Question
I'm a teacher, so can only fly on weekends, major holidays, or at peak times in the summer. I manage to collect points on United, but usually can't find a way to USE those points. Do you have any ideas as to how a non-elite-level flyer can book a flight with points at peak times?
-- Kevin
Answer
First of all Kevin thank you for your part in the education of our children and if at university level, for tomorrow’s best citizens. You are correct, there are some vocations that simply don’t bode well for those trying to use frequent flyer miles. But, don’t abandon all hope since most members actually do use their miles for summer vacations and weekends. We almost never like to redeem miles during major holidays … for obvious reasons.
You are astute enough to recognize that being an elite member can and often does make a difference in your ability to use those frequent flyer miles, which is why much of any advice will often lead with suggestions as to why and how you should seek that level of membership out. I’m no different but will leave that part to answers in other questions in this series for the Perrin Post and really just concentrate on what the non-elite flyer can do as there are far more members like you that we hope we can help.
Beyond knowing which days work best, you must also known when is the best time to book an award. Given that you have a fairly rigid period of time off to use your miles, this should play into your hands since you can plan well in advance. For summer travel, the best time to book an award is here in the month of December. Other non-elite members are out shopping and won’t get around to thinking of redeeming their miles for travel until mid-January or so. Many might be surprised that January is one of the busiest months on record for award redemption (not travel, just the booking process) and if you can make your summer plans now before that big crush starts, then you’ll have increased your odds immensely.
The two most challenging hurdles for non-elites often are: 1) wanting to redeem to highly desirable destinations like Hawaii and 2) seeking multiple award seats on a single plane. These tips will even help with those situations.
1) NO does not mean NO
Airlines prefer for you to use their online booking tools for awards (it’s cheaper for you) but we do know that no airline has perfected that tool yet. Often the online booking tool does not make available all the award seats the airline has available. It often doesn’t display the entire various partner awards inventories and is often weak on international routing, open jaw travel and the inability to display the “roadblock” for you getting the seats you want. With the airline hub-and-spoke system, it’s often just a single leg of your request that prevents you from getting from NO to YES and if you were able to determine that roadblock, you might be able to fly around it with a different routing. The best thing to do if you consistently get a NO from an online booking tool for award redemption: say YES to paying a few dollars and contact the airline award redemption desk by telephone. You’ll often find incredibly helpful reservation agents whose creative booking techniques can move that NO to a YES. Costs vary by airline when contacting them directly to assist in your award reservation, but we feel it’s a small price to pay.
2) Are You Really Sure?
Compare cost per mile of redemption to buying a ticket. Use online booking engines to check prices across many carriers at once. Pricing can give you a rough guess as to whether award travel is going to be available. It is not foolproof but, generally speaking, if flight loads are low, prices go down and award availability goes up. Having said that, make sure you at least try to get full value out of your miles. Far too often we’ve seen travelers redeem their miles just because they can – with no thought whatsoever about it being a good deal. For instance, would you redeem 25,000 miles when you could purchase the ticket for $119? We know we wouldn’t. But it’s relative and if you choose to do that, as long as you have justified the use of your miles, then all is good.
Another sneaky way to “forecast” the availability of awards into the future might be to use the Farecast technology that is featured on Bing.com, the new search and travel tool from Microsoft. Here’s that link:
http://www.bing.com/travel/about/howAirPredictions.do
The way we use it is to search for a flight and look at the “predictor.” If it says, “wait,” then we have found that more often than not, it also means that award availability is still a possibility. As well, this tool now features hotel deal information and it can give you ideas when it might be a good time to use your points vs. saving them for hotels on other rainy days.
Other tools that can assist you with “predictors” are FareCompare.com and FlySpy.com. Remember, when fares are predicted to go down, then award seat availability can be predicted to rise.
3) If this is Tuesday …
Since even your students likely now belong to frequent flyer programs, you must have a plan when considering using an award to a popular destination. The best plan is to know which days offer the best award travel opportunities:
Best Days: Within the U.S. (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday), To Florida (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday), Hawaii (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday), Asia (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday), (Caribbean (Tuesday, Wednesday), Europe (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday), Mexico (Tuesday, Wednesday), South America (Tuesday, Wednesday);
Worst Days: Within the U.S. (Friday, Sunday), To Florida (Friday, Sunday), Hawaii (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday), Asia (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), Caribbean (Saturday, Sunday, Monday), Europe (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), Mexico (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), South America (Friday, Saturday, Sunday).
4) Open Wide! (open jaw and one-way awards)
Be flexible: Want to go to New York and there are no seats? Change your dates or fly into a neighboring city such as Newark. Just because Tuesday into JFK isn't available doesn't meant that Wednesday into EWR isn't either. Once you do get the No answer back from your award request, it’s now time to put on the thinking cap and come up with other solutions. Lucky for you more and more programs are flexing out the choices you have with your awards. For instance, a number of programs now offer one-way awards which means you can use them for what is referred to as open-jaw awards: flying into one city and out of another. This is very helpful when flying to airport concentrated cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles to name a few. It may be that you can get to a city, but just can’t return from there. So perhaps fly to LAX but return from Ontario or Orange County or other nearby airports if the award is that valuable to you. Flying into Newark and flying from LaGuardia if in and out of New York.
5) 6 months, no more, no less
After years of research and tens of thousands of actual award redemptions, we’ve figured out the best advance window for increasing your chances of getting just the award you want. Sorry, it’s not 331-days-in-advance. That has gone downhill since airlines became better at what they call “dynamic” pricing of fares and awards. Sure, you can still try to book early as some airlines release award seats one year in advance (actually it varies by airline and is often 331 days in advance), but we’ve found that about 6 months in advance of a travel date is the best overall date to start your search for awards. Any sooner and awards are often not fully released yet. Any later and you face the maddening crowd of too many members and not enough awards – at the 25,000-mile level. This means that if you want to plan for summer travel for June using awards, start your search in late December.
6) All programs not created equal
Choose your program wisely: Yes, we’ve said it before, your choice of programs is very important. Not all airlines redeem at the same level for their members. Research the airlines, some are known for being very stingy on award availability while others are fairly liberal. Among those airlines with the absolute best reputations for giving away the awards? American AAdvantage. Check out the research that InsideFlyer magazine does monthly to determine which program fit better with the types of awards you want to redeem.
7) Take two aspirin and call back in the morning
You might find this interesting: nearly 27% of all members booking their awards change some part of that award redemption before they fly. Some may never go, others may book different outbound or return and some even change the destination altogether. The facts are, things change, kids get hurt, work comes into play or frankly there are other family and economic emergencies that disrupt even the best of award plans. When this happens, it’s an excellent time for the frustrated flyer to get a hold of some award seats that weren’t available just moments ago.
8) I’ll take one from there … and one from there.
As well, you want to school yourself in the fine art of partnerships. Perhaps a flight from Denver to Montreal is not available using your United Mileage Plus miles. But, it may possibly be available if you were to redeem those same United miles on their partner, Air Canada that could be a code share of that same flight. Yes, all the seats on a typical flight are not owned by the flying airline, some are held by partners. And of course when you have a concentration of flights in and out of an airport, you might be able to fly one-way with one of the airlines and the return with yet another partner. The options are endless and while it makes for a confusing start, it can pay huge dividends when you do get the award that started with a No.
9) I’ll hire you …
There are a few services you can try that just may help you find the award seats you want and they range from low-cost to an award concierge if you wish. Let’s look at the low-cost options first. A service which includes multiple airline choices and is dedicated just to tracking awards, is the
AwardPlanner service from
MileageManager. This dedicated award tool allows you to search for award seats from all the programs you have miles with making it fairly easy to use. If the tool is unable to find your award seats at the time of your request, it will put that same request into a queue and re-check daily for you until it finds something and will then notify you via email. If planning in advance, you can let this tool run daily for you for several months and it has a really good track record of actually finding seats (airlines changing award inventory or other members changing their minds). And finally, you can use that same
AwardPlanner service from
MileageManager to engage the services of an actual person to find an award for you. They will use their special knowledge of how to work around the “No” answer to figure out how to get the award you want. It costs, but will certainly be less than buying a ticket. Outside of AwardPlanner, there is another service we can recommend as well for finding award seats. Called
BookYourAward, it is basically the same as the paid AwardPlanner service in which experts of award redemption or a fee will do their best to make your miles come true for an award.
10) If you have to ask how much it costs ….
Maybe you don’t have enough miles to really get there. The facts seem to indicate that any destination is possible to get to using your frequent flyer miles, but like the sharp travelers we are – we just don’t want to pay double miles to get there. A growing number of savvy travelers have devoted their lives to becoming more adept at collecting miles, which means that in the long run, they will always have enough miles to get where they really want to go, regardless of the number of miles required by any award chart. While we don’t want to see you drop your teaching job to simply hoard miles, you just may want to make sure you are the “educated” member who does know the simple tips that you can use to easily collect all the bonus miles you are likely to ever need. Most of the savvy travelers do make a habit of looking in at
FlyerTalk for everything about their miles and points.
We hope that these tips and general awareness of how award redemption works will benefit you and other non-elites. Again, thanks for being involved in the education process and here’s a tip of our collective hats to all teachers.