Outrageous travel made easy. Outrageous Travel Lesson 1

Don’t pay list price- find bargains or use frequent flier miles.

Got a yearning to fly?

The first lesson we learned about Outrageous Retirement Travel was that you don’t have to pay list price. Our retirement lifestyle included as much travel as possible.  To us that meant getting the most value from our frequent flier miles programs.  We had a simple idea about airfare when we started our adventure. We would either try to book bargain price deals (i.e. travel off season) or use our miles. We had travel miles accumulated and we would use them to pay for the trip.(When we started one trip was all we could believe possible.) It seemed simple and easy but we soon learned otherwise. Actually using those miles for the trip you want isn’t nearly so easy as the program information suggests. Using them isn’t hard but getting your trip at the lowest miles level is..

Our first outrageous travel trip primed the pump.

For our trip to Venice last March, everything worked beautifully. I just called the airline and booked. We got the travel to Venice for the basic award level of miles (45,000 for each of us). The dates we wanted were open and the only compromise we made was to fly out of San Francisco instead of Sacramento. This was so easy that we didn’t understand that booking award trips with miles is an art- and a very complicated one to boot.  We were hooked on outrageous travel.

Not so fast!

It turns out that airline frequent flier award reservations are quite complex. First, airline reservation staff are not always so competent and helpful as you might hope and second, trips for the number of miles in the award charts are seldom available to mere mortals going through normal channels. We had beginners luck. It encouraged us to plan another outrageous travel trip.  Booking our second trip wasn’t so easy. We could find award flights but not at the award levels in the charts.  he points for those trips as offered on the airline websites were double or triple the mile on the award chart. This drove me to do more research and I found help.

The Frequent Flier community on the web. 

There are websites and communities of frequent flyer’s on the web that explain the techniques necessary to find those travel deals that give the most value for those miles. It seems that you have to research all the legs in a trip. Flying from a gateway airport (international hub) or domestic hub makes this easier. From a second tier airport like Sacramento, it is important to find the flights that take you to the hub with the lowest award level,. It is easier to book an award flight from a gateway or hub for any airline than a flight including the connections. This is because each route and flight may have a different award level (indication of availability of award tickets on that leg) and the airline will price the entire ticket at the highest level of any leg on the trip. This became apparent trying to use Delta miles (notoriously the hardest to get tickets at the lowest number of miles). Although the standard price was supposed to be 45,000, the website would charge 90,000 for the trip. Only someone who had spent some time reading the airline award blogs and following the frequent flier award community would realize that only when each leg is researched to find a low priced time and route can you assemble a complicated but inexpensive award booking. Additionally, the possibilities from other airlines in the same mile sharing group are seldom shown and typically these airlines have higher award availability. These are things that you are unlikely to know as a casual traveler and unless you decide to do some research you may give up on using those mile for outrageous travel.

The Award Travel Community speaks a different language.

In the community of people who get value from their miles, there is a common language which is mysterious to newbies. At first, I was resigned to learning the lingo and spending the time to find those routes. It isn’t rocket science but it is tedious and time consuming, especially the first time. I was anticipating several days of working through the details. But then I discovered something amazing- you can hire people to find your award flights and outrageous travel is possible for anyone who is willing to hire an expert. America is a wonderful place.

I discovered MileValue Booking Service. 

One of the Mileage bloggers reported about using one of these services. He was more expert than I and he was satisfied with the result so I decided to try as well. I was ecstatic with the result. I was able to book a trip from Sacramento to Rome on Delta next summer for 45,000 miles. The only glitch was that we couldn’t get the final leg from Los Angeles to Sacramento included in the award. We would have to book that seperately. This is a very small issue on a flight to Europe and I was quite pleased with the service. Trying to book this myself using the Delta website priced out at 100,000 each.

The point here is not to be critical of Delta or any other airline for that matter but to educate the uninitiated that booking  a frequent flier award flight is complicated and getting the best value for the miles can be difficult. You can spend the time and learn the tricks or pay someone to do it for you. To me it is an easy choice- I pick the pro and keep my time for things I am good at.

For anyone interested in finding the best award flight for a proposed trip, I recommend you use the Milevalue Booking Service at Milevalue.com. You don’t pay upfront and Scott will research the options for your situation and wishes. You get to select any or none of the options produced and then pay when you have your booking. It was fast and painless in my case. Still, even an expert can’t work miracles. Sometimes you can make the award fit your requirements.

We started with our Christmas trip to Buenos Aires.

I first asked about booking our trip to Buenos Aires in December. We wanted to use the Delta miles because we had used all our American miles for Venice. We had waited too late. We could get to Buenos Aires but not back. I then asked about Rome in June and was pleasantly surprised at the suggested trip, connecting to LA from Sacramento and then nonstop from LA to Rome on Alitalia for 45,000. The Delta website did not even offer the Alitalia option and I had never seen any flight offered for less than 62,000. I was pleased.

I cannot say how easy it might have been for me to find and book this trip myself. With the right preparation, it might not be challenging. What I can say is that for me with the information I possess right now about booking award travel, it could well have taken me a week and I still might not have found all the possibilities. I was happy to pay for the result in a few minutes and a resolution of the travel so I could move on. For me, the service was a ten and I will use it again without hesitation. I am confident that the Buenos Aires trip might have had a similar resolution if I had booked it earlier.

In summary, I am more excited about getting more value from our travel budget by using frequent flier awards. We have so far scheduled two month long trips in the next year, Buenos Aires in December and Rome in June.  Now it is time to decide where to go next winter.

We still look for bargain fares and inexpensive ways to build our program miles but we now feel much more confident about keeping the cost of that travel down by using the Award Booking Service. Now that I know how complex it is to get that value, I definitely understand the value in using my time for other things and paying an expert to get the flights I want.

Are you ready for outrageous travel? 

Or maybe you have some stories about Buenos Aires or Rome to share.  If you have good stories about flying with frequent flier miles or lessons you can add to the process, please leave a comment below.