This year I set out to continue my annual Soccer/Football (football from here on) trip tradition and check off a few new grounds. While planning I realized that I would be short a few segments for keeping my UA Gold so I decided to skip the IAD-LHR non-stop and add a segment in each direction. This proved entertaining as it allowed me to experiment with arrival/departure airports within the UK, but eventually I decided on a fairly vanilla DCA-EWR-LHR and BHX-FRA-IAD routing.



Flights

United counts miles and co-pays towards upgrades as PQP, so I decided to book an economy routing and upgrade with miles/$. Once I decided this, I did some experimentation and identified that booking premium economy to England and economy back was cheaper than the difference in co-pay. So I ended up booking DCA-EWR-LHR in R (Premium Economy) and the return in W but there was PZ space available so my upgrade from FRA-IAD instantly cleared.

I paid $1,390 for this (with $115 of APD), then 40,000 miles and $975 of co-pay to upgrade both legs. My DCA-EWR upgrade cleared two months out and about 30 hours before departure my EWR-LHR upgrade cleared. Had I not been in R I definitely would not have cleared as there are 9 people on the list and 6 seats, but as a Gold in R I was ahead of all 1Ks in Economy. This is not tremendous value, as you could just buy round trip J for about $2,800, but I have a ton of Chase points which I transferred and this will net me more PQP for less cash.



Hotels

I have three expiring hotel credits (Amex Plat, C1 VX, and Chase SR) I set out to use, but also a conflicting goal of attaining Hyatt Explorist for the first time. In the end, I decided to use 2/3 of my credits and let the Amex Plat one expire. I booked the Hyatt Regency in Birmingham using my Venture X credit, but paid a little more than the best available rate for a total of $419. Then, I took advantage of a reasonable Hyatt rate to book the Hyatt House London Stratford for $466. For my last night I used the Chase portal to book the Ibis Birmingham Airport for $95. This made of a total cost of $980 for 5 nights, after using my credits it $630 out of pocket for 5 nights, an average of $126.



Match tickets

Skip this if you aren’t interested in how I bought tickets to the football matches! Three of the four grounds had easy tickets, with the only difficult one being Villa Park. However Villa have an innovative GA+ experience that gives you access to a special bar area (with one free drink) and a seat in the famous Holte End stand for $155 (note it sounds like this setup is controversial as it functionally prices out locals to allow tourists like myself to attend). The other four matches didn’t require anything complicated besides buying them the day they became available to non-members for a total of $167 for the four. This meant my total ticket cost for two Premier League and three Championship matches was $322.