 Due to COVID-19 most airlines are in survival mode and coming up with various promotions to keep them afloat or to get the much needed cash infusion. Etihad Airways is running a promotion which started on 10th of June and valid till 24th of June where you would get 50% more in value when you purchase a travel voucher which could be used for booking any flights starting 1st August 2020.
You can purchase the travel voucher in any amount from $250 to $65,000 and it would be valid for 2 years from the date of purchase. One of the best thing is that you can use the voucher for booking flights for any friend or family and till the end of schedule from the date of booking which could be the last date of expiration of the voucher. You can also book your tickets online and see the voucher value while booking so you do not necessarily need to call. You will need Etihad Guest Account to have travel voucher deposited to the linked travel bank account. You would also earn miles and elite points on the actual ticket purchase. Do keep in mind that although highly unlikely Etihad can also go out of business and you would wind up holding "zilch" or $0 in value for the voucher. Also you cannot use the travel voucher for paying taxes and fees for the award ticket. Below are the terms and conditions of the voucher:
You will need to call the Etihad call center here to make the purchase and in the process they will create the travel bank account for you loaded with the travel voucher purchased. More information on travel bank can be found here. Etihad has vast network of flights and has highly rated Business Class and ranked in top 10 of the world's best business class seats in 2019. So, there could be quite number of opportunities where you can travel with Etihad using the voucher. 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.
0 Comments
Lot of folks are currently looking to either change or cancel their near term travel as well as at the same time return to their home ASAP due to the outbreak of COVID-19. While most of the airlines/hotels are updating or changing their policy to accommodate the passengers/guests, there is lot of anxiety among the folks who are either currently travelling or have near term travel booked.
So, if you need to change / cancel your travel here is your to-do list in no particular order:
Be safe and hopefully the situation will get better sooner than latter. 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. Lot of folks would have heard about "hidden city ticketing". In short the idea behind hidden city ticketing is to book a ticket to a final destination which is cheaper then your actual destination by using your actual destination as a stopover. So for example you want to fly from Dallas to Los Angeles but the flight to Las Vegas from Dallas via Los Angeles is cheaper and so you book this ticket with intention of getting down at Los Angeles (The hidden city). So, how about extending this idea on international trip where your real destination is the "hidden city" but it is much cheaper to fly there as a stopover rather than a destination. This would allow you to not only visit your real destination cheaper but would also allow to visit additional city/country for less than the cost to your real destination. For example you want to fly non-stop Singapore Airlines flight from San Francisco to Singapore (hidden city) but booking a non-stop flight would be expensive. Instead of that you buy a ticket to a destination which Singapore Airline serves via Singapore and is much cheaper. This way you not only visit your real destination but as a bonus you visit an additional city or country at no additional cost. Let's see a real example here: San Francisco (SFO) to Toyko (NRT) roundtrip with Toyko as the real destination: Let's say you want to visit Tokyo from San Francisco in Feb 2019. The cheapest ticket to the destination for few dates in Feb 2018 for 10 to 15 days is shown below. As you can see the cheapest for this trip is $726 and that flight has long layover.  SFO to NRT roundtrip for 10 to 15 days  SFO to NRT rountrip from Feb 6th to Feb 18th How about changing few things here. Instead of flying to Tokyo as a destination how about flying there as a stopover. Let's look at an example by modifying the destination to be a cheaper place and using Tokyo as a stopover. Below is an example with search date used by few trial and error selections.  SFO to HKG via stopover in Tokyo (NRT)  SFO to HKG with stopover in Tokyo (NRT) As you can see from above the flight to Hong Kong (HKG) with return via Tokyo (NRT) is cheaper than the original flight. Although in the above case you need to spend 1 night in Hong Kong but you do get a non-stop flight from Tokyo (NRT) to San Francisco (SFO) during return journey from your trip and as a bonus you can visit Hong Kong for 1 night. In fact you can also extend the 1 night stay in Hong Kong to either 2 or 3 days and the cost would not change.
The above idea could be extended to any other destination you want to visit although it may not be available for all the dates. Also you would want to select an airline which has "hub" in your "real destination". One of the biggest "Con" of this is that you need to be careful of the made up destination as some of them might require a visa to visit but other than that this is perfect travel trick you can use for your next trip. 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.  Happy New Year to all the folks who are reading this. Today I want to highlight something which is easily overlooked by all of us while looking to purchase our flight tickets. There are times where you would be looking to just purchase a one-way flight ticket. This could be because you are able to secure the other one-way ticket using miles in premium class or you were able to get on the myriad sale where the other one way ticket was awesomely cheap. In the miles and points world you do end up buying flight tickets with cash lot of times and below info would be useful when you do your next flight search. Buying two one-way tickets on different carrier can be cheaper in peak season: If you have ever tried to purchase a flight travelling out of USA during summer break or Christmas/ New Year you would know what I am talking about. Everyone is travelling during these times and the airlines know it and thus prices can be exorbitant. Most 3rd party aggregation sites would give preference over a round trip ticket booked as one ticket then two separate one-way tickets and this is where it would be useful to search for separate "one-way tickets" which at times would be cheaper than a single round trip ticket. Make sure you check the price on the regional website where you plan to return from and you might be in for a surprise. Converting a return one-way ticket to a multi-city ticket for future use: This is where it gets interesting. As we all know during non-peak times round trip tickets are almost always cheaper than one-way tickets. So, why not convert a one-way return trip into a round trip? Let's assume you want to travel from San Francisco, CA to Amman, Jordan in Christmas and return back in January. For the purpose of this demo I will use Google Flights as my go to tool. Below is what it looks like booking one-way return trip today for Jan, 15th, 2018:  One Way Return trip segment costing $852+ As you can say that most folks are planning to return from their vacation during early January the one-way tickets are still a tad bit higher. So, what if you tag along a future one way trip and make it a round trip? How about booking a future one-way trip to completely different destination which you might have in your visit list? Check out below for example.  Changing a required one-way trip to round trip ticket with marginal cost. As you can see, changing the search to "multi-city" and putting a destination which you might already be planning to visit in future is just ~$300 more than the original one way ticket you were looking to purchase anyway.
So, the next time you plan to travel in peak travel periods do not forget to change your search criteria and you might be in for the unexpected discount on your travel. 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.  As someone who would collect miles and points in various airlines and hotel reward programs it is inevitable that there are times when your miles/points are expiring and you want to extend it if possible. One of popular currency is Avianca Lifemiles. Lifemiles keeps having promotion every 3 months or so where you can buy miles cheaply for as low as 1.375 cents/mile when you buy 50k+ miles. But what if you have miles in your account but no travel plans and then the time comes when the miles are about to expire? The easiest way to extend the life of your expiring miles is to purchase miles at the cost of US $33 + tax per 1000 miles or to transfer small chunk of miles (Starting at 1000 miles) to friend or family account at a cost of US $15 + tax per 1000 miles. There is another option though where it does not have to cost you any money and that is by donating your miles. Most of the programs requires you to donate minimum of 1000 miles or more to participating charitable organization, but Lifemiles allows you to donate 1 mile and extend the life of your miles by ~24 months. You can go to the homepage here and go to "Donate Miles" as shown below or you can go to the Donate Miles link here.  You can go to the "Donate Miles" option to donate your miles So next time you are close to expiration of your Lifemiles just donate 1 mile and extend the life for 24 more months without buying or transferring any miles. If you are interested in subtle tips and value on lifemiles check out this flyertalk thread.
Disclosure: Miles And Money could earn referral bonus for sign up through some of the links above. Some of the links may or may not be publicly available links.  Upside is the new business travel website which aims at reducing business traveler expense while at the same time providing incentives in terms of gift cards for travel package (flight + hotel) booked through their website. The way it works is they will encourage you to choose "alternative options" which might still work for you while providing you with $100 or more in known brand gift cards (You can select which gift card you want). They nominally charge $35 booking fee which is potentially offset by the gift cards they offer for the booking done through their website. As of this writing their are offering a minimum of $200 in gift cards for the "flight + hotel" package regardless of price booked through them and also waiving $35 booking fee if you use some of their launch partner promotion code (google it and you will find few of them easily and you can enter them here). Although their primary target audience is business travelers you could still book the trip through them for leisure and earn the gift cards. So potentially it can be very lucrative offer to give them a try if you are looking for a weekend outing somewhere close by where you can essentially earn $200 in gift cards easily. Their package cost are usually equal or less than the cost of flights and hotels if booked separately but at the same time providing you with good value gift cards. The biggest return is if you book international itineraries but even domestic itinerary would give you good value for your money. Also you do have option of making your trip "refundable" but at a higher cost. Below is one of the examples of available trips which looks very attractive using their promotion.  SFO-LAS Weekend Package for 2 nights for ~$408 with $200 gift card rebate As you can see from above example your actual cost is close to ~50% factoring in the gift card rebate. If you are flexible in your days and are looking for vacation close by, you could easily reduce the above cost more than 50%.
So, take upside for a ride and see what you can find for your getaway.  Travelling using miles is a great benefit where you could fly to destinations which otherwise you might not dream of going to (as it would be too expensive for you to afford it). But there are times when you want to change those award tickets or completely cancel the trip you once planned with so much of time and effort. Most airlines would charge you a fee to cancel the award and redeposit the miles unless you have some sort of elite status with them which would waive off those cancellation fees. Let's face it, airlines wants to monetize any opportunity you throw at them as that's one of the revenue generator for them. But most often you will find creative ways of getting around this limitation. Although I do not provide any guarantee that it would work 100% of time and YMMV, but I can guarantee that it would work more often than not if one thing falls in your favor, and that thing is "Schedule Change".
What is Schedule Change? Most airlines allow you to book award tickets for almost 330 days in advance. Since airline industry is dynamic in nature there could be routine changes to the schedule due to certain route additions/deletions or change in partnerships between the airlines or some changes due to airport maintenance requirement. All this could entail change in either departure or arrival time of flights which accounts for "schedule change". How does schedule change help you? Since each and every airline has a different policy regarding schedule change (and this info is often unpublished), its hard to predict what would work and what would not. But below are few instances which could very well help you to be qualified for a full refund of miles with no cancellation fees for your award tickets:
How to increase the probability of schedule change to affect your itinerary:
So knowledge of above would help you save your buck in the inadvertent circumstance where you could no longer take that trip and would still want to avoid those hefty cancellation or miles redeposit fees.  One of the way’s to accumulate miles in the airline frequent flyer program is to collect points in one of hotel programs which allow point conversion to miles. Most often than not the conversion ratio from points to miles is bad but still there are few exceptions to this. So, why would you want to transfer points to miles?
Let’s look into more details about the good hotel programs purely from points to miles conversion perspective. Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG): SPG is one of the few programs which provides great transfer value:
Wyndham Rewards (WR): WR is another program which provides great transfer value:
Apart from Starwood Preferred Guest and Wyndham Rewards there are bunch of other hotel programs which could potentially earn higher miles at times due to lucrative seasonal promotion offers. Some of the hotel programs which are useful for points to miles conversion are listed below. Hyatt Gold Passport Club Carlson Marriott Rewards Priority Club Hilton Honors Choice Privileges Best Western  You want to get the best rate on next big loan? Or want to buy the car you are longing for at an awesome bargain? Or want to get the Credit Card for the next free domestic flight? All these needs you to have an excellent credit. But how do you know you have great credit history?
There are three different credit monitoring agencies in the US: 1. Experian 2. TransUnion 3. Equifax Getting to know the scores of them would help identify your credit score and get the next big bargain you are looking for. But how do you find these scores for free? You can at least get the score of two of above for free. 1. Credit Sesame (Experian) : This is a website where you can create a free account and plug in all your details and it will help you get your credit score. The pull done to get your score is a soft pull and as such does not affect your credit score. The score is a close approximate of your actual Experian score. Here is the link: http://www.creditsesame.com/ 2. Credit Karma (TransUnion) : Credit Karma has lot more better features in my opinion and provides tracking of various scores including Auto Insurance score as well. Again they do a soft pull on your credit and as such does not create a credit inquiry on you. It closely resembles the TransUnion Score. The link is here: https://www.creditkarma.com/ So armed with information about your credit score you would be able to make the next big decision with ease. Disclaimer : The links provided does not earn me any commission or referral. To keep great scores make sure you always pay your dues on time. |
AuthorI love traveling / backpacking. This blog focuses on below 3 aspects of travel: Archives
December 2020
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
