GarrettP1

<deleted by moderator>.
My experience with Luxury Consulting: On Jan 5 I contacted their website about travel from either Korea or Japan to the US mainland.
A day later he contacted me, and got my information. I have 400K miles with Delta, and my ultimate travel destination was Ft Walton Beach FL (VPS), round trip.
I didn't care how I got there, but wanted to use my miles. My travel dates were widely open (I currently reside in Guam).
He didn't get back to me with anything concrete until Jan 10, but came up with a trip from ICN to MEX then to IAH. The cost was 95K miles about about $40 in taxes (from IAH I would take a flight from United to VPS).

What bothered me was that he wrote: it's probably best if you book this flight yourself, that way you don't have to send my all your information (credit card, FF number, etc). He didn't charge me.
The only reason I had contacted them was that I wanted to pay someone to book this for me. If he had told me he was going to take 5 days and just send me an idea I never would have contacted them in the first place.
I tried booking his suggested route myself, but I wasn't able to do it.
I don't plan on using them again.

Garrett

Jasper2009

(bolding mine)

I'm sorry to hear you were disappointed with the recent booking experience.

As mentioned in my e-mail, I apologize if that statement came across wrong. For a round-trip booking 95% of the work is researching options and max. 5% of thre work is making the booking.

Whenever an itinerary is easily bookable online, most clients strongly prefer to make the booking themselves using the itinerary I send them vs. sending me all the passenger information, billing information, credit card information, account information and password etc.

For complex bookings that require spending hours on the phone that's obviously a different story.

Obviously I'm happy to complete the booking online for a client if desired (and did so in the end per your request - my apologies for not picking up that preference in the first place).

neurosciguy

John from the Flying Mustache and Dominik from Boundless Miles are both excellent, I recommend those two.

mtu_flyer

I'm going to try to keep this as brief and accurate as I can to give an account of my awful experience with JuicyMiles.

I am new to these types of services and didn't know much about them until seeing a number of point blogs recommending Juicy Miles. Since I didn't have much experience booking mileage, I thought I would give a try.

I initially made contact with John, paying my $25 "good faith" payment after giving him some parameters. His first suggestion was a route (they don't give you the specifics until you pay them more money) that he said would net me 29K MQMs and 7900 MQDs for $2700. Initially I thought this seemed pretty decent but decided I would do a bit of my own searching to see how much better it was than what I could find on my own. Not knowing the specific route they were proposing, it took me only 15 minutes of searching to find a $2800 flight that would net me 36K MQMs (7K more than what they were proposing) and just over 8K MQDs. I replied back to John saying the redemption wasn't attractive considering I could easily find something better and to continue searching to find a route that had a better redemption.

After that point, John sent me an email reply saying "We look forward to helping you in the future", implying that he wasn't going to continue looking for a better route. I thought that was odd so I sent him a follow-up email saying maybe he misunderstood me and I was asking him to find a better redemption route considering I found one on my own that was better. After that point I didn't hear from John for about a week even after emailing and calling multiple times. Finally he got back to me nearly 10 days later and said he had been traveling a lot and they were upgrading to a new system. Ok... so I ask him then what he has found and he said "You are at the top of my list" and he would get back to me shortly. Later that day, he gave me a call and said he had a "monster" booking that would net me 40K MQMs (turns out this wasn't the case later when I realized he miscalculated it and was actually only 29K MQMs) and over 8K MQDs for $2999. At the time I thought well that's better than the one I had found earlier so yeah lets go for it. He then sent an invoice of roughly $380 (this is on top of the cost of the ticket) for "consulting services" which I paid. Around this time, I sent an email to my boss indicating that I would be needing to take days off for the trip and said he needed me to cover a conference that weekend as my coworker who originally was tasked with going, had a wedding to go to and he needed me to cover. I then told John about this and said I wouldn't be able to leave this weekend and to kindly return the $380 fee for the "reservation" (which I hadn't actually followed thru to book yet) and to find another routing. He then replies that because there are fees and whatnot with their "booking service" and that he couldn't refund me the money even though I never paid for the flight. Now I'm really starting to think this maybe a scam and decided to do a little more digging.

I started to wonder, how much money did they save me for this trip? At the beginning of our conversation, John said they get special fares from the airlines and flight routings that the average consumer can not find. They tout it in their promotional material and correspondence that they work tirelessly to get you the best pricing and routing - their marketing is very enticing to lure you in. I then thought about the $2999 price and thought, hmmm that's an odd amount. So I took to google flights tonight and am appalled to find out that the EXACT same routing (same booking class) direct through the airline is just over $2500! Their "limited time" fare was nearly $500 MORE than what the average consumer can book directly! Add the consulting fee and I would have been paying nearly $900 above the normal ticket price! These guys are misrepresenting the actual ticket price and pocketing the entire $900!?! How is this not illegal to be stringing someone along, getting more money out of them every step of the way, only to find out by the end that you've not only paid more for a ticket you can book yourself but also for their "consulting" work to find you an "amazing deal"? WHAT A TOTAL SCAM!

I hope my experience will deter anyone from using their service. People work hard for their money and to operate a business this way is not only unethical but disgusting to say the least. I will be sharing my experience on other forums and websites in hopes that other hard working people don't scammed by this operation!

Now I'm waiting for people with vested interests in this kind of practice to try and defend it...

pkerr

As always... "buyer beware".

mtu_flyer

Yup... this was a learning lesson and I hope that by sharing my story, others won't fall into this scam.

viperbrown

Very disappointing to learn of this indeed. Puts my own experience with John into perspective, when he was unresponsive for about a month and then gave me a far-flung excuse. Seems to be his modus operandi. I was lucky that in my case that by the time he sent some ideas, which were logical but not earth shattering, I had already secured some great bookings elsewhere.

mtu_flyer

The part that really kills me is paying for a ticket $500 above what you can book with the airline. That's borderline fraud.

Mwenenzi

This thread is about award booking services.

You just seem to be looking for paid fares to earn ff miles/elite qualifications. Many many threads on FT about this. And as you state not hard to do yourself.

mtu_flyer

Ah I didn't notice the difference. Is there a forum you can suggest that would be more appropriate for this?

mccomb

Just wanted to give my feedback on two award services I tried for a pretty flexible booking from the east coast to Buenos Aires in business at saver levels. I did an initial search and could not find saver space.

I sent a request to MileValue first, and got this disappointing response:
Hmmm...

I then sent a request to Juicy Miles, who responded within 24 hours and found us several options. None were ideal (long layovers and we're traveling with kids), so they went back and searched several more times before finding an itinerary that would work for us. Great work and effort! I'll use them again.

Roberto Louza Musetti Naccache

Has anyone used an Award Booking services for SA or OW RTW tickets and can make a recommendation? Thanks in advance!

WorldID

Hi newbie here, base in BOS. I need two one-way tickets from TPE to BOS in Business class using AAdvantage miles around May 16th - 20th (2018) but AA told me that there is NONE available for the month of May.

Does that sound right? May is 3 months away. It can't be all seats been taken at this time, can it? Am I too early to book the tickets? Can anyone help explain it? Any recommendation? Will any award booking service be able to locate the two tickets for me?

GeezerCouple

Did you ask about partner airlines, too?
I'm not sure if they'll volunteer about all partners. (They once switched us from a JL flight to the same itinerary AA flight even though I had specifically requested a particular JL flight number. Instead, they put us on AA metal. I caught it, thank goodness.)

Yes, the awards services may be able to help. They use some software that will alert them if availability opens. I have no idea what other "tricks" they use, but we've had remarkable success if our first attempts ourselves don't work.
It's been worth it for us, big time

GC

WorldID

Yes, I did ask AA about JL and CX, both fly the route, none available for the month of MAY. May I ask which award service did you use? - there're soo many of them - hard to choose. You can PM me if you don't want to post it here. Thanks GC!