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priznat posted:I’m flying for business in a couple weeks (YVR<-> YYZ, about a 4-5 hour flight depending on direction) and I’m eyeing the Air Canada seat upgrade bids. Are these a worthwhile deal on points for business or premium economy? It depends on what the cost is and how much you value the premium seat for a longer flight like that. 27k for PE seems like a decent deal to me, though if you have no other use for those miles and don't travel often, business is not the worst use. I use my Delta miles for upgrades because redeeming them for award flights is a laughable goal in most cases. I usually value premium seats at around $50 an hour, but that's a personal valuation and not any sort of widely applied metric.
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Feb 7, 2024 18:50
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BA finally aligned everyone's tier points year. Gonna suck to book tier points runs but nice to be in sync with my partner now.
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Feb 7, 2024 22:55
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Beef Of Ages posted:What you're seeing is the difference between revenue and award tickets. Airline award tickets have dramatically smaller availability than revenue tickets do for obvious reasons, and booking via the Chase portal is actually booking a revenue ticket from the airline's point of view, but Chase takes points from your account to pay itself back for buying you a revenue ticket via its travel agency (Expedia). So the key is exactly what you're experiencing: find an award flight available on a Chase partner airline, then transfer the points. In almost all cases this is a better value for the points you have, but it's much more difficult to find award space. That's the nature of the game. I know the Chase portal is for revenue tickets, but are you saying that the tickets on airline websites when searching to pay with points may also be revenue tickets, and that's why the points costs are so high? If so, is the only way to find award tickets just to experiment with different days and airports until something reasonable shows up? To give an example, on one random day the cheapest one-way JFK -> AMS on KLM is 68,000 points + $86, ordinarily $458. That's a horrid .5 cents per point, so obviously much cheaper through Chase. So is that a revenue ticket with an awful points rate, and I just need to try different parameters to find the decent award ones?
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Feb 9, 2024 00:51
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runawayturtles posted:I know the Chase portal is for revenue tickets, but are you saying that the tickets on airline websites when searching to pay with points may also be revenue tickets, and that's why the points costs are so high? If so, is the only way to find award tickets just to experiment with different days and airports until something reasonable shows up? Sort of, but not quite. Super helpful, I know.  For most airlines, including the majors in the US, they have moved to revenue-based pricing for awards. So when you search for an award ticket, it comes from an award bucket but there are (usually) multiple award fare buckets just as their are multiple revenue fare buckets. The non-discount awards have variable pricing that tends to move up and down with the equivalent revenue cost of that particular seat at that time. Thus, the example you provided of the KL seat is indeed a poo poo redemption value. If you can use Chase points for a lower point value on a revenue ticket instead of transfering them 1:1 to FlyingPoo for a redemption, then you got good value from your Chase points. As you noted, other dates/times/destinations will have different point values for redemption so, as always, flexibility is key in finding a good fare, be it an award or a revenue ticket.
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Feb 11, 2024 16:36
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Beef Of Ages posted:Sort of, but not quite. Super helpful, I know. Alright, I understand, thanks. Confirms my decision to eventually move off of travel cards towards straight cash back in the future, lol. I hate this kind of stuff.
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Feb 14, 2024 21:06
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mobby_6kl posted:I think that was to avoid them messing that up too. She was going to some lodge in the middle of a rainforest that required a boat and a 4x4 to get to so who knows how that'd work out. Sometimes the website has multiple options  but sometimes they disappear completely. Which happened during my last attempt lol. Still eventually I got the guy to admit that there's a flights with the ~30h layover, but he still didn't want to make the change because it's not "one flight with a connection" or something. Even though it does show up in the booking system. They really want me to take the refund but I just want to go to Koreaaaaa 
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Feb 20, 2024 23:01
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priznat posted:I’m flying for business in a couple weeks (YVR<-> YYZ, about a 4-5 hour flight depending on direction) and I’m eyeing the Air Canada seat upgrade bids. Are these a worthwhile deal on points for business or premium economy? If you already paid for the tickets AND that's what they want as the bid to upgrade, I would probably pass, personally, but that's also because I do travel a lot on Aeroplan points and want to maximize their value. TBH if you're not likely to use the points for anything else, given as you're tall and it's a fairly long flight I would probably go for the PE upgrade. But it's certainly not what I would call a good deal.
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Feb 21, 2024 16:05
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HookShot posted:If you already paid for the tickets AND that's what they want as the bid to upgrade, I would probably pass, personally, but that's also because I do travel a lot on Aeroplan points and want to maximize their value. TBH if you're not likely to use the points for anything else, given as you're tall and it's a fairly long flight I would probably go for the PE upgrade. But it's certainly not what I would call a good deal. It ended up not winning the bid on the one way but getting it the other so I am good with that. It was pretty drat cramped on the flight out so I am really looking forward to it! Thankfully a 787 both ways and no clapped out airbuses.
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Feb 21, 2024 18:39
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Is French Bee from NYC to Paris worth the risk of them being a budget airline? Its under $250 one way.
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Mar 20, 2024 23:24
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goodness posted:Is French Bee from NYC to Paris worth the risk of them being a budget airline? Its under $250 one way. It depends on what you're looking for. Is it a risk in terms of them operating as an airline? Probably not? They have to pass the same quality and maintenance procedures as any other airline that flies in Europe and the US so I wouldn't worry about it from that standpoint. It is a risk to your sanity from being crammed into tiny seats for many hours? Yeah, probably. Their standard Y seat is only 16 inches which is ludicrously tiny. Most airlines offer Y seats that are between 17 and 18 inches wide and that inch makes a really big difference, especially for a transatlantic flight. But that's all personal comfort issues; if all you care about is getting to Paris and you're not a large person, go for it.
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Mar 20, 2024 23:34
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goodness posted:Is French Bee from NYC to Paris worth the risk of them being a budget airline? Its under $250 one way. Are you only flying one way? If you either have date flexibility or are willing to connect, I’d expect to find AF or AA/BA for 550 or 600 round trip, and the difference between flying them and goddamn French bee is worth fifty bucks (or less if you want to check a bag or eat on the plane or such)
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Mar 25, 2024 18:50
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Jean-Paul Shartre posted:Are you only flying one way? If you either have date flexibility or are willing to connect, I’d expect to find AF or AA/BA for 550 or 600 round trip, and the difference between flying them and goddamn French bee is worth fifty bucks (or less if you want to check a bag or eat on the plane or such) I wish, coming back from Oslo on Norse Atlantic.
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Mar 25, 2024 21:10
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goodness posted:I wish, coming back from Oslo on Norse Atlantic. I see you've embraced the new "Glutton For Punishment" fares.
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Mar 26, 2024 02:49
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Beef Of Ages posted:I see you've embraced the new "Glutton For Punishment" fares. At least until they gently caress me over once. But yeah its worth saving hundreds of dollars. That is a lot of food in a fun place. For a long flight I'll just take a big weed edible and pass out for the overnight haul.
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Apr 6, 2024 16:51
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goodness posted:At least until they gently caress me over once. But yeah its worth saving hundreds of dollars. That is a lot of food in a fun place. This is the way. poo poo, I'll do that in business class sometimes, but only after we climb above 10,000 feet. Ain't nobody need to try evacuating while stoned off your tits.
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Apr 6, 2024 17:09
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I have a credit I have to use to book by May 22nd on Delta. A friend and I are taking a trip to Mexico City in late October/Early November, I know the sweet spot for booking is usually 30-60 days out from the trip; what is the likely impact to price for booking this early out? Since I'm the one with the credits, I want to cover part of his ticket to make up for the sub-optimal booking time, I was thinking like $150-$200 (ticket prices we're looking at are $700-$900 after taxes); does that seem pretty reasonable? EDIT: It's worth noting that Delta is offering the cheapest non-Volaris non-stop flights from Seattle to Mexico City, so I don't need to worry about airline price differentiation. Ham Equity fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Apr 8, 2024 |
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Apr 8, 2024 20:23
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What kind of credits are these? If they're attached to a ticket number, then I don't believe you can use them for someone else as the names have to match on the credit and the new ticket. In any event, if the value is about to expire, book something else with it now the cancel it once it tickets. Boom, new credit with an extended expiration date.
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Apr 8, 2024 21:11
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Beef Of Ages posted:What kind of credits are these? If they're attached to a ticket number, then I don't believe you can use them for someone else as the names have to match on the credit and the new ticket. Ham Equity fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Apr 8, 2024 |
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Apr 8, 2024 21:34
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Ham Equity posted:Credit is for $707, which is likely gonna be a little less than my airfare alone after taxes/fees. I really don't want to risk losing this if there's some weird edge policy regarding credits on cancellations that you spend credits on. I don't see a risk here at all. Your credit is stored value against a previously canceled ticket. When you use that credit toward a new ticket, the new ticket number now holds the flight coupon that represents the value of the ticket. If you then cancel that new ticket, the process starts over again with the value being associated to the new ticket number with a new expiration date. While it is a slightly different application, I did this recently to prevent some orphaned AA miles from expiring. I booked a cheap award, waited for it to ticket, then canceled and redeposited the miles. The expiration date reset to whatever their current window for non-elites is and we all move on. No big deal.
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Apr 8, 2024 22:29
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About 5 weeks ago, I flew from Charleston to Chicago, with a layover in Charlotte. My flight was delayed in Charleston, then repeatedly delayed in Charlotte past midnight and finally moved to 10 a.m. the next morning. I didn't trust that flight would exist at this point and rebooked via grand rapids. I requested a refund from American airlines, who I bought the ticket from, as well as reimbursement for hotel+uber to the hotel (about $100 total). After a month they finally responded to me 1) requested receipts for the hotel/uber, which I provided 2) offered a $50 coupon to a new flight 3) also 'credited' me with 7500 miles. I almost never fly and haven't responded to their offer as of yet. Is there anything I can do to get the cost of the ticket back? It was ~200-250
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May 30, 2024 14:28
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I have what is probably a stupid question, but I’ve done a lot of googling and can’t find an answer. Is there a service or website or person who can help synthesize information about how many frequent flier miles and AmEx points we have and help us find the ideal flight? My wife and I would like to go to France in April or May of 2025 and stay for roughly 10 days. For a multitude of reasons, this will be our last big vacation for a long time, so we kind of want to splurge for DeltaOne or AirFrance first class. We are super flexible with the exact flight days. We have to fly in and out of Detroit. Between the two of us, we have about half a million AmEx points and 150k Delta miles. I’ve tried SO MANY searches trying flights to Paris and/or Nice on different dates and different cabin combinations. Outside of making a convoluted spreadsheet myself, there HAS to be a better way to figure this out, right?
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May 30, 2024 19:41
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Calling customer service to book is tiring but they can often make it work well.
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May 30, 2024 22:25
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Short version is, I’d use Google flights to find the cheapest/most convenient flight then go to the airline site and see what your points would buy you for that flight.
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May 31, 2024 03:53
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i think expertflyer pro can do what you want you could use their overview to search for those classes in ita matrix too, maybe?
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May 31, 2024 10:37
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trevorreznik posted:About 5 weeks ago, I flew from Charleston to Chicago, with a layover in Charlotte. My flight was delayed in Charleston, then repeatedly delayed in Charlotte past midnight and finally moved to 10 a.m. the next morning. I didn't trust that flight would exist at this point and rebooked via grand rapids. You rebooked the ticket on AA via Grand Rapids or you booked a completely separate ticket on another airline through Grand Rapids? If the former, you used the value of the ticket so there isn't cause for a refund and the service gestures are what you're likely to get.
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May 31, 2024 13:38
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Aggro posted:I have what is probably a stupid question, but I’ve done a lot of googling and can’t find an answer. Part of the problem you're running into is that most airlines publish schedules 300 or 330 days out, so searches right now aren't going to return much in the way of revenue inventory, much less award seats. It can be a good strategy to look at inventory as it loads because sometimes you can find award buckets available before revenue management runs through and closes things down. As to the issue with searching, there is no easy fix for this outside of paying one of those award booking services that is a waste of money for something you can do yourself. Airlines purposefully make this difficult because they'd rather sell all of their seats rather than give them away in awards. Services like ExpertFlyer will alert you if an award bucket opens but it is limited to the specific flights that you ask it to search for. There is no way that I know of to have a wide and ongoing search of many different flight combinations. Since you're based in DTW, I'd be stalking the AirFrance/KLM sites and the Delta site for awards; you can transfer your Amex points from Membership Rewards to both of those programs if you find something that is a good value. Also consider other gateway cities in Europe and then take an extra flight or a train to get to where you want to go in France; flexibility is key in finding and utilizing awards at a good value. If you find a decent revenue fare, you can also book it via Amex Travel using your MR points. Sometimes you get better value for the points that way and it looks like a revenue ticket to the airline. Lots of options and ways to do what you want to do, but none of them are easy or simple and I regularly use a spreadsheet for complicated award searches. It is the nature of things. 
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May 31, 2024 13:54
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peanut posted:Calling customer service to book is tiring but they can often make it work well. This is almost universally not true. The days of agents seeing more inventory than the website is well in the past in most cases.
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May 31, 2024 13:54
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Beef Of Ages posted:You rebooked the ticket on AA via Grand Rapids or you booked a completely separate ticket on another airline through Grand Rapids? If the former, you used the value of the ticket so there isn't cause for a refund and the service gestures are what you're likely to get. The former. Thanks, that's what I was expecting. Pretty lovely that a 15 hour delay with no weather issues gets a token voucher, but I guess that's what I get for never flying. I got a bigger voucher last year for a much shorter delay but that was on a ticket a frequent flier friend had bought for me.
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May 31, 2024 14:14
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trevorreznik posted:The former. Thanks, that's what I was expecting. Pretty lovely that a 15 hour delay with no weather issues gets a token voucher, but I guess that's what I get for never flying. I got a bigger voucher last year for a much shorter delay but that was on a ticket a frequent flier friend had bought for me. Yeah, US airlines are generally a pile of poo poo on such things, and AA leads the pack in that domain in my experience. Things get better with status.
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May 31, 2024 15:02
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Are there any sites that would let me create price alerts for flights to a specific destination under a certain price with no specified dates? Maybe I’m loving up by using mobile but I haven’t been able to get it to work anywhere. Ideally I’d also be able to choose one stop maximum.
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Jun 1, 2024 17:32
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Snowy posted:Are there any sites that would let me create price alerts for flights to a specific destination under a certain price with no specified dates? Maybe I’m loving up by using mobile but I haven’t been able to get it to work anywhere. Ideally I’d also be able to choose one stop maximum. I believe Google Flights will do that when you select the "Any Dates" option when you save a flight.
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Jun 1, 2024 17:48
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I want to go to one of the ‘stans and eat plov and look at old buildings and maybe some mountains and not melt. I think Tashkent, Uzbekistan is my destination pending some sort of calamity or some goon telling me one country is way better than the other for train travel or getting around without knowing the language. I can sorta sound out Cyrillic and plan to brush up between now and then. Anytime in September 2025, 14 days, originating from Austin, Texas. I imagine I’d need to catch a connecting flight or two in the UK or Germany or something?
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Jun 3, 2024 18:14
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Beef Of Ages posted:I believe Google Flights will do that when you select the "Any Dates" option when you save a flight. This is making me feel a little insane, because Google Flights even says "effortlessly track prices for specific travel dates or for any dates, if your plans are flexible, to uncover the best deals" The only way to have the option to track prices is to put in a date. And the only way for me to select flexible dates is in the Explore tab, not Flights, but there isn't a way to set up an alert there. Under flights I can't select a price filter under $1000, but the prices for the destination I want are often much lower so that doesn't help much. It seems like such a simple thing but doing some googling it seems like there's lots of confusion about how to set up flexible date price alerts at all, let alone under a specific price. I tried Skyscanner and Kayak with no luck, Going might do it but I'm a little hesitant to spend $50/year for that. I'm hoping I'm just being dumb and missing something obvious, which is entirely possible.
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Jun 3, 2024 21:08
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wolfs posted:I want to go to one of the ‘stans and eat plov and look at old buildings and maybe some mountains and not melt. Tashkent is the obvious top choice, followed by Samarkand (and Khujand, by air or rail). Turkish Airlines is likely, and could be a nice layover.
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Jun 3, 2024 23:29
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I've booked economy round-trip tickets from Beijing to Denver through Lufthansa, but I want to try upgrading the Beijing to Frankfurt leg of the trip to business class since it’s always been a bucket list goal for me to try flying business or first class someday and it’ll be my birthday when I arrive in Frankfurt, so why not? The problem is that the direct purchase option is way too expensive at nearly $1.9k USD, but the minimum bid of 610 Euros seems much more doable. Does it matter when I place the bid for it to be more likely to be successful? Also, does the flight itself matter in terms of chances of a successful bid (ie taking off on Friday instead of a Saturday)?
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Jun 5, 2024 23:11
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Teriyaki Koinku posted:I've booked economy round-trip tickets from Beijing to Denver through Lufthansa, but I want to try upgrading the Beijing to Frankfurt leg of the trip to business class since it’s always been a bucket list goal for me to try flying business or first class someday and it’ll be my birthday when I arrive in Frankfurt, so why not? To get the bubble bursting out of the way up front: you're unlikely to get upgraded this way. "Way too expensive" at $2k is relative when you consider that Lufthansa can sell a business class seat for $4k-6k or more pretty regularly. Depending on the market, route, and load on the flight, whatever you paid for economy plus $2k may be a steal for a business class seat. Further, the bid system has two factors working against you: Lufthansa is trying to get as much revenue as they can for a seat, and so making a low bid means you're likely to be out-bid by someone else. You're also impacted by scarcity in that there are only so many business class seats on a flight and the airline wants to sell all of them rather than giving them away (upgrades) or at a reduced yield (the bid system). Even if you bid and are the highest, they may not offer any upgrades on a particular flight because they sold all the seats. The selection of flight and timing can have some impact on how full premium cabins are, but there's little way for you to know in advance and no way to predict what will happen. Thus, the most sure way to get what you're looking for is to pay for it. If the offer is $2k, then the question is really whether or not you're willing to pay that, not if there is another way to do it. Airlines have gotten increasingly sophisticated at using data and monetizing their premium cabins rather than giving them away and striving for volume in economy. It's how most things in travel work these days.
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Jun 9, 2024 15:24
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I can only speak to my own experience with LOT, which uses the same Plusgrade platform as Lufthansa, but much more often than not my minimum or minimum+20 bids have been accepted. Of course sometimes the premium cabins are just full, and I’ve had the odd op-up when I didn’t bid but on the whole it’s been useful and much cheaper than fixed price upgrades to the reservation, at check-in, boarding or on-board (I’ve checked them all). Completely agree with Beef of Ages that the only way to be sure to fly in a premium cabin is to pay the fixed price upfront, but if you’re ambivalent then the Plusgrade system can work. 60% of the time, it works every time.
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Jun 9, 2024 16:22
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