A real life example


Today was a perfect example of what I am doing my best to teach…….

 

Scenario….My son, daughter in law and grandson are coming to Ohio from Texas on January 30th and returning to Texas on Sunday February 2. The cheapest flights we were able to find was San Antonio to Lexington for $385 each or $780. When I searched this Delta flight as a rewards flight I was able to find the very same flight for 44,000 miles or at base 1/1 redemption…..$440 total….that’s a win!

 


 

 

Today we realized that my son did not book the exact return flight that I had recommended, he booked a return flight leaving Lexington at 5 AM!!!!! After a discussion with my in laws we decided neither of us wanted to drive them to Lexington at 2AM so how do we fix this ?  The Delta Fare was a basic economy so cannot be changed and they will only allow cancellation of entire reservation. The in laws did a quick search and found that a one way ticket at a decent time returning to San Antonio was $374 each for a total of $748.  We didn’t want to spend $748 either so…..

 






I have about 400,000 rewards miles between my Capital One Venture x and my American Express Gold. I started searching the major airlines for a flight to San Antonio from CVG, DAY, IND, LOU, LEX.  Within about 10 minutes, I found a flight on American Airlines from CVG to SAT 5:33PM to 10:40 PM 1stop for 7.5K miles each.




The unfortunate part of this scenario is that American is the hardest to deal with on rewards travel. I am unable to transfer miles to AA from either of my cards and they must be purchased through AA. I had 3400 miles in my AA Aadvantage account so I needed 12K more to complete the booking. To my surprise, AA was running a 10% on miles purchase so the 12,000 miles +tax came out to $402.


 

Lesson…..Initial search results told us we were going to spend $748 to accomplish what we wanted, using the knowledge I have gained in the travel world I was able to spend a total of $402. As an added bonus, I paid for the miles on AA with my American Express Gold card. The AMEX Gold gives 3X rewards for all purchases directly with airlines…..so I earned 1206 MR from AMEX….

$346 savings on fare and +1200 points………

 

Go Travel!

 






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