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Earn & Redeem Expedia Reward Points

1/12/2020

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If you are not tied to loyalty to any of the brand name hotel chains or if you are looking to stay at hotels which are not part of any hotel chain then Expedia might be a place to go to book your next hotel stay. The reason being the Expedia Rewards which have improved over the period of time and can provide good value for rewards on stays which otherwise would not be rewarded.

Expedia Rewards has 3 different membership tiers which is Blue Member, Silver Member and Gold Member. All Expedia Rewards members start as Blue member where they save 10% or more on select hotels and enjoy Hotel Price Guarantee till midnight before the stay. The Silver tier of members earn 10% more in points and get extra's such as free WiFi, free Breakfast or Spa credits whereas the Gold tier members earn 30% more in points and have all the other benefits of Silver tier. 

Expedia has two co-branded credit cards from Citi where currently you can earn 20,000 or 50,000 Expedia Reward points after meeting minimum spend and which would instantly give you Silver or Gold tier status respectively.

Earning Expedia Reward Points:
As a Blue member you earn 2 points/$ spent on hotels, car, packages, things to do and cruises which is effective earning of 1.41% and 2 points/$10 spent on Flights giving effective earning of only 0.141% on Flights. If you use Expedia App you earn twice those points effectively making the return as 2.85% and 0.285% respectively. 

Silver member earn 10% bonus on the base points making the earning as ~1.574% while Gold member earn 30% bonus on the base points making the earning as 1.857%. (Except flights which earn's 1/10th of that rate).

Redeeming Expedia Reward Points:
The good news is that you can start redeeming your points even if you do not have sufficient points for paying the entire cost. The only exception to this is booking flights where you need to have sufficient points to cover the cost of entire flights (including taxes and fees). Alternatively Expedia has what they call VIP Access hotels where you can redeem your points for participating hotels at twice the value. So instead of redeeming 140 points for $1 you would redeem only 70 points for $1 of value. 

VIP Access hotels: 
Although classified as VIP Access hotels these can vary in price and does include lot of budget hotels. Expedia uses certain (non-revealed) criteria to classify them as VIP Access, but you will find lot of budget properties which are VIP Access as well.

Here is a little trick you can use. When you are searching VIP Access hotels for your destination after your initial search, under the "Property Type" check box for "VIP Access" and sort by price for you selected hotel rating. You will see a list of hotels and a default selection on the top where it applies your available points. Click on "Remove points" option and you will see the list change with now lower priced hotels which have "VIP Access" bookable. You can select the one which fits your stay criteria and eventually apply the points on the payment page after you select "Pay Now". Below are the two snapshots of search with and without "Remove points" options.

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Sort Order with apply points enabled by default
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Sort Order with apply points disabled after initial search
As you can see disabling the apply points after the search shows cheaper hotels by price showing up which did not came up earlier. You can now check out your other criteria for hotel selection and make your reservation of the VIP Access hotel to get best value of your Expedia Rewards points. Hopefully you can take advantage of Expedia Reward points for your next hotel reservation.

 Disclaimer: Some of the links used in the post may be referral links and earn referral to this site. We appreciate you supporting the website.
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Flying in peak season? Get cheaper tickets or free one way added..

12/24/2018

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Are you looking to fly during Christmas, New Year or during peak summer dates? Most of us would have this dilemma of using the holidays for travel but paying exorbitant prices. This could be due to the limited vacation time or kids school being shut during this times. If you are the one who cannot avoid peak dates travel then below tricks might help at times.

Trick 1: Book two one-way tickets:
At times of low season this might be a completely bad suggestion, but when you are looking to fly in high season, this might be a neat way to reduce your flight cost. The reason being that most 3rd party aggregates and booking sits such as Expedia would want to issue a single ticket for your round trip. The simple reason being booking two separate one-way tickets would require separate cancellation/change fees if any of your plan to fly changes.

Although some times the 3rd party flight booking sites would display tickets as two one-way, the chances of that being efficient in time and cost is low. Below is an example of search with last minute peak season ticket where the round trip flight fare from SFO-DEL for low connection time jumps from ~$2095 to ~$2778.

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SFO-DEL-SFO from Dec 25th to Jan 2nd.
Below you can see what happens when we instead search above as two one-way tickets. The total fare for the round trip becomes ~$2160 which is much lower than booking a round trip ticket.
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SFO-DEL Dec 25th one-way ticket
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DEL-SFO Jan 2nd one-way ticket
Trick 2: Book one-way + round-trip ticket (tagging a free / almost free one-way ticket):
This is another neat trick which can help you get an additional one-way to the same original destination or if you are creative to the destination where you plan to visit in the future. The idea here is that instead of booking a round trip you book a one-way and add a round trip ticket from your destination to your source. For e.g. instead of booking "SFO-DEL-SFO" you can book "SFO-DEL" (one-way) + "DEL-SFO-DEL" (round trip). So for "SFO-DEL" one-way you would pay ~$931 and booking "DEL-SFO-DEL" round trip is just $1246 with Alitalia!!
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DEL-SFO-DEL with Alitalia from Jan 2nd to Mar 18th. Search done using Momondo.com
As you can see from above that although the flight from "DEL-SFO" is 2 stops and little longer you are getting a free one-way for future date ("SFO-DEL" in March) with just additional $15 compared to booking "DEL-SFO" one-way ticket.

So, the next time you plan to travel in peak times and are looking to purchase paid ticket do remember the above two tricks before you make your purchase.

Disclaimer: Some of the links used in the post may be referral links and earn referral to this site. We appreciate you supporting the website.
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BEST WAY TO RENT A CAR FOR LEISURE TRAVELER?

3/24/2013

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On your air trip one of the concern is the cost of car rental. As the cost of the flight tickets are dynamic so goes the car rental prices. But if you are leisure traveler looking for bargain on you car rental then you might be interested in the strategy below which can sometimes result in good amount of savings on your wallet. 

Step1: Start your car rental search at Expedia, Priceline or CostcoTravel:
Begin your search for car rental prices at the Expedia, Priceline or CostcoTravel . Most often than not you will get fairly decent idea on going price of car rental. Another advantage of going this route is you get the prices which are not "discounted" through any rental car company or partner discount/promotions. 
For e.g. sample search for SJC Airport for car rental from 04/13/2013 to 04/15/2013 yields a lowest price of Economy car (incl of taxes) as $38.31 (Payless), $38 (Payless) and $37.82 (Alamo) as shown below
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1. Expedia Pricing
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2. Priceline pricing
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3. Costco Pricing
Step2: Go through the website "Zalyn" to see what are the coupon options it presents:
You do not  need to sign up for the service and your intent is to get listing of different possible coupons. Zalyn does a good job of listing good set of discount coupons and codes as shown below.
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4. Zalyn showing different discount coupon and codes!
Step3: Use Step1, Step2 and Car rental vendor's website to figure out the pricing for your rental:
This step involves using data of approximate price for your rental from Step1 combined with different discount codes provided by Zalyn in Step2 to determine what further discounts you could get. Since we know that Payless and Alamo were the lowest, it would be best to try different codes provided for Payless and Alamo above. Selecting "Payless - Save 15% on your rental" gives a code which discount's Payless cost to $34.47 (all inclusive) for Economy Car as shown below.
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5. Payless website with 15% off coupon
Step4: Is this the best? Check one more thing!!
One area where "Zalyn" lacks is in the ability to determine if you can earn any "Airline Miles" and thus assigning a discount code and coupon to earn those miles. Since rental from "Payless" does not earn any "Airline Miles" but "Alamo" does earn them you might want to check if there are any special promotion code at "frequenflyerbonuses" which gives you a good discount as well earn "Airline Miles"? (Note: Earning Airline miles adds a cost of $.75/day to $1.5/day and earns from 50 miles/day [UA, Delta] to 600 miles/rental [Southwest] or 1000 miles/rental [Virgin Atlantic] , so you might want to take that into account in your car rental).

Best of luck for your NEXT CAR RENTAL search!!
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    I love traveling / backpacking. This blog focuses on below 3 aspects of travel:
    1. Maximizing your travel experience .
    2. Sharing how to travel with miles in premium class or at discount in economy class.
    3. Great cash-back deals in travel.

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