Archives for January 2019

We all know that Delta is the best domestic airline. But that doesn’t mean it’s the airline you should be flying. There are so many criteria that must be looked at before deciding which airline should be given your dollars. After all, the “best” is so subjective these days.

At present, Delta can be described as the airline with the best service, hard product and reliability, but these are only some criteria in the ever-changing puzzle that must be looked at. Let me walk you through my framework and the criteria I give to each of the Big 3 airlines.

I am going to list out the criteria that I deem most important in my rankings of domestic airlines, and then I will assign a 3-2-1 ranking for each of the three airlines. I will only focus on the Big 3, since they are the only reliable carriers out of my home airport in the Northeast.

Obviously, this a long list of factors to consider, but I feel there is strong reasoning behind each one of my selections. Keep in mind, these ratings will change largely based on where you are located, and if you are hub-captive. In my case, direct routes are not a criteria since I am only getting a direct connection to a hub, and I generally don’t takes those routes anyway due to the limited timing granted by those schedules.

I’m not going to go through each of my criteria. Rather, I’d like you to make this choice for yourself and tally up your rating of how the different airlines stack up. You may want to adjust some of the criteria to be weighted, so feel free to play around with the chart.

Now it’s your turn! I’m curious to see your results.

Value is what every point accruer has in mind. What’s my cents per point? What luxury hotel can I book? What new first class product can I try? Stop it, you don’t need to maximize everything you come in touch with, guys!

I’ve thought long and hard about the value of points, and there is certainly one time when you should redeem poorly in the “traditional” value categories: traveling to see family and friends, or on the spur of the moment. More frequently than ever, I’m stuck asking myself, why not go visit a friend this weekend for his birthday? Why not go and surprise everyone and see their faces light up, when they realize….I actually made it across the country.

This sort of value isn’t easily understood, or calculated, but it allows you to make someone’s day, someone’s weekend, someone’s month! For example, I’ve got a great group of college friends who are reuniting in San Francisco this weekend. A boys trip. I thought to myself, well, why couldn’t I make it out there? It’s a long way from the East Coast, but hanging out with my best friends for a couple days is invaluable. It’s hard to get a group of guys together on the spur of the moment, so I figure let’s at least look into flight options with points.

Since virtually all of my travel requires a connection, I have a lot of options across the American, Delta and United. Let’s break down the available flight options, between cash and points for this route over my preferred dates:

• Round Trip Economy: ~$922 …!
• American Airlines w/Points: 12.5K outbound, 25K inbound
• Delta: 16.5K outbound, 46.5 inbound
• United: 32.5K outbound, 32.5 inbound

Despite all of the hate over American AAdvantage, this clearly is the best value in terms of miles, not to mention I have a huge stash of points that I don’t foresee using any time soon. The route wouldn’t be a full saver round trip award, but that’s okay. I might be able to supplement some cash credit from Hurricane Florence to pay cash instead of miles on the inbound, which would only add a couple hundred dollars to the overall cost. Not a bad deal if you ask me for a $922 economy flight, but not the best redemption either (i.e. 70K American AAdvantage miles for Cathay Pacific business class to Thailand).

My point is, don’t feel like you can’t spend your miles. The whole point of the game is to prudently acquire miles that you foresee using, and use them on experiences that either minimize your cash outlay, or allow you to take on experiences that you never had imagined you could do before.  In fact, burning miles can just be repurposed as “investing to see your friends / family.” If you look at it in a different light, you won’t be upset about your low cents per point redemption, and all you’ll remember are the good times you had with your pals.

I’m sure you’ve been in this situation before. You’ve done all the hard work, applied for the best credit cards, banked your Chase Ultimate Rewards, American Express Membership Rewards and Citi Thank You Point, and are now wondering how to redeem for a big trip you’ve been thinking about for months. But where do you redeem if you want to treat yourself to a bit of luxury? Splurge on first class flights or luxury hotels?

In my experience, if going for luxury, I personally will choose a business class flight over a luxury hotel if my flights are 8+ hours or overnight every day of the week. Luxury hotels are great, but when you are jaunting around the world, with limited time off, I you need to hit the ground running upon arrival, I could care less about the hotel room having extra amenities, particularly if it’s an adventure or culture trip. My ability to get a good night’s sleep, feel rested, and improve my mood will trump any extra service levels a concierge or luxury hotel service can provide.

I am always surprised by how many folks can’t wait to blow points on the Ritz Carlton or Conrad properties when on vacation. I get it, you want to spoil yourself and feel pampered, and in a lot of cases it makes sense, particularly at beach resorts. But oftentimes the way I travel, I want to be active, and staying inside a hotel during vacation is not really my thing. A hotel has a bed, and as long as that bed has a decent mattress and sheets that don’t give me a rash from low thread count, I will probably feel rested enough to tackle the day!

In other words, I’m of the opinion that getting a lie flat bed on a long journey will have a very material difference on your experience. From all the new research out there, sleep is paramount to improved happiness, alertness, better decision making, and less stress. If I can start my vacation on the right foot, I will be less focused on “relaxing” at the destination and can go straight into activity mode, which is my favorite mode!

I know I’ve personally flown on 8+ hour economy flights on transatlantic routes, and often have had the feeling of “I can’t wait until I reach my final destination, get me off this plane so I can get some decent sleep.” And that is no way to start a vacation, if you can’t help it.

I’m curious, what are your thoughts: would you rather choose a lie flat bed or luxury hotel?

Like anything, getting started in the points and miles sphere is exciting and inspiring at the beginning of the journey. With all these lucrative credit card rewards offers rampant nowadays, it’s easy to get on the path to your next vacation. Cards are accrued, points acquired, and then it comes to redemption time. Hopefully, you have the right arsenal of points to get to where you want to go, but the stars don’t align every time.

But if you play your cards right, you can avoid this problem entirely. Enter the concept of Currency Dilution. Think of this as spreading your eggs across too many baskets, except in this case we are talking about points.

It’s pretty common to see beginners accrue Delta Skymiles, American Airlines miles and United Airlines miles and then ask the question “can I transfer Delta Skymiles to United Airlines?” The answer is “no,” and it will be for the foreseeable future. Neither airlines nor the banks want to make it that easy for you. Which is why you need to smarten up.

Put simply, Currency Dilution makes your life hard. It can create excess worry: “OMG, all I need are 3K more Skymiles to get this award, but I have no idea how to get them”. Or, even worse, “I thought American Express transferred to United and was banking on those miles to get that award”. Oops.

So without further adieu, I’ll lay out some hints, tips and strategies to make sure these examples aren’t you.

How to Eliminate Currency Dilution in 3 Steps:

1. Focus on One or Two Transferrable Currencies
2. Pick Two Domestic Airlines of Choice
3. If Wanting to Diversify, Focus on Transferrable Currencies with Overlapping Partners

Here is a bit more explanation as to why you should absolutely execute on these three ideas. Frankly, anyone in this game should be thinking about these three steps and taking action against them!

1. This is almost a no-brainer, but it needs to be highlighted. Despite cards coming out with lucrative category bonus multipliers, it still doesn’t always make sense to chase these spend multipliers when your primary currency is different than what the new card offers. Always focus on trying to build massive balances in a couple areas, and stop being distracted by shiny objects.
   
   
2. Despite the fact that elite status isn’t worth much these days, it still makes sense to bank your points across no more than two airline programs. You won’t be earning many points if you don’t fly too often, but it’s still pretty worthless to accrue Delta Skymiles if you primarily redeem through American Airlines or United Airlines. Try to consolidate as much as possible to gather enough points for an award. Kudos if that airline transfers easily from bank points.
   
   
3. If you are looking into advanced strategies, then this is likely the most important rule in Currency Dilution. Here’s an anecdote for you. Let’s say that you have accrued a bundle of Chase Ultimate Rewards and American Express Membership Rewards. Let’s also say that you are incredibly enticed by Citi’s new category multipliers of 5X dining and travel. At face value 5X beats Chase, but you think that Currency Dilution may hurt you more than harm you. Well, you might be able to have your cake and eat it too in certain circumstances.

To further my example, let’s say that you have 75K Amex MR and are looking to go to Europe next summer with your wife in business class. 75K will get you one ticket, but it won’t get you two! You think Aeroplan might be your best option with Amex, but you can’t accrue enough of those miles with American Express. With the Citi Prestige coming out with a larger bonus, you think that perhaps that might be a smart option to look at. American Express and Citi both transfer over to Avianca, which has a pretty good rate for booking business class awards to Europe, 63K one way to be exact.

Luckily, you believe that the new Citi Prestige will not offer a bonus of less than 50K Thank You Points, so with that and the minimum spend you should easily reach the required 126K miles for the two of you to get to your award. In this case, Currency Dilution is on your side and winning for you! You strategically planned out the best options for your award, and combined different transferrable currencies to reach your goal. Well done, you are an award travel maverick.

That being said, this won’t work in many cases. Let’s take a look at another example, a die-hard United Airlines frequent flier based out of New Jersey. In this case, you bank all your miles to United, and are therefore heavily invested in the Chase Ultimate Rewards program. You’d love to get to Europe just like the earlier example, except signing up and participating in a different transferable currency won’t do you squat since your old faithful United Airlines is only an airline partner of Chase! In this example, you really are shit out of luck if you are short on miles.

Long story short, if you are looking to diversify beyond core transferrable currencies, always make sure that you are signing up for cards and participating in programs that will net you overlapping partners. This will help “top off” awards if you are short a few miles or points in your core program. For advanced travel hackers, this is CRUCIAL to get to where you want to go. And for you beginners, please don’t sign up for every willy-nilly program you see out there. Understand your goals, understand your travel patterns and plan appropriately.