husband and trumpet-playing son are headed to a trumpet conference. By pooling the mileage they had collectively earned on past United flights, we were able to accumulate enough miles to cover this trip. Airlines that don’t allow mileage pooling extract hefty fees when you don’t have quite enough for an award ticket: You must pay either to “gift” miles to someone else or to buy the extra miles you need.

In this case, my husband and son each had enough miles for one ticket, but purchasing their flights separately would have required identifying my son as an unaccompanied minor—even though his dad would be on the same flights under a separate ticket—and it risked having their reservations rebooked separately if anything went wrong. So pooling their miles provided additional benefits to make their travel smoother.

United is the latest airline to adopt mileage pooling, but a bunch of other airlines already have this system in place, from JetBlue and Hawaiian to British Airways and Emirates. The rules of who can pool mileage and how to do so vary by airline, but I can tell you that United’s process takes several days—you have to wait 72 hours after you join a pool to contribute or redeem miles, and there’s an additional 24-hour waiting period between when you transfer miles into a pool and when you can use them to book a flight. By the time I jumped through all those hoops, the miles required for the flights I wanted had gone up, so I had to add more miles and wait an extra day. But it was still preferable to shelling out more than $600 for the flights; next time I’ll make sure our pool has more miles than what’s needed for the flights I have my eye on, in case the required redemption amount goes up in the interim.

So now that it’s easier for your family to redeem your collective frequent-flier miles, where do you want to go? If you know when you can travel, check out our favorite destinations by month. You’ll also find inspiration in our travelers’ reviews of their best trips, organized by traveler type, trip theme, destination, and more. If you’d like our advice on where to go, click the black button below.

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singapore airlines suites

The Best Frequent-Flier Deals for American Express Points

Question:

Wendy, I have accumulated 2 million American Express points. How do I get the best bang for my buck redeeming them for airline tickets? Should I dump them all into a frequent-flier program? I am open to any and all suggestions. Thank you!
—Dee

Answer:

For smart advice on using AmEx Membership Rewards points, I’ve called in my old buddy Brian Kelly, a.k.a. The Points Guy. Brian’s been so successful at collecting and leveraging his own miles that he was able to give up his Wall Street job (which is what he was doing when I met him) to travel around the world full-time. He shares his hard-won knowledge on his website ThePointsGuy.com, and he’s got three nifty suggestions for you, Dee:

“Having 2,000,000 Membership Rewards points at your disposal is definitely a great position to be in. I would keep the points in your American Express account until you’re ready to plan a trip, but you don’t need to blow all two million on a single high-end round-the-world adventure (though you certainly can, assuming you have a few weeks to travel).

Instead, I’d suggest transferring the points to Membership Rewards partners as you need to use them, or, if American Express is offering a temporary transfer bonus to a certain program, it may make sense to transfer speculatively. For example, earlier this year, you could convert Membership Rewards points to British Airways Avios with a 40-percent bonus, so you’d earn 1.4 Avios for every point you transferred. If you had transferred all two million points, you would have ended up with 2,800,000 Avios, which is enough for a whopping 622 one-way short-haul flights on American or US Airways within the US (up to 650 miles), at 4,500 Avios a pop for coach.

Because airline-program devaluations can come at any time (and bonus opportunities can always pop up), it usually makes more sense to keep your points in a flexible currency, like Membership Rewards, until you’re ready to book.

If you’re looking to travel in style, another great airline transfer partner is Singapore Airlines. Singapore reserves the best awards in First and Suites Class on its 777-300ER and A380 aircraft for its own members, so you can’t book premium seats on long-haul flights using miles from a Star Alliance partner. This makes Singapore’s KrisFlyer miles exceptionally valuable. For every 1,000 Membership Rewards points, you’ll receive 1,000 KrisFlyer miles. You can experience Suites Class on the A380 starting at just 31,875 miles (or 31,875 American Express Points) for a one-way flight between Singapore and Hong Kong. Or you can travel all the way from New York City in Suites Class for 93,750 miles, plus about $300 in taxes and fees. Your 2 million points will get you and a friend to and from New York to Singapore in Suites ten times.

Finally, Air Canada’s Aeroplan program is another great transfer partner. As with British Airways and Singapore, you’ll receive 1,000 Aeroplan miles for every 1,000 points you transfer, and points typically transfer instantly (or within a day or two). Aeroplan is especially valuable for premium-cabin travel when compared to United Airlines, allowing you to fly between the US and Europe in Lufthansa First Class for 62,500 miles, rather than the 110,000 miles United requires. Note that Aeroplan does charge fuel surcharges on some carriers, including Lufthansa, so you may need to pay a few hundred dollars in fees in addition to the miles you’ll use for an award.

In total, American Express partners with 16 airline programs and four hotel chains, though you’ll generally get the most bang for your buck from the programs I’ve outlined above.”

Dee, I’m beyond jealous! Enjoy all those trips!

View from the Wing's Gary Leff (right) with fellow frequent flier Randy Petersen.

Inside the Mind of a Miles Expert: An Interview with View from the Wing’s Gary Leff

If you want to know anything about travel rewards programs, Gary Leff is the person to ask. He is one of the most well-known and respected authorities on miles and points—whether they be for airlines, hotels, rental cars, or credit cards. He writes the View from the Wing blog, runs Book Your Award (with another mileage pro Steve Belkin of Competitours), co-founded the frequent flyer community Milepoint.com, and was a longtime moderator on FlyerTalk.com. His most impressive accomplishment (to nerds like me, anyway), is that he’s also had a cameo on The Colbert Report. To other types of nerds, it’s that his day job is as CFO for a university research center.

Although I’ve known Gary for years (he wrote for me regularly when I was editor of condenasttraveler.com), I was embarrassed to realize that while I’d engaged him in countless conversations about credit cards and the best ways to earn miles quickly, I’d never really asked him about his own personal travel experiences. And not surprisingly, he has had amazing ones. Anyone who’s traveled as much as he has would—though not everyone’s stories would include being accused of stealing coffee from a hotel in Macau. Read on…

El Bulli

Most memorable travel moment: dinner at El Bulli, 2008. Photo: Gary Leff.

Most memorable travel moment:

I managed to get a Saturday night booking for El Bulli, which at the time was regarded by many as the best restaurant in the world. So my wife and I flew to Barcelona for the weekend, took the train up to Figueres, and checked into a hotel in Roses. When we arrived at the restaurant, after a long drive up a cliff beside the Mediterranean, two young women dressed in sweat pants walk in ahead of us and asked for a table. They were told, as politely as I could possibly have imagined, that this would just not be possible…. We walked inside, were greeted and taken to the kitchen where we met and took pictures with chef Ferran Adrià.

Now that the restaurant has closed, with Adria having stared down the John Stuart Mill problem (Mill wondered what the point in life was if he had accomplished all of his goals by age 18!), I feel grateful to have experienced it.

Most embarrassing travel moment:

Being accused of stealing coffee by room service staff at the Sheraton Macau. I didn’t do it, honest!

I was there over Chinese New Year (nearly every hotel was sold out, and rates at the Sheraton approached US$600 per night, so I was grateful to be able to use just 10,000 Starwood points a night there). I decided to order coffee from room service around 6 a.m. The hotel explained that I could tell them how many cups of coffee I wanted, and that’s what they would fill the pot to. So I asked for 6 cups. A short while later room service delivered the coffee. It seemed awfully light for 6 cups. I poured two cups, and the pot felt nearly empty. So I called back down to in-room dining. The same person I ordered from answered, and she remembered that I had ordered 6 cups. She said she’d send up 4 more cups right away.

So at 6:30 a.m. there’s a knock on the door, and the man who delivered the first pot of coffee appeared. He didn’t have a pot of coffee in his hand. Instead he declared: “I am here to investigate.” I told him that we had ordered six cups of coffee, I poured two and that’s all there was. He lifted the pot of coffee and said, “there’s still some left”. He then said it’s not possible that we could have gotten less coffee, because the machine is electronic. They specify how much goes in the pot.

There I am, standing in a bathrobe in my hotel room, being told that it’s not possible that I could be missing coffee and in any case the coffee I ordered was right there, in the pot! What was I trying to pull, anyway? He thought I was trying to cheat the hotel, to get extra coffee without paying for it.

He then poured the remaining coffee from the pot into an empty cup. It filled only half way. I said, “You were right, there were actually two and a half cups.” He harumphed, walked directly outside the room, and handed me the pot he had brought along with the four replacement cups of coffee I had been promised—once I satisfied him that I wasn’t actually trying to steal coffee.

Name one thing people would be surprised to find in your travel bag:

Downy wrinkle releaser. As experienced a traveler as I am, and no matter how much I work on my packing and folding techniques, I can’t get rid of wrinkles.

East Coast Lagoon Food Village, Singapore

East Coast Lagoon Food Village, Singapore. Photo: Gary Leff.

Non-touristy spot everyone should add to their must-visit list:

The criteria I’d use to think about ‘non-touristy spots’ isn’t that they’re places tourists don’t go, but that they’re places locals go to and indeed are primarily visited by locals.

I love to enjoy travel and understand a place through its food, whether it’s eating my way through Paris or the suburbs of Kuala Lumpur. If you love food as well, two places truly can’t miss are some of the Singapore hawker centers. The Newton Center, closest to many of the hotels around Orchard Road, is the most touristy and in general also the most disappointing. I think there’s nothing that compares to an evening at the East Coast Lagoon Food Village, open air and on the beach. Visit the Red Hill Road center or the Hong Lim Food Center. Each place will specialize in a single dish and take cash only. Look for dishes that sound like you’d want to try them and then walk around the center, focus on the stalls that have the longest lines.

Seating is first come, first serve. Place something at your seat to save it. The traditional Singaporean method is to leave your tissues at your place, this is respected, although of course you can have a companion stay there while you go and order, too!

In the U.S. I think the best place to travel is the Austin area for Central Texas barbecue. Franklin Barbecue is technically perfect, but the lines are incredible. There are so many fantastic places in Austin proper like La Barbecue and a new outpost of Black’s in Lockhart up by the University of Texas, that you have options. Take a drive out to Lockhart for the original Black’s, my favorite, and while you’re there try the sausage at Kreuz and just walk inside Smitty’s with the blackened corridors from a century of smoke.

Blacks Barbecue Texas

Blacks Barbecue. Photo: Gary Leff.

Name 2 indispensable travel apps:

The spread of Uber gives me plenty of confidence going out in unfamiliar places, knowing that I can always easily find my way back even if I wind up somewhere off the beaten path where there’s no public transport and taxis don’t go.

I find I’m much more efficient walking around cities I don’t know well thanks to Google maps, I simply don’t get lost and waste time the way that I used to.

The travel gadget or gear that has saved your life…or your mind:

Compact power strip. I carry a power strip in my laptop bag, it’s something that costs less than $10. But I’ve never heard a hotel guest say, “this room just has too many outlets!” and I’ve found myself in many airport terminals and even lounges where sharing outlets is a must.

What travel-world bloggers have you learned the most from?

The person on social media who taught me the most isn’t a blogger, but an online forum participant named Mark Love (who goes by the name PremEx online). He taught me that the most important thing isn’t understanding travel rules and what you’re entitled to, but how you talk to the real people on the other end of the phone or across the desk. You want to build a rapport, understand what they’re capable of doing for you, and generate the sympathy that will motivate them to help. (And of course, if that turns out not to be possible, ‘hang up call back’ and start the process over.)

Whose Tweets do you find the most useful and entertaining?

Scott Mayerowitz (@GlobeTrotScott), the Associated Press airline and travel reporter.

Look into the future and describe one aspect of travel that will be different in 20 years:

The next step in online is mass customization. Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) are beginning to do a better job not just listing and selling travel, but helping to provide the information and guidance that consumers want. That was the idea behind Orbitz’s PR flub in ‘charging Mac customers more’ for hotels. They weren’t really charging customers with Mac computers more, their data suggested customers who use Macs tend to prefer hotels at a higher price point. So they were suggesting pricier hotels, not because those earn the OTA more commission but because consumers visit an average of 9–12 different sites when planning travel. If they can’t give consumers what they want, they lose the sale entirely.

The Department of Transportation has a pending rule where they plan to require all travel sites (above a revenue threshold) that display airfares and schedules to present the same uniform information—as opposed to the customized information most useful to a given individual consumer for their specific trip.

Provided regulations don’t get in the way, in a few years—not 20—we’ll have come full circle with online travel sites providing customized advice the way people used to get from the very best travel agents. It will have taken more than two decades, but we’ll have gotten to a place where online booking serves consumers about as well as the top end of brick and mortar used to.

Most effective thing you’ve ever said or done to get an upgrade:

You get an upgrade by having loyalty program elite status or points to spend, and knowing the rules of each chain or airline. You increase your chances of an upgrade clearing by avoiding the stiffest competition—traveling when planes and hotels aren’t likely to be full, and when passengers seeking upgrades don’t have status. That means hotels during shoulder season, and airlines outside of peak travel times (avoid Thursday and Friday evening flights, and the first bank of flights Monday morning; fly Tuesdays and Wednesdays in the afternoon).

Hotels have far more discretion than airlines to deviate from a predetermined algorithm for whom to give upgrades to, so the next most important thing is to be nice, and ask.

To make friends, I always carry:

Starbucks gift cards. (Call me mercenary, but I’m trying to make friends with people who can reciprocate, like airline lounge agents.)

Overrated:

Western European capitals

Underrated:

Central and Southeast Asia

The airplane movie that, unexpectedly, made me bawl was:

Airplane. (Google tells me bawl means shout loudly, not just weep.) The travel movies that get me every time are Lost in Translation and Before Sunset.

When I travel, I’m not afraid of:

The strangest of street foods

But I am afraid of:

Coach.

 

 

Follow Gary and View from the Wing:

Twitter: @garyleff

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/garyleff

 

Be a smarter traveler: Use Wendy’s WOW List to plan your next trip. You can also follow her on Facebook and Twitter @wendyperrin, and sign up for her weekly newsletter to stay in the know.

United Airlines Business First class

How to Find the Best Flight with your Frequent Flier Miles

Question:

Wendy, is there someone you recommend to make airline reservations using frequent flier miles? I have a ton of United miles and American Express Membership Rewards points and am looking for someone to figure out the best way for me to use them. We want to fly to Europe this summer in business class.

Thanks,
Francis

Answer:

Francis, I get this question at least once a week. There are a few mileage-award redemption advisory services, but I’ve always sworn by Gary Leff, whose Book Your Award service, geared to travelers who want to fly in first or business class, has been put to the test by thousands of my readers over the years.

Gary is the blogger behind View From the Wing, a co-founder of the frequent-flier community MilePoint.com, and a one-time hilarious guest in a Colbert Report skit. His partner at BookYourAward.com is Steve Belkin, another mileage magician and the founder of Competitours, an Amazing Race–type travel company.

I’ve known Gary and Steve for years. Between them, they can figure out any first-class or business-class mileage ticket you need, taking into consideration your personal requirements (date range, maximum number of stops, etc.) and your available bank of miles, credit-card points, and other loyalty-program points. (And they’ll help you find more if you come up short).

They know which airlines offer the best award-seat value for which destinations. They come up with flights and routes that require fewer miles than you thought you were going to have to spend or that provide a few welcome layover days in a destination you thought you’d have to skip. And, if that’s not enough, once you’ve used your miles, they’ll teach you how to replenish your bank for your next trip. Their flat fee is $150 per ticket. They’re also insanely busy helping people like you so, if you do reach out to Gary and Steve, tell them I sent you.

United Global First Class

Unexpected Ways to Use Your Frequent Flier Miles

I had the good fortune to spend this past weekend learning from some of the smartest frequent-flier mileage and loyalty-program bloggers out there, at the Boarding Area Conference (aka BAcon) in Las Vegas. For those not familiar, Boarding Area is a network of sites that share information, news, and advice for frequent travelers (from families to business folk); it was created by frequent-flier legend Randy Petersen (who also founded Milepoint, FlyerTalk, and InsideFlyer). And since I was sitting in a room all weekend with people who know how to get the most out of loyalty programs, I sought out some advice for the rest of us. We all know that frequent flier miles are more than just a way to earn free flights, but we’re not always sure when else to use them and what other perks are worthwhile. So here goes: four unexpected ways to use miles to make your next trip amazing.

1. Plan special events

“Airline miles and hotel points are often best used to book travel, but sometimes there are other ways to get big value out of them. We used SPG hotel points to get luxury box seats at a Cubs game at Wrigley field for my husband’s birthday one year and that made the trip to Chicago very special!”

—Summer Hull, Mommy Points

 

2. Put premium cabins within reach

“What many people don’t realize is how lucrative award tickets can be. Casual travelers tend to think of using their miles and points for domestic economy travel, but international premium cabins are more approachable than you might think, and don’t require that many more miles. I used 135,000 American AAdvantage miles per person to book Cathay Pacific first-class tickets for my mom and me for her birthday last year. That was an incredibly special experience—and something that wouldn’t have been possible for us without airline miles.”

—Ben Schlappig, One Mile At A Time

 

3. Upgrade your hotel stay

“Airline miles aren’t nearly as good for upgrades as they used to be (US airlines tend to charge cash—as much as $600 each way—in addition to miles for international upgrades) but hotel points can be a great way to upgrade. Hyatt is especially generous in this regard, charging just 6,000 points per night to confirm a suite when you pay a standard rate for a regular room.”

—Gary Leff, View From the Wing

 

4. Give someone an amazing gift

“One of the best ways to use miles/points is to give them to others by booking flights and hotels for them. To us this is one of the most rewarding uses of miles and points because we can share first-class flights and five-star hotels with family and friends who would never otherwise be able to experience luxury travel.”

—Daraius Dubash and Emily Jablon, Million Mile Secrets

 

5. Bring a friend on a business trip

“Autumn is peak time for meetings and conventions. It’s also a smart time of year to use your miles to bring a family member or friend along when attending one. Due to a decrease in demand for air travel during the fall “shoulder season,” it’s one of the easiest times of year to redeem miles at so-called “saver” rates. So redeem 25,000 miles and bring along someone special for a long weekend before or after that meeting in New York or Chicago or San Francisco. It’s a great way to spend some time together and have at least part of the trip subsidized by your company or client. ”

—Chris McGinnis, TravelSkills

 

In what unexpected ways have you used your miles? Tell us below.