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Pleasantly surprised by Cathay Pacific's service for oneworld emerald customers even in economy. Middle seat was automatically blocked off, multiple FAs came by to greet me, was given a bottle of water and a blanket / pillow
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Apparently in Germany, if your DB train arrives at your destination between 1 hour and up to 2 hours late, you get 25% compensation, and if 2 hours or more, 50% compensation.
Had a crazy delay going from Berlin to Munich where our train arrived 2.5 hours late 🥲
We’ve started a new project to post Asia travel deals, Asian Luxe Travel! It will focus on premium travel in Asia, such as business class deals and luxury hotels.
If interested, please subscribe to whichever social media channel you prefer!
Asian Luxe Travel Twitter
Asian Luxe Travel Facebook
Asian Luxe Travel Threads
For example, we already posted deals from Tokyo to Europe starting from $2120 round trip in business class on China Eastern / China Southern.
ontribute to offsetting 25 HAN-YVR round-trips here:
https://www.gofundme.com/dem-flyers-cx-mistake-fare
One of the ways in which I’ve begun to cope with the changing landscape has been to focus more on earning cash and cash equivalents (I like to call them ‘funny money’) like Flexperks, Chase Ultimate Rewards with a Chase Sapphire Reserve, Wells Fargo GoFar Rewards, Amex Membership Rewards redemptions through Amex Travel. This has largely suited me well, but it has left me without a clear plan as how to weigh their use versus the use of traditional points, or at least a plan with any greater specificity than “earn[ing] cash first, spend[ing] cash last.”
One of the interesting threads that I explore as I figured out how to book two of my five trips to Dublin was the value proposition of flying in premium economy, both to make up the comfort gap between coach and business class (perhaps making it easier for me to sleep on a redeye) as well as to take advantage of generally lower cash fares while maximizing the value of my traditional (non-funny money) airline miles.
Premium economy is a concept with which anyone outside the U.S. has been familiar for a long time but that first arrived domestically only recently after American Airlines announced it would be the first US-based carrier to offer Premium Economy as properly differentiated (hard and soft) product from coach (as opposed to the extra legroom seats and free booze you find in economy plus). Typically, you’ll have a small cabin between business and coach with a lower seat density (fewer seats per row), extra legroom, recline, and better meal service.
The extra width, even if it’s only 2″, would make a huge difference for me, and I can sleep in a reclining seat much better than I can a traditional coach seat (sometimes I won’t even lie flat on my business class flights).
However, the typical up charge puts it about halfway between economy and business class on most days, though sometimes it can drift significantly closer to business class fares when airlines have paid fare sales.
So is it worth it? There are a couple of angles I see here:
As I mentioned in my post about Dublin bookings, I don’t particularly mind flying in economy class in the westbound direction (Europe -> US), because the flight is typically during the daytime and the westbound jet lag doesn’t affect me all that much. It is much more important that, if I were to fly business class at all, it be on my outbound (redeye).
Premium economy could be a good way to reduce costs in the case where I only care about one of my legs being in a true premium cabin while still being cost-sensitive. Most European and Asian carriers make it fairly easy to do mixed cabin cash bookings, and the savings on the legs can be sometimes fairly sizable (this example comes from Iberia’s site):
Of course, this is predicated on your willingness to pay cash or to sit on the phone with Amex Travel, GoFar Rewards, or the like in order to get the exact flight combinations you want (OTAs won’t typically surface mixed-cabin bookings, but most such agencies can book the flights if they compose a valid itinerary). Alternatively, you could also use the same strategy in reverse, substituting economy for business class and flying premium economy on the flight you care about. That way, you could take a fairly cheap base fare ($600 round trip), and pay $300 to ‘upgrade’ your redeye instead of taking an expensive fare and ‘downgrading.’
British Airways and Air France offer two of the original and most well-rounded premium economy products, and frankly, they look pretty damn comfortable. So comfortable, in fact, that I nearly pulled the trigger on booking one.
I’ve always been scared away by Google Flights search results for premium economy, which often price out at $1800-$2200 for a round trip, because even paying for a British Airways award with all of their fuel surcharges can net out to a cheaper but more comfortable business class itinerary.
However, as I discovered a few days ago, different OTAs often surface different prices. Since Google only tends to aggregate from the airlines websites for premium cabins, you miss out on a lot of the special, incentive pricing given by OTAs. For example, when I searched Google Flights, a round-trip on Air France came up for $1,868. However, after running the same search on Orbitz, I found the exact same flight for $500 less:
The $350 per-leg up charge over economy (which prices at ~$600 round trip) is still a lot, but it’s an option that I would certainly consider if there were no business class award availability and I could book using funny money (in this case, I couldn’t — Flexperks used to use Orbitz as a search engine, but they recently switched :/, and Orbitz was the only OTA with the price this low).
One thing that does improve the value proposition of premium economy, however, is its (often significantly) higher mileage-earning than traditional economy. For example, when crediting a BA premium economy (W) fare to Alaska airlines, the (status) mileage earning is as good as a typical business class fare (D, I, R) on American Airlines:
For those who need extra miles for status or redemptions, discount premium economy fares can give you two to four times the mileage earning of discount economy fares (in the case above, the base mileage earning is two times higher, and status can often bump that by another 50% or 100%), so depending on the up charge, you might actually come out ahead relative to having booked an economy ticket.
Conventional wisdom recommends never to book an upgrade award, since a) the upgrade awards cost as many miles as standard awards despite requiring the same fare class available and b) they come with fare restrictions that can cause a(n economy) ticket to double or triple in price.
Premium economy, however, has far fewer fare buckets and less price variation than vanilla economy (I make this claim anecdotally
based on fare charts
It’s pretty evident why this would be the case for someone. Once you have built up miles and points balances through credit card signups and manufactured spending, means are less of a bottleneck. Traditional award charts offer fixed miles prices for flights irrespective of the cash price, which means that (assuming you can find availability), a $500 flight to a random U.S. city near a national park costs you the same as a $200 ticket between two major domestic hubs. For premium cabins, the value proposition can be even greater, because the miles prices are typically marked up 50-150% relative to coach, whereas cash prices can differ by up to a factor of ten.
Therefore, last year saw me travel to a bunch of places I had been dying to visit — Australia and New Zealand with Esther and Michael, Milan and the south of France with my sister, and Cambodia and Hong Kong with my friend Jacob.
Of all my “planned” trips last year, however, the ones that were the least expected and also the most difficult to arrange were my visits to Dublin. My partner moved to Ireland for a year, and since my job offers me the flexibility to work from nearly anywhere (incidentally, we have an office in Dublin), we decided that it would be easier for me to trek there than vice-versa. All told, I will have made five trips to visit, and the process of booking those flights allowed me to explore a lot of different facets of travel hacking and flight booking that hopefully will open up other options down the line.
Since writing things down helps me remember them, I decided to do a write-up of my experience booking each of my five trips:
What I spent:
One thing that remained relatively unchanged last year was Delta’s Skybonus program. Skybonus is a rewards program for businesses as an incentive for them booking flights for their employees. Like AA’s equivalent, Business Extra (United’s is explicitly limited to corporations/large companies), rewards are earned as multipliers on ticket price, with higher multiples for higher fare classes.
At the end of 2015, Delta changed the program to have an annual spending requirement and to require a minimum number of distinct employees to take a flight, in order to make it a less viable double-dip option for sole proprietors. However, through some fare sales, targeted promotions, and help from family members, I was able to not only meet the requirements, but earn enough points (85,000) to redeem for a domestic round-trip. No one I know had ever earned enough points or redeemed a Skybonus certificate, so I was eager to try it out.
Within a few minutes, I received an email with my certificate number and a prompt to call Delta to redeem for a flight.
However, having redeemed gift cards for Delta flights, I knew there was a way to redeem online, so I clicked through to the redemption instructions and followed the links to Delta’s website.
After entering the certificate details, the full certificate details appeared:
Thankfully, and unlike the upgrade certificates for which you can redeem (for which it’s often difficult to determine if there’s availability), my certificate’s terms were simple: as long as there was availability in T class (which is not the lowest fare class), I could book a flight.
On I went to search for a redemption (I had pre-confirmed T class availability before redeeming for the flight):
There were plenty of options. I picked the most direct, which led me to the fare details page and eventually the checkout page.
Interestingly, the price breakdown and receipt showed not an award redemption, but a purchase of a flight with a base fare of $0 and the $11.20 ($5.60 TSA fee each way) in taxes and fees. What I suspect, therefore, is that I will earn Medallion Qualifying Miles on the flight, although obviously I won’t earn any redeemable miles. Ideally, I would have attempted to credit it to Alaska, but since their partnership with Delta is ending before I take my flight, I won’t get to see if I can earn redeemable miles based on fare class (for the sake of science, I might put in my Air France Flying Blue number, but the miles wouldn’t be too useful for me).
Another interesting note is that, despite the flight being after the end of the Delta/Alaska partnership, the website did allow me to enter my Alaska Mileageplan number and select “Preferred” seats as per the current reciprocal status benefits. Who knows if they’ll stick, but worth a shot.
All in all, this was a successful double dip. I think it’s unlikely I requalify for Skybonus this year, so it will probably be my last, but I’ll take it!
Happy hacking!
I was scheduled to take the last flight out of Chicago on a Sunday night, UA 308 from ORD to SFO at 11:30 PM. At 9:30 PM, I hopped over to the L station and was waiting for my train to O’Hare, when I got a notification that the flight had been cancelled. Wait what?! But I had to get to work the next day. I quickly checked if there were any flights also getting back to SFO that night, and apparently there were none, or none that I could make given that I was 50 minutes away from the airport.
So I resolved myself to staying an extra night in Chicago and taking the next available flight. Apparently United had already booked me on the 3:55 PM flight that would get to San Francisco at 6:25 PM. Not cool. I called in to see if there were any earlier nonstop flights, and all the United ones were booked. However, the United agent offered to check if there were any American or Delta flights that were earlier. Given that I’m American an Executive Platinum, I jumped at the opportunity to earn more American miles and possibly be upgraded to First Class (which I was after same day changing to a flight with more First Class availability!)
I was rebooked to AA2639, leaving Chicago at 10:15AM and getting in at 12:47PM, which would at least let me catch the rest of the workday.
I wondered how how AA would calculate the miles earned since it was United booking the flight for me. However, when I checked my itinerary on the AA.com site, it said the cost of the flight was the amount I had paid UA before taxes and fees, which was $129. I resigned myself to just earning $129 * 11 = 1419 miles.
However, when I logged into my account, instead I earned 1,846 miles + a 2,216 bonus for being EXP, which is the right amount for distance based earning!
So apparently, flights booked through interline agreements count as some special kind of fare that still earns distance based mileage! I’m pretty sure this would not work if you were originally flying AA and IRROPs forced them to put you on a different AA flight. I suspect AA flights that are marketed by partners as well as certain tickets like consolidator tickets may also earn distance based. Anybody want to give it a try? Anyways, next time you run into an IRROPs situation and have the chance to be booked onto a carrier with a revenue based mileage program that used to have a distance based one, keep this in mind!
A natural question to ask is “how much are JetBlue points worth?” And more generally, how valuable are other fixed-value currencies (where the miles cost of an award flight is based on the dollar cost of the flight rather than some fixed amount)?
The most common way we think about the value of airlines miles is in terms of how much cash value we get for each point. The higher this value is, the better. This valuation is what gives traditional airline miles their appeal — for premium cabins in particular, it’s possible to get values north of 10 cents for every point redeemed. Typically we take some blended average of these real redemption values, the purchase values of the miles (typically they can be purchased for 2-3 cents each), and the value of economy class redemptions. Regardless of the benchmark, though, the high upside is what gives traditional airline miles their appeal, because the number of points needed for a flight, rather than the value of those points, is the thing that’s fixed.
The other way to think about value is to specify how many points you need for each dollar of airfare cost. This is a harder quantity to reason about because it doesn’t immediately correspond to a useful benchmark — it’s hard to instinctively compare the worth of two currencies where one needs 50 points per dollar and the other needs 60 points per dollar. It’s counter-intuitive precisely because the smaller number is better, but even with that information, it’s not a practically useful term.
The one domain in which it is useful is for understanding fixed-value airline miles. Take Southwest as an example.
When Southwest devalued its points last year, the new redemption values ranged from 70 points/$ to 80 points/$ ON THE BASE FARE depending on the flight. That means for, say, a flight costing $140 plus taxes, you would need either 9800 (at 70 points/$) or 11200 (at 80 points/$) points to redeem for an award. After factoring in the money you save on taxes, you end up with a ‘traditional’ value of 1.4-5 cents per point.
Although Southwest’s points scheme is fairly well understood, Virgin America’s and JetBlue’s have for whatever reason remained black boxes. So naturally, we ask: is there a fixed conversion value for Virgin America points? For JetBlue?
Take a DAL-LAS flight on Virgin America on a random date:
The total for the flight is $128.10, from which, based on the number of points needed (below), we would get a “value” of 2.2 cents per point (subtracting the $5.60 cash fee).
If we just look at the base fare, we get a value of about 1.8 cents per point. However, even this number varies because we pay a fixed $5.60 in taxes. So more expensive flights will have a value closer to 1.9 cents per point based on the base fare, and values closer to 2.3 cents per point based on the all-in fare (this number is higher because we’re replacing a larger percentage of taxes with a flat $5.60 fee).
What if we value points the Southwest way? Is there a function that determines exactly how many points a flight should cost? That magic function is…..
# Points = Base Fare * 52.5
Here’s my work:
| All-in Fare | Base Fare Only | ||||||
| Points | Cost | Point/$ | CPP | Cost | Point/$ | CPP | |
| DAL-LAS 11/11 | 5568 | $128.10 | 43.42 | 2.20 | $106.05 | 52.50 | 1.80 |
| DAL-LAS 11/11 | 6545 | $148.10 | 44.16 | 2.18 | $124.65 | 52.51 | 1.82 |
| DAL-LAS 11/11 | 13870 | $298.10 | 46.51 | 2.11 | $264.19 | 52.50 | 1.86 |
| SFO-JFK 10/18 | 8010 | $178.10 | 44.94 | 2.15 | $152.56 | 52.50 | 1.83 |
| SFO-JFK 10/18 | 18754 | $398.10 | 47.09 | 2.09 | $357.21 | 52.50 | 1.87 |
| SFO-JFK 10/18 | 62708 | $1,298.10 | 48.30 | 2.06 | $1,194.42 | 52.50 | 1.90 |
Obviously, this isn’t immediately useful, since it makes it harder to compare Virgin America points against typical airline miles (i.e. it’s easier to reason about how many cents of value you get per $ with something like Alaska miles). However, it does illuminate the program a bit and will hopefully allow us to pattern match with other programs (Delta, I’m coming for you) better in the future.
Running the same analysis for JetBlue, we find that you need 80 JetBlue points/$ of base fare for economy class and 83.5/$ for Mint. JetBlue rounds down to the nearest 100 after computing the number of points, which explains the slight deviations:
| Total | Base Fare Only | ||||||
| Points | Cost | Point/$ | CPP | Cost | Point/$ | CPP | |
| JFK-SFO 8/18 | 22300 | $314.10 | 70.98 | 1.38 | 279.07 | 79.91 | 1.23 |
| JFK-SFO 8/18 | 23400 | $329.10 | 71.09 | 1.38 | 293.02 | 79.86 | 1.23 |
| JFK-SFO 8/18 | 29700 | $414.10 | 71.71 | 1.38 | 372.09 | 79.82 | 1.23 |
| JFK-SFO 8/18 | 60800 | $798.10 | 76.17 | 1.30 | 729.3 | 83.37 | 1.19 |
| JFK-SFO 8/18 | 49200 | 648.1 | 75.91 | 1.31 | 589.77 | 83.42 | 1.19 |
What do you think of the points/$ valuation? Does it make more or less sense than $/point?
Happy hacking!
A few posts, including one from Project Endpoint and one on Reddit, claim to have confirmed the card as a Flexperks-earning card. Having finally converted over from my Amex, I can confirm this is true, with one major caveat:
Points earned with the Fidelity Visa card can be redeemed for travel through the online rewards portal as if they were each worth 0.5 Flexperks.
So it’s the same chart, but with all the values doubled. Let’s run a few searches.
Looking for a one-way, we see flights with prices all less than $400. On the original Flexperks chart, these would cost 20,000 points each.
However, running the search on Elan’s portal, we see the price is 40,000.
Obviously, that isn’t proof in itself, so I decided to see if I could find flights on the margins of the award tiers to see if/how the prices changed. Doing the same search, but for round-trip, non-stops on American, we see flights ranging from $562 to $660. These would straddle the 30,000 ($400.01-$600) and 40,000 ($600.01-$800) price bands on the Flexperks chart.
Sure enough, we see a cutoff at the same point, but the prices are 2x — 60,000 and 80,000 respectively.
Given that the Fidelity (Elan) Visa doesn’t have any bonus categories, and the value of Flexperks are capped at 2 cents (and usually less than that), it doesn’t actually make any sense to treat this card as anything but a 2% cash back card, since you can’t get any better value than 1 cent per point through the travel portal.
Bummer.
The one silver lining is that the points transfer screen still loads properly, so once my balance becomes non-zero, I’ll give it a go and see how many points wind up on the other side. It would be a silly loophole for them to transfer 1:1, so if it works, you might not hear from me about it 😉
