Archive for the ‘e-Rewards’ Category

Today only. Read the terms and conditions. If you have a American Express Gold card you are not eligible. Big spend requirement of $10,000 within the first 120 days of card ownership. NO Annual Fee first year.

Here is the link and I hope it works for many of you.

Link

George pointed this one out and it has merit for Delta member. Just join SkyMiles Dining and complete a $50 dine by March 31st and you’ll get an easy 1500 miles.

Here is the link and remember you only have until the 31st to complete your dine.

CheapCaribbean Offers 70% Off Air and 5 nights Hotel only $499 Barbados

Here is a link worth clicking. These guys at CheapCaribbean find some great package prices. At $499 each , check this one out.

Yesterday Was a Busy Ticketing Day Hawaii and New Zealand for December 2009

I love those Thank You points. We planned a return trip to New Zealand and it became reality yesterday. After the Double Elite program included previously made reservations, I could see 100,000 miles in 2009 on United.

So I booked us from Savannah to Queenstown, New Zealand for December 28th (just in time for 2009) and return on January 16, 2010. Mrs Douglas in Chicago reservations worked extra hard to get the flights that would upgrade immediately using our System Wide Upgrades and we are all set. The tail end of the trip is on Air New Zealand which will be in coach, but the tough stuff, the transcontinental and transpacific are both confirmed in Business both ways.

These were booked with one 90K thank you point redemption each on tickets we just had to cancel . I mean given the choice of New Zealand in summer or Vancouver in November well, we opted for going down under.

And as it turns out, there was enough left over on each ticket for a couple hundred dollar travel credit for future use.

As I mentioned in an earlier post I put together a nice 1 day MR for 11, 000 EQMs and now on to Hawaii in December.

Hawaii has kind of become a traditional stop for us the first week of December. There is nobody there and we are using a four day timeshare promotional stay at the Hilton Waikoloa Resort. Our cost as $510 which included our rental car for 5 days, 20,000 Hilton Honors points, luau tickets for two and of course a standard room, unless somebody finds a Hilton Gold Offer we can all use.

The second 4 nights are at the St Regis in Princeville on the Garden Island of Kauai. This is a rebooking of our cancelled stay at the end of our upcoming around the world trip. The hotel renovation is not going to be completed in time so they agreed to let us postpone and still keep the sneaky deal we got at a category 5 cash and points option. The resort is now a Category 7 and way out of my price range. A fellow flyer nut alerted me to this booking snafu almost one year ago where you could book the St Regis at the previous category level.

The tickets will come from another Thank You point ticket that just made no sense to me. I mean Vancouver over Labor Day or Hawaii in December? I only have two confirmed regional upgrades at this point and want to get them on the reservation ASAP as they are not clearing and I want to be close to the top when they start to clear them.

I picked all Boeing 757 equipment and a 777 from Washington to Los Angeles as they have more First Class seats than the A319 and 320′s. I’m sure I’ll be ok, but it means driving to the airport today to cash in the vouchers as I’m putting two tickets on one voucher. Kind of a pain, but I got lots of flying for $0.00 out of pocket. And maybe I can use some of these $267 vouchers I’m carrying around and a $137 one as well. Those came from refares last year.

The only downside to buying the Hawaii tickets now is the price drops in the future. Yes, I have to monitor them and there is now a new $150 refaring or reticketing fee.

But Ms Katy will be happy that she got moved up to First Class if all goes well and the $150 will fee will just cut into the next voucher when we do see a price drop.

Katy and I are going to New Zealand this February (it is summertime there), all because of this travel hobby. I have discussed several of the techniques that made this possible in earlier posts. You can check back in the archives to refresh your memory.

The cheap flights to New Zealand were a FARE MISTAKE I found last May 7th on the Mileage Run Forum of http://flyertalk.com/, which is my favorite online web site.

Somebody priced a one way BUSINESS CLASS ticket from San Francisco or Los Angeles to Auckland, New Zealand for $550. Round trip was then $1100 plus taxes or about $1350 all in.
It was supposed to be $5500 for a one way BUSINESS CLASS ticket or about $11,000 plus taxes or $13,000+- all in. This is the most expensive airline ticket I have ever bought, but it was easy to swallow considering the destination and knowing I’d saved over $20,000 on two tickets. All because somebody missed one little zero (0) $550 vs $5500 when loading the fare.

The fare was available for about 18 hours before the airline caught the mistake and pulled the fare on their site and all the third party sites like Orbitz, Travelocity etc. At times I’ve had success booking with travel sites in parts of the world that are still sleeping when they disappear from the local sites. Seems the airline can’t get it off the worldwide web at the same time.

I booked this international ticket in May of 2007 for a trip this coming February 2008. By the way, it was a REFUNDABLE ticket. A fare mistake does not have to be flown right away, just purchased RIGHT NOW when available.

Now for hotels. In October I wrote about a multi program transfer that got Choice Privileges points for Choice brand hotels. I used excess American Express Membership Rewards Points and Continental Airline miles to obtain Amtrak Guest Reward Points which I then transferred into Choice Privileges Points that have now covered the cost of eleven (11) of the 16 total hotel nights. Surprisingly, Choice has more hotel choices in New Zealand than Starwood, Hilton, Marriott or any of the other major chains. That worked out just fine for me.

I always use http://tripadvisor.com/ to check previous guests comments on the hotels in question, and particularly Choice brand hotels as they seem to have the widest variation of quality amongst their properties. I’ll pick up the other hotels based on the city location and http://tripadvisor.com/ recommendations.

In New Zealand they drive on the wrong side of the road for Americans and it bothers me. We have picked the sites we want to see from http://www.aatravel.co.nz/101-must-dos-for-kiwis/index.php and the corresponding driving directions from the National Car Rental Website
http://www.nationalcar.co.nz/.

To minimize driving (and we could not see it all in the time allotted anyway) we will take New Zealand rail service from Auckland to Wellington and across the straits by ferry and back on the train to Christchurch.
With a full day in each of the above cities, we will on the road by car, but out of the metropolitan areas and in the countryside of the South Island.

Our supplemental costs were $520 for two train tickets, $336 for the car rental (instead of $1100 if we’d picked it up in Auckland and driven the extra 800 miles plus), and $118 for two one way tickets from Christchurch back to Auckland for our return flight home.

Sometimes things just work out:

On the way home, we have a six hour layover in Sydney, where my oldest son will just have settled in for graduate school studying International Public Health.

As a bonus from the Choice Points deal, I have made reservations for him using Choice Points for his first three nights in Sydney. The rooms at the Clarion Inn in Darling Harbour would have been $350 per night.

Katy just happened to have a few extra airline miles, so we upgraded the return flights from Business Class to FIRST CLASS SUITES for a unforgettable pampering experience to finish our trip to Kiwi land. We can’t wait, and will blog in while there.