guitarguy wrote:Drew777 wrote:dbr wrote:Drew777 wrote:
What currencies do you like Skymiles over? In my experience they're probably the least valuable airline miles, including foreign airlines.
This can be strongly affected by where you fly. In particular being in a Delta captive city can make Skymiles more useful than the gyrations necessary to use "more valuable" currencies. YMMV
My local airport is a Delta hub, and I have never earned a single Skymile. It's actually often cheaper to book flights on Delta using some of their partners' miles rather than Delta's own Skymiles. They're commonly referred to as Skypesos in the travel hacking community. I travel fairly often and have been able to get plenty of use out of other airline currencies. Of course if you don't have flexibility it limits you.
Could you elaborate?
We are going to Hawaii in 2018, I'm accumulating Skymiles really quickly via the Amex business cards to fly under chase 5/24. Already most of the way there (based on todays rates) to fly free...by later this year we will have almost double the miles required via signup bonuses only. So we're pretty set planning to use Skymiles for these flights.
That said, I also live near a Delta hub, and it's def our preferred airline. Our travel dates are also usually very flexible. What do you prefer to use over skymiles?
This is for American AAdvantage points, for use on AA
https://www.aa.com/i18n/aadvantage-prog ... -chart.jsp
or on AA partners:
https://www.aa.com/i18n/aadvantage-prog ... -chart.jsp
Note that using AA points on partner airlines, there is not "surcharge" (in points) for certain times/advance purchase/etc. Just one "points price".
And it's not impossible to get.
On our first try using points for premium travel, we got two First Class seat/beds on JAL to Japan, for 80k each.
We just had to switch the day by one (maybe 2?) days.
For the return, on Cathay Pacific, we needed to fly a day later, and having an extra day in Japan wasn't any problem at all
In addition, one can transfer points among partner airlines and/or use points for a different partner airline.
As we are still learning, it can be possible to use Airline X's points for travel on what appears to be a totally unlinked/non-partner Airline Y.
In that case, one might need to transfer A's points to Airline Z, and then use Z's points to travel on Z's partner, Y.
This can also be done starting with Amex award points, rather than airline points, by transferring the Amex points to an Amex partner airline, to use there, or to use to book travel on one of that airline's partner.
We had no idea about some of these possibilities until about a year ago, when we paid a service (PointsPros) to help us because we were having trouble with strange routing needs to/from small airports overseas. (There was no charge unless one likes the flight/class/date selection, so we figured there wasn't much to lose.)
But I was astonished by how the rep was trying to work things, so I started reading more, and then more...
I'm still carefully trying to learn which types of airline and charge card points can be transferred or used on partners (two different things).
It turns out that some points I thought weren't particularly useful (didn't like the airline or the airline didn't fly to/from nearby airports, etc.) could be used in a couple of ways that could be *very* useful for us.
It was terribly confusing at first.
But now, one of my "job descriptions" is "getting the best use of the travel points".
For us, that's going to be premium class international, not domestic and not at hotels.
Can't remember where I read this next bit (elsewhere right here on BH?), but there seems to be a way to transfer United points (which have a modest change/cancel fee when used on United) to another airline, then use those points on "partner United", where there is a tiny cancel/change fee.
That one is a bit convoluted for a small and only potential benefit, but there are all sorts of clever tricks.
Note: We do NOT like flying on American Airlines, and will use our stash of AA points on other airlines.
RM
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