It's A Long Walk
I hate flying. I hate not traveling even more. So, I bite the bullet. But you can still be smart about how you bite.
Tools For Flying
We have more information at our fingertips than ever! That doesn't mean it's easy. Still, here's the intro to Google Flights
Not That You'd Be Caught Dead In Coach
Economy gets worse every year. How to make it better? Ditch the hoi polloi and fly Business.
A lot of travel blogs make this sound easy: but, unless you're a.) pulling in a Manhattan salary, b.) single, or c.) fly all the time for business, you can't do this easily. But: You can do it. It helps if you're smart with your airline points, shop wisely, and try alternate solutions.
Using Google Flights
Tools Of The Trade
OK, you’ll need strategies for getting over the pond without breaking the bank. I’m going to lay out a few assumptions in the process:
1.) You have kids, so you can’t fly off-season. Otherwise, it’s an easy game – easier, that is. Getting a cheap ATL-PAR flight in early December isn’t particularly hard. Too bad many of us just can’t pull us kids from school for a week or two without consequences.
2.) You don’t live in NYC or DC, which are major transportation hubs. NYC-LON has occasional fares so low that you can get away for a long weekend, and make it worth-while.
3.) Comfort and duration plays some role in your flight decision. This will rule out some services, especially Priceline: I used them once and snagged a cheap-ish flight. We were routed BHM-DFW-MXP (Milan) which added about 8 hours total to what I would have booked by myself. Not worth the $200 total savings, according to my wife.
4.) You don’t have a ton of Frequent Flyer miles to splash. That I’ll cover in a later post.
A few words on airline pricing. Airlines do their best to defy predictability. They have sophisticated models and algorithms designed to maximize their per-flight revenue. You’ll have a hard time outguessing these, even with today’s tools.
But their computers are not infallible. What you have working in your favor is competition: airlines are sensitive to competitor pricing, and one carrier publishing a sale on a particular route will often cause other carriers to match. This match often happens automatically through the system’s computers; carriers do monitor these and will manually correct anything that’s artificially low – or, sometimes not. If you’re lucky, and quick, you can find these deals. But they come with caveats, so you want to be careful.
In the old days, you would have to rely on a good travel agent to make recommendations for you – and often their expertise would help you find a good deal. Today, travel agents barely exist for the public (they’re still there for business travel, but their focus there is more on making sure the trip goes smoothly: cost is secondary). They’ve been replaced by the multitude of search engines and aggregators, which made some sense. Search and book, and cut out the middle-man. Unfortunately, most of the tools available are totally inadequate when it comes to dealing with the airline’s current pricing models. And that’s not likely to change: airlines will always do their best to stay a step ahead of the aggregators. In the worst case, airlines actively work with the aggregators to inflate pricing. Consider: how does Travelocity make money? Do you pay them? Somebody does, and if it’s the airlines, who do you think will come out ahead, you or them?
So I no longer bother with Travelocity & Expedia, much less Orbitz and CheapO. They all use the same search engine, and are decidedly lacking in tools. You pretty much have to search one departure-destination combo at a time, and one set of dates. Not helpful.
Kayak was, for a while, a better model. For all I know they also use the same search engine, but they came out with a fairly useful tool that’s still worth checking. The “Explore” tool lets you enter a departure location, a travel date range (either a specific month or a season) and then shows you, on a map, what kind of deals other users have booked along those lines. It is far from infallible: for one, it will list the lowest fare someone has found, but you have to drill down to find out that that fare included a 32 hour layover in Kiev (this is right out). And it only shows what Kayak users have booked: I booked directly with Delta for my upcoming flight, and got it for $500 less than the Kayak listed deal. Still, Kayak can serve as a pretty good visual for what kinds of fares can be had. Recall above: airlines tend to match deals. If you see ATL-MAD (Madrid) pop up on the cheap, then it’s worth exploring. It may be a competitive hot-spot.
The best site for researching flights is Google Flights. Google acts on its own: it has cash to burn, so it’s using the site to drive eco-system traffic in a larger war with Facebook – it doesn’t need a back-door deal with carriers. And it uses projects like Flight as test cases for engineering concepts. As such, their interests are more likely to align with yours, and not the airlines. Of course, it's capturing all your data, which it will use for its own nefarious purposes later on, but that's later. Live in the Now.
On a top level, Google Flights does the same as all the other sites – enter a route and date pair, and up come the flight options. Where Flights shines is that it gives you easy view into different travel options. You know you want to go to London this summer, but what are the best dates? Google can pull up a grid view to show a full week range of combinations: e.g., June 3rd to June 14th, or June 1th to June 15th, etc. And it’s easy to scroll through to cover the entire summer. This is key, because the price on a flight can vary dramatically based on the departure and arrival combination. You can save hundreds by shifting your travel days a day or two on both ends. Google will also clue you in on this when you make a basic search, but the calendar grid view is so powerful I go to it right away.
The other very useful tool is the destination map. It works a lot like the Kayak one – enter a departure point and flight dates, and then scroll the map to see prices for different destinations. The advantage over Kayak is that these are current airline prices, not what someone got recently. It’s much more accurate than Kayak in that regard. I almost always end up toggling back and forth between map and grid view, trying different combinations. Google has other tools, but these are the most powerful. Try them out for fun.
Advance Skills
Perhaps you may have played around on Google Flights, especially the Flexible Dates view, and hopefully seen its power. It’s still pretty wide open, though, and, as promised, here are a few tips to get the most out of it.
To Start: Traveling out of BHM airport is usually an expensive proposition. I’ve checked the same for Huntsville and Montgomery. As nice as it is to fly directly out of BHM, it comes at a premium of $300/ticket, I’d say, over other options. The closest to an affordable flight I’ve ever found was $1,050 RT to Paris, and that disappeared in a day. The root cause is lack of competition; flights from BHM are few, and of those, SWA takes up a large number. It would be perfectly lovely and quite possible for Delta to reasonably price in a BHM-ATL-PAR flight, but there’s no competitive pressure for it to do so.
I almost always, therefore, begin my searches in ATL. It’s drivable, obviously, and there are direct flights to most European destinations. You do have to factor the drive and park cost in – as low as $9/day if you use the remote shuttle site, though I often go with the $12/day Economy parking. $100 for a 10 day trip, from $25 gas – it’s a cheap way to go. There are busses that take you from BHM to downtown ATL, but you have to take MARTA to get to the airport from there. $14/person for that…both ways…you come out behind pretty quickly. Only, don’t underestimate how difficult the return drive can be. You’ll have been up for 16+ hours, probably, when you land back in ATL. Be careful.
When you start searching from ATL you’ll notice pretty quickly that ATL-Europe pairs are not particularly cheap, at least not compared to some of the other ads you’ll see. Reasons: again, lack of major competition (ATL is dominated by Delta); lack of a bargain carrier (e.g., Norwegian, more on them later); the extra two hours of flight time compared with, say, NYC departures. ATL-Europe generally starts at $1,000, whereas NYC-Europe can be had for $500 (though you don’t want that flight, more on it later). Oddly, that $1,000 fare usually involves a stopover in the US, usually NYC. So, you’re driving 150 miles and don’t even get a direct connection. Bummer. Direct flights are almost always $200 more.
The best you can hope for with ATL departures is to keep checking and catch one of those odd computer pricing glitches. Last year I found ATL-Paris for $600 in June – this is a good deal. Anything below $700 to continental Europe from ATL is a steal. I consider $800 to be a good purchase. The $600 flight wasn’t ideal, it has a stop in NYC, and the trip length was 8 days max: I like to go for at least 10. We ended up passing on it, but such deals can be had (the driver, btw was an offer from United that was coupled with an AARP discount. Delta matched it for a very short period).
Anyway, ATL remains the first best option, really, in terms of convenience. I set my Google search to “direct flights only” to filter out the Aeroflot routes – if I’m driving to ATL, I count that as one flight, and I don’t want another if I can help it. I usually start looking 4 months in advance; airlines rarely start their pricing games further out (unless you’re using miles, in which case you need to start 330 days out – more on that next week). I think that oil futures are the main reason why airlines won’t discount more than 4 months out, but I’m sure more goes into it. Expect the sales to kick in between 3-4 months out. Google will actually help here, they have a tool that predicts, based on past history, when the best time to buy a certain flight is. The airlines know this, too, and will try to inject some randomness into the process.
Buying when the sales are first announced is a risk-reward proposition. You’ll get the best pick of seats if you buy early, and with luck you’re locking in a decent price. Again, I go with $700 direct to continental Europe as being excellent, $800 as very good, $900 as fair. I don’t go above $900, you can always do better. So if I see $770 to Zurich, I jumps on it.
Wait, what? Zurich? Why am I going there? OK, here’s the point I was trying to make with my previous posts on France/Italy/England: Go into this process with an open mind for your destination, because they’re all good (I haven’t gotten to describing Germany/Switzerland, Spain, Greece, Ireland, Scandinavia yet, but they’re excellent choices, too). I prefer to have top 3 choices for destinations and see if something develops. This year, ATL-ZRH was $300 less than ATL-PAR, so Zurich and southern Germany it is. Two years ago Milan was on sale – and there we go. If you have your heart set on one particular spot, then so be it, but flexibility increases savings.
Back to the purchase. If the initial sale at $800 is not in your budget, you can hold out for a lower price. You may get lucky and score something at $600; you may not. You can always decide that connecting through Istanbul on your way to London is worth-while. I try to minimize connections, and if they must be, at least have them going in the same direction. Amsterdam is, more or less, on the way from ATL to Paris, so you’re not losing a lot of time, I can do that. Other people are willing to route through Dubai to Rome. That’s not for me (unless it’s Emirates business class, in which case, go ahead and make the flight longer).
But you are stubborn, aren’t you? You have your heart and mind set on France. If so, be prepared to make the trip a little less convenient, but I’ll show some strategies that don’t involve stuffing your kids into the overhead bin.
Expert Skills
You changed your mind. So now you have to go to Tuscany, eh? Excellent choice, and you'll need strategies to get there that are not covered in my above Google Flights tips. You probably need to fly to Milan (MXP). A sale ATL-PAR really doesn’t help you.
Well, maybe it does, we’ll see. If you have a must have destination, it pays to expand your search parameters, and get ready to change planes, multiple times.
First thing is to go ahead and take off the “direct only” filter in your Google Flights searches. If it’s that important, one stop shouldn’t bother you. You may get lucky and snag another ATL-PAR flight for $600.
You may want to consider searching alternate departure points. Yes, you can try Huntsville or Montgomery, sometimes something quirky can happen. I’d include Nashville, too. They don’t have direct flights to Europe, but they do have plenty of competition and even a few bargain carriers that keep prices. I checked, and I would not choose any of the cheap flights (three planes, 30+ hours),and I’m not keen on flying bargain airlines across the pond, but Nashville is a drivable distance, so it’s worth a look.
Your better options include checking prices on major hubs, and see if you can get a *really* low fare. I generally scan Chicago, NY, Boston, Philly, DC, and Charlotte. The trick here is that if you find your low fare from one of these hubs, you can then see if there happens to be a low fare getting there from Birmingham. Chicago is a good option on this, in particular. It’s possible to get to Chicago for $200-$250 direct – check SWA, too, they don’t show up on Google Flights. From there, you may be able to score a direct to Milan for $650. It’s not likely, but not impossible. In fact, the best option here is probably NYC, there are cheap flights to Europe leaving Newark all the time. The trick is to get there: BHM-NYC has gotten outrageously expensive, nearly $400. That’ll negate any savings from NYC-MXP.
You can try to get really crafty, though, and see if you’re willing to drive to ATL and fly to NYC from there. ATL-NYC can sometimes be had for under $200. Nashville-NYC can be competitive, too. It takes a good deal of hunting here – you have to keep going back and forth between the Europe leg and the US leg, checking dates, but it can work. Case in point: two years ago I bought tickets NYC-MXP because they were at $599 R/T. That’s a pretty good deal, and I knew we wanted to go there. Now, getting to NYC isn’t easy, but I had a Delta companion ticket from my credit card (side note, Delta companion tickets are rarely worth it – you have to pay an increased fare to use them, which eats into the savings, sometimes completely. But it’s always worth a look). I also had a $300 credit from being bumped on a previous flight. I found $250 tickets, used my companion on one, the credit on the other, and all told, made it to Milan from Birmingham for $712/person. Pretty darn good. Without the companion & credit, it still would have clocked in at a respectable $850. This was when oil was at $100/barrel, mind you.
The added benefit of this kind of arrangement is that you can break up the trip and enjoy a secondary destination. For the above trip, we stopped for a night in NYC and got to do a little touring around with the kids. Chicago, Boston, Philly, DC would all offer similar opportunities. The break in the travel gives you a chance to ease your way into your vacation.
You can flip it around, too – remember, you may have found a great direct flight ATL-BCN (Barcelona). Now, go see if there’s a cheap ticket from BCN-MXP. Europe has a lot of bargain carriers, I find that flying within Europe is cheaper than flying within the US. In my example, BCN-MXP is $114 round trip. $114! And that’s on a British Airways codeshare, so you get one bag free. You have to be careful about that, btw. For example: You can fly RyanAir from Shannon, Ireland (SNN) to Paris for as little as $46 RT. Let that sink in. Then build an itinerary: ATL-NYC ($176), NYC-SNN ($571), SNN-PAR ($46). That’s $800 to get to Paris, RT, from ATL – pretty good. Plus you get to spend a day in NYC and another couple in Ireland. I think that’s a solid trip. Note your total flight time is minimal – 2 hours ATL-NYC, 6 hours NYC-SNN, 1 hour SNN-PAR. 9 hours total. That’s a whole lot better than going BHM-DFW-Istanbul-MXP.
Now RyanAir is, I’m told, a less than pleasant experience. They charge you for everything, bags, snacks, beverages, etc. You’ll probably end up with an extra $200 in fees, maybe more. Plus, it’s extremely cramped. So, beware when booking domestically, on either side. Check the T&C’s and make sure you’re not going to get severely dinged.
A last note: The idea of bargain domestic flights has been around for many years. It’s starting to show up for international carriers, too. I was very excited to read about a new airline called Norwegian Air; they fly out of Boston, NYC, and Orlando, and offer RT fares in the $500’s to destinations like London and Copenhagen. Plus, they fly new 787’s, which I’m dying to try.
But read the fine print: $500 RT does not include bags, or seat assignments(!) You can’t fly as a family without assigned seats, that’s right out. Once you add all the necessities in, you’re back up to $800+. Still decent, but not enough to move the needle. So beware of these – there’s another airline called WOW, same deal. But if nothing else, these bargain carriers keep prices low everywhere. I wish one would buy a slot in ATL. Or BHM – there was a rumor of a BHM-Stuttgart flight from a bargain German carrier (for Mercedes folks) that sadly never materialized. Sad Panda.
Business Of Flying
Ditch The Hoi Polloi
Can you tell I'm obsessed with flying business class? Well, that’s what happens when you fly it once. You want to get back.
Airlines don’t make it easy. They don’t need to drop their business class pricing – your average corporation has no problem paying $3,500 R/T to fly an executive overseas (justification: that exec will be productive on day 1 of the trip, as opposed to day 2; I suspect there’s a tax angle, too). So, you may see the occasional “sale” (currently, $2,500 for ATL-London on Delta, usually $3,300). It’s still not useful for most of the rest of us.
Back up here – how did I, under these pricing constraints, ever actually get a business class trip? Ahh, the good old days, when credit card companies were first partnering with airlines to award miles…before they really knew the math on it, and “loyalty” was a key airline concept. They’d find out that loyalty is only useful for a certain subset of business travelers; the rest of us book the cheapest airline, even if it’s just $5 less.
Still, it was the early days, and airline cards were handing out miles in bunches. Huge signing bonuses, plus jaw-dropping mileage multipliers. There was a famous instance of getting 1000 miles on a purchase of a brand of pudding cup. People went wild.
Also, airlines though that transparency was helpful. Delta had a published award chart, and darn it, getting to those award levels was pretty easy. For the 2010 trip my wife and I took, I think I spent 160,000 miles for the two of us, business class. Heck, I got nearly half of that just by signing up with the card.
Airlines have since learned to be stingier with their miles. You can still get decent award sign-ups, but from there…ok, take Delta. In 2010, see above, the award amount for business class to Europe was 40,000 miles per leg. And it was on a clear chart. Sure, they had limited availability, you had to book, like, 11 months out, but it was there.
In between then and now, Delta added tiering on their award inventory (there were some scattered 40,000 seats, but most were 55,000, or 80,000); pulled the award chart (now you didn’t know what their lowest, or base level was); started devaluing the miles annually. The current low-price I can find? 70,000 miles one-way (ATL-London, if you’re curious). In 8 years, they’ve nearly doubled the mileage requirement, amounting to an effective compounding inflation of 8% per year. The Consumer Price Index over that time is less than 2%. Insult to injury is that last year the base rate was 62,500. They upped it over 10% between 2017 and 18 alone!
The upshot – saving up your miles for a business class trip is tougher and tougher. Sure, my Delta miles don’t expire, but they become less and less valuable every day. I have to pile in a ton on every year just to keep my miles at purchasing power parity.
Well, that’s less than helpful. So, for the fun of it – if you still want in, or, at least want to see if Business Class is worth your money, do the following. Get a Delta Gold Amex, shuttle everything through it that first year (I’m not advocating carrying a balance: just use it for whatever you can pay off; and avoid the purchases where you have to pay an interchange fee, typically 3%, for making the purchase). Then, make a handy referral for the card to your spouse. In year two, shuttle your spend through that card. You’ll get miles for the referral.
By the time you’re done, two years in, you *should* have enough miles for two one-way tickets in business. That’ll at least get you a taste. And, btw, you don't have to get a Delta Amex, you can do the same strategery with any travel card/airline partnership. I checked -- a plain United card gives you 40,000 in the first year for signing up, and they do post their award travel chart. 70,000 per one-way business class. You can get two of those in 3-4 years.
OK, what about the way back? Used to be, airlines would soak you on a one-way, so this scheme didn’t work. Not anymore! Norwegian will happily sell you a one-way at regular discounted price. Southwest does it, too. So, for example, book your outbound flight Atlanta-London using your Delta miles (140,000 total for two; you may have to pay $10 in taxes), then fly coach back to New York on Norwegian for $434; grab the $98 flight from New York to Atlanta. All in? $1,074 for the flights. Now, the Amex card will have an annual fee, $95, but it’s waived the first year. So, maybe add $100 to the above. Call it $1,200 all-in. Not bad, for a 50% business class itinerary. Sure, it took you two years to build up, but I’d say it’s worth the effort. Just don't complain if it totally ruins coach for you.
Further Strategies
So you want to fly business? There’s a real question as to whether a business class ticket is even worth it for you. The 2.8% return on Delta miles that I calculate is predicated on the assumption that a business class ticket’s cost is equal to its value. That’s a personal question.
I actually don’t think a business class ticket is worth it: You pay a $3,000 for 8 hours of additional comfort. $400/hour! I reserve that kind of fee for serious legal advice; the extra room and free booze just doesn’t cut it for me. One reason is that I can’t sleep on a plane, regardless of the comfort. It makes no difference to me if I’m awake in a lie-flat vs. an upright seat.
A business class ticket is wasted on a kid, in my opinion. They have plenty of room in a coach seat. Free booze helps them not at all. Unless you’re trying to give them something to shoot for later in life, or just build a memory, then they don’t need this. When I was a boy, we’d set up pillows and blankets and sleep on the floor.
My wife, however, can sleep on a plane, but not in a coach seat. For her, the difference is substantial. If it cuts down a day of jet-lag, you can start to justify it. If you hate coach flying so much that you’d prefer not to go at all, then it’s definitely a value. Plus, I’ll admit, it’s a pretty fun experience. Now, when I fly as a family, I fly as a family: we sit together. So I aim for one business class flight in every four trips, rather than, say, have my wife fly in business while us boys stick it out in coach. Seems pretty democratic.
Since a straight purchase of four business class tickets is beyond my annual budget, I use my miles. Let’s do the math on that, then: 4 business class tickets on Delta = 500,000 miles. If I travel to Europe every 2 years, as I try to do, that means I expect a business class trip every 8 years. So, I have to book 62,500 miles/year, $5,000+ a month. That’s basically spending every penny through the card. It can be done, but it’s tough – you got to maximize boosters whenever possible.
Your other options, of course, include just getting close, and buying the extra ticket(s) at rate. You can hope for a sale, or try services like http://www.skyluxtravel.com/ -- I’ve never tried them myself, seems shady, so don’t take this as a recommendation, and you can’t coordinate easily with your award redemption. If you have to buy two tickets, and get awards on the other two, your out-of-pocket will be somewhere in the $5-6k range. Still a bite, but doable.
A further option that’s appealing is to just to business class on one of the legs – my wife, for example, likes to start the trip in business. It sets the tone for the trip and helps with the initial jet lag. Coming back? Not so critical, since it’s a daytime flight. You’ll be awake anyway, so lie-flat seating is largely irrelevant. Plus, you have the experience of the trip to get you through the 8-9 hours.
Surprisingly, Delta has no problem with you booking just a one way with miles. Same cost per leg either way. The trick was always getting the one way return ticket: airlines used to absolutely soak you on a one way ticket. For example – current Delta rate for ATL-ZRH in June, R/T, is $1,400 (outrageous, btw, I bought in for nearly half that). The one-way fare for June is $2,400. You’re better buying a R/T ticket and simply not flying the second half, which is a waste, and not always easy to do.
These days it’s getting a little easier to get a one way. The bargain carriers don’t seem to mind much at all: go to Norwegian Air, and you’ll see that they let you do it without a problem. Domestically, Southwest Airlines seems to be OK with one-way tickets, too. So, a sample itinerary I could build for myself:
Outbound: ATL-LON, Business Class, 4 seats, 250,000 miles +$600 in fees.
Inbound: Norwegian Air, LON-NYC, LowFare+ $473.30/ticket, $1893.20 total
Southwest Airlines, NYC-BHM, $175/ticket, $700 total.
Grand total: $3193.20 out of pocket, about $800/person.
It more or less works out to be a regular fare purchase, with using the miles to upgrade the outbound leg to business class. Not ideal – the one-way fare I’ve constructed is about $650/ticket, which is not much lower than my R/T target of $750. This is just an OK compromise between waiting forever for miles to build – 10-12 years, in my case -- or using them every 6 years on half of the trip.
La Compagnie
I tried this option this summer: $1,400 R/T for business class seats Newark to Paris. Another $300 to get to Newark. All-in-all, a pretty good experience, you can read my review here.
Card Strategies
I’ll fess up: I don’t use my credit card rewards programs correctly, and it’s costing me money. Not too much, but if you’re going to travel in style and/or inexpensively, then you need to incorporate a good card rewards strategy. In this post I’ll discuss point/miles/cards, and how to get the most out of it. I’m going to assume throughout that you’re not a super-frequent flyer, because then your strategies will be different. Super-frequent fliers will think nothing of booking a flight from LA to Sydney and back just to accumulate the miles. The rest of us don’t have this option. If you do, though, you should be following The Points Guy.
First, the basics – y’all probably know all this, but to recap: It used to be that credit cards and airline points/miles went hand-in-hand: you used the card that got you miles for the airline that serviced your needs best – for us in Birmingham, that amounted to either Delta or SWA. If you were lucky, or good at finding deals for point multipliers, you could fly for free.
Credit cards eventually moved away from the airline strategy to a straight forward point strategy: cash back, not miles (though some still call them “miles”, and the traditional miles programs still exist). $1 purchase = 1 point. 100 points = $1. So, you’d get a straight up 1% on your purchases. Easy. And since cards want you to spend, they’ll give you multipliers on certain spend, or during certain periods. 2X is pretty common, and still works out for the card issuer: they get a little over 2% of the transaction fee, so 2X points is break-even in that regard. Once you get to 3X, the card issuer is coming out behind on the transaction, unless they have a deal with the specific vendor. Usually, though, they’re hoping usage will result in interest balance, and they’re mostly right.
Chances are your current card gives you 2%, on average. That’s pretty good. You can definitely boost that by finding out when certain cards have certain multiplier periods, and load up then. For example, the bank where I work, BBVA Compass, has an NBA Amex card that gives you a 10X point multiplier for all purchases made during NBA All-Star weekend and the NBA Finals. That’s 10% cash back, no matter where you use it: I know, I'm a homer on this -- but that's super rich. I don’t know of another card that does that for you. I’m going to try to make any necessary big-ticket purchases then – school tuition, for example. My school will let me charge tuition on a card, though they pass on the transaction fee (3%) – this is pretty common. I still come out 7% ahead, provided I can pay it back quickly.
Maximizing these offers is a good idea, in general. The problem is that it’s now pretty much decoupled from travel. I get cash back, but rarely do I let it accumulate. Often I’ll apply it to a balance right then and there. That’s great, but it only helps me with my airline bills in a big picture kind of way. If I were disciplined, I’d set up a travel savings account at my bank and automatically put cash in monthly – and somehow resist the temptation to raid it when an unexpected expense pops up. That’s the best practice.
Miles programs force me to save for travel, since the miles aren’t really good for anything else. That’s nearly the only reason I still participate. I expect that the next time I use my miles, and get down to a zero balance, I’ll switch to regular balance rewards, and try very hard to leave them alone.
Because I’m in Birmingham, Delta and SWA are the most common carriers, and so Delta miles are the most use for me. (I don’t fly often enough to qualify for SWA flights). Delta has made it difficult to redeem miles – confusing, at least. You can use your Delta Amex card to get spend levels to qualify for their million miler club, etc, which gives you access to discounts, mileage boosts, and their club lounge. I have no way to reasonably reach their requirements, and really, no need for the perks. I don’t fly often enough. The way I figure it, either you fly a bunch and reach their targets easily, or not at all.
Anyway, Delta still uses an award chart with variable redemption rates. I’m not going to go into them all, I’ll just focus on US-Europe. You have two options there:
1.) Use miles for a coach ticket
2.) Use miles for a business class ticket
You use to be able to use miles to upgrade an existing ticket, but that option is only available on domestic flights. It was a pointless hassle before that restriction anyway.
Now, let’s start with point 1. Delta’s current redemption rate is 60,000 miles for a R/T coach ticket – that is, at least 60k. They release a few tickets every flight at 60,000, and then as those are used, the cost ratchets up to 90,000, 120,000, etc. They do have a handy tool on their website that lets you shop for affordable mileage flights pretty easily, but generally, if you want the good and cheap flights, you have to book early – 330 days in advance. But the good news is that you can book and then change pretty easily, usually without a fee.
Now, the problem with using miles for straight coach is that it’s a terrible value. 60,000 on a ticket that costs $800 = $0.013/mile, or a 1.3% return on credit card dollar spent. That’s poor, so I don’t even bother with it.
That gets us to Option 2: Business Class Award. This is generally what I shoot for, and if the chat boards can be believed, so do most others. First, the math: A Business Class ticket to Europe, from ATL, Goes for $3,500 or so, and rarely goes on sale. The lowest redemption amount for a business ticket is 125,000 miles. The math says…$0.028/mile, or 2.8% return on every dollar spent. Now that’s better – better than, say, Capital One’s straight 2%.
It’s a little less than 2.8%, since you have fees to pay even on an award ticket, but they’re not much, $150 or so. If you’re lucky, you can even find a flight from Birmingham for 125,000 miles. The key is to a.) look early – 300+ days in advance -- and b.) look to different European cities. ATL-PAR books pretty quickly, but some routes, like ATL-BCN aren’t as popular. Spend two days in Barcelona, then take a cheap Euro flight to Paris. It’s my favorite way to use Skymiles. And the Delta tool on this is surprisingly useful.
So, if you’re doing the miles thing, this is the best bang for your buck. Spend whatever you can pay off on the card, look for multipliers (most are worthless) and special offers. Delta used to run sales to purchase miles at a discount: I haven’t seen a sale in a few years, but when they happen, it’s usually in December, so check around then. And get a card for your spouse, each new card will get you 50,000 miles as a bonus. Amex charges a fee, but the perks – free bags on domestic flights, plus a companion ticket – can offset that.
Otherwise, I recommend going straight cash back and being disciplined. Take a look at the BBVA Compass Amex card and the 10X points during the NBA finals. Chase Visa has quarterly categories that give 5%, but I think you end up closer to 2% over the course of the yea. Capital One is 2X all the time. That’s your baseline. You can be crafty and use 4-5 different cards at different times, and maybe you can get 5% over the year. That’s better than my 2.8% on my Delta card. But it takes work.