Archive for the ‘Fare Mistake’ Category

Here is a link to join zipcar for free the first year. The $25 application fee and $50 first year membership fee are waived when applying through this link.

http://www.zipcar.com/boston/apply/?group%5fid=73358171

You can join using the link from Boston, but your membership is good wherever there are zipcars.

The concept is relatively new in the USA but spreading to other cities. The current Boston rate is $9 per hour and New York is $10 per hour.

Check it out.

Every Major US airline carrier belongs to an alliance of international carriers to offer seamless worldwide travel. United Airlines and US Airways belong to Star Alliance. American Airlines belongs to the Oneworld Alliance and Delta Airlines, Northwest Airlines and Continental Airlines belong to the Skyteam Alliance.

Each alliance offers Around the World Award redemption where you must use more than one member airline, must travel in one continuous direction (east to west or west to east) and fly literally around the world.

Katy and I chose the Oneworld Alliance because of my participation in the American Airlines Aadvantage program, the numerous ways to add AA miles relatively cheaply, the lower mileage threshold for the award we were looking for, and the actual award rules from the Oneworld chart.

We chose the 20,000 to 25,000 frequent flier mile award in Business Class which costs 150,000 AA miles each. We were allowed to use up to 16 flight segments, have each overland break count as a segment and one year to complete our travels. When calculating the flight miles we only had to count “line of sight” miles so the starting point Traverse City, Michigan USA to the first stop Boston, MA was calculated as though a non stop flight. We actually had to fly TVC-ORD-BOS but the only were charged for TVC-BOS.

Our travels took us on the following routing:

TVC-ORD-BOS for son’s college graduation
BOS-SNN Shannon Ireland for a 4 day tour of the Ring of Kerry in western Ireland
KIR-STN Kerry Ireland-London Stansted on Ryanair (not part of the RTW)
STN-BGO Stanstead to Bergen Norway for the fjords on Norwegian Air
(not part of the RTW) 4 days for the Norway in a Nutshell tour.
BGO-STN-VCE Venice, Italy definitely a must see (not part of RTW)
VCE-BRU Brussels, Belgium a day stop as it was the cheapest way to get to
our next stop of London Heathrow (not part of the RTW)
NOTE: The three stops of Bergen, Venice and Brussels costs us about $300 each total using the European low cost carriers Ryanair and Norwegian Air.
LHR-HKG London Heathrow to Hong Kong in the upper deck of a British Airways 747 with lie flat bed seats and an overnight flight. PERFECT. Two days in Hong Kong
HKG-SYD Hong Kong to Sydney Australia on Qantas Airlines for two weeks in Australia. We visited Sydney, the Blue Mountains and Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef.
SYD-HNL Sydney to Honolulu again on Qantas where we transferred to Kauai and 4 days at the Kauai Hilton to rest up.
HNL-TVC Hawaii to Traverse City in First Class to end the adventure.

We spent 6 weeks, with two hostel stays in Killarney, Ireland and Katoomba New South Wales, Australia as the hotel rooms for points were not available or the room prices were too high. The other hotel stays were FREE from Sheraton Starwood Preferred Guest, Hilton Hhonors, Marriott Rewards, Comfort Inn Choice Privileges and Radisson Goldpoints.

Would we do it again? Absolutely. In fact we have 700,000 American Airlines points saved up for the next RTW which will take us to Machu Picchu, Iguazu Falls in South America, Stonehenge out side of London, Cape town, South Africa, Athens Greece and onward to Australia again, New Zealand and Hawaii as the resting place. The next RTW will take 190,000 AA miles each as the distance will be 30K to 35k miles again in Business Class.

Be sure to consider a trip of a lifetime using the alliance “Around the World” options

Several times every year a retailers will make an offer to give frequent flyer miles for buying their product. Some of these offers have become legendary in the frequent flyer community.
We even have our own hero: the “Pudding Guy”
Pudding Guy found .25 cent pudding cups with an offer for 100 airline miles with each cup purchased. He bought over $2500 of pudding cups, redeemed the coupons and got 1 million American Airlines miles. He donated the pudding to homeless shelters (nice tax write off) and even got the shelter residents to clip the coupons for him.

The point of the story is keep your eyes open for products you normally buy anyway, that are offering miles as a bonus. Some of the offers have been “too good to be true.” Here are some recent examples:

64 Wendy’s drink cups for a round trip ticket on Air Tran. I bought enough drink cups at $1 each on EBay for 12 round trip tickets. That’s $64 per round trip ticket.

Value Mags offered magazine subscriptions several years ago with 112.5 frequent flyer miles per dollar of magazine subscriptions. Remember a frequent flyer mile is worth 2 to 8 cents each. Every VA clinic in Michigan and our local high school got magazine subscriptions for years to come. I ended up with 20 round trip tickets on Northwest airlines and a nice tax deduction.

Eggo Waffles were a big hit with AA miles for each purchase as were Nutra grain bars and Kellogg’s cereal packages. When buying these products at Sam’s Club or other discount outlets the value of the miles many times exceeds the purchase price.

Shutterfly, an online photo processing shop, offered 1500 goldpoints per order this summer. I made 400 separate orders for $1.89 each including shipping of single reprint photos and got 600,000 Goldpoints. That equated to 40 nights hotel stays, some of which would have cost over $300 each night (Radisson Edinburgh, Scotland on the Royal Mile). Some of the goldpoints I converted back to airline miles at a cost of less than 1 cent each.

Quite often, online retailers will let you buy a gift certificate with your airline producing credit card (MILES), for yourself, and then turn around and give you miles again when redeeming the gift certificate at an online airline related shopping portal associated with their store. AA, NWA, United and Delta all have shopping portals

And last years award winner was people taking out home equity loans with several national lenders for huge mileage bonuses ( 5000 miles per thousand $ borrowed) and then paying off the loan in 2 or 3 days and keeping the miles. One man I know got over a million United Airlines miles by refinancing his home 4 times in the same year and using the loan proceeds to payoff the loans. His net cost was about 10 day’s interest as the lenders were paying all the closing costs.

And don’t forget to check http://fatwallet.com/ , http://slickdeals.net/ and other coupon sites for discount travel coupons. Just use your search feature. There are always $ OFF coupons available on http://ebay.com/ for travel and hotel discounts. I saved over $600 by buying a coupon on Ebay for a 3 day stay at the Marriott in Bucharest. There are ALWAYS coupons online for discounts on rental cars, hotels and airline flights.
PLEASE be careful on Ebay. Some of the items there are restricted from being resold and Ebay watches those auctions.

Stay with the Blog. As these promos become available, I’ll let you know.