I shared with you a while back about the fabulous Travel Insurance offered on purchases made with the Chase Sapphire Preferred* card. Since then I've had not one, but TWO exciting rewards events I want to tell you about!
First, as you may know, at the beginning of January I set off on a fabulous transatlantic cruise aboard the Norwegian Bliss. This was a solo cruise, and I had intended to try out flying standby on other airlines for the first time on my way home. After reading through the non-rev reddit forum, I decided to buy three tickets, with the intention of refunding whichever ones I didn't use. These cost between $280-$315 each. When you fly with other airlines you incur a small cost, and when you fly internationally you must pay the taxes and fees accordingly as well. I didn't mind though since this ticket cost about $2,600 to buy outright!
Late one night when I was up because I was in too much pain to sleep, I was listening to a podcast to distract me (staring at the ceiling in silence makes it hurt more) and I was inspired to check out the options for redeeming points for this trip. Evidently, many airlines open up reward seats at the last minute to fill up flights. I spent some time hopping around on different websites and checking out my options.
The Chase travel portal will allow you to redeem your points for bookings at 1.25 per point. I priced out the cheapest flight available, which was on Iceland Air, and found that I could book the flight for about 53,000 points. This was a pretty good deal, but I don't know much about Iceland Air and I didn't really want to risk that.
I found a few other deals on Air Canada and Virgin Atlantic's websites, but the one I settled on was with British Airways. They offered me a seat for 30,000 points and $150. This was quite a deal because, as I mentioned, this flight was about $2,600 to purchase a ticket for! In the points and miles world they like to do a little math and determine what the value of your points were for a purchase. I estimate that my points were worth about $0.084, an excellent value! In contrast, if I had redeemed my points for cash, as with a regular cash back card, they would have only been worth $0.01 each. So now I have a confirmed seat with a great airline for my trip home! I can't tell you how excited I was! Yes, I'll miss out on the opportunity to tell you about flying internationally on standby, but I'll also miss out on the stress of it.
My other exciting Chase points experience came with booking our family's flights to Disney World for this May. We're going on a group trip with 10 of us, so it was really important to me to find the best deal, because whatever I purchased would be x10! I watched the prices go up and down. I set price alerts. I prayed. I did all the things. Eventually it settled out so that I was pretty sure what the best price was going to be. I wanted to buy the tickets with my
Chase Sapphire Preferred* card so that we would have the
Travel Insurance. While this card would award me 2x by purchasing the tickets through the airline's website, I could get 5x by purchasing them through Chase's travel portal! When you're making this kind of investment, it's worth doing your due diligence to make sure you're getting the best deal possible.
This was, by far, the most challenging airline ticket purchase I'd ever made! For one thing, I had determined that the best price and itinerary had us flying down to Orlando on Delta and returning on Alaska Airlines. That meant that each person needed not one roundtrip ticket, but two one-way tickets. And we have 10 people going so that means 20 tickets! Airline sites don't like to let you purchase more than 6 tickets at a time per flight. No problem. I figured I'd just book two groups of 5. Problem. When I entered 5 people instead of 1, my price went up by $40 per ticket. That's a $400 difference for 10 tickets and worth investigating. So I did what the website recommended, and I called a Chase Travel Specialist to book a group of 7 or more.
One of the interesting challenges to booking airline tickets is how critical things like spelling are. I had the exact spelling of the first, middle and last names of our entire party as well as everyone's birthdates, but now I had to relay these to the travel specialist over the phone and make sure there were no errors. This was a long- drawn out process of "S as in Sierra, P as in Peter, E as in Echo, L as in Lima, L as in Lima, I as in Ida, N as in New York, G as in George." In case you didn't get that, it was "spelling." Every name had to be spelled out by me, confirmed by the agent, and then corrected if necessary, and it was several times.
Finally, we got to the point of booking the actual tickets. The first two groups of five heading to Orlando went smoothly, and then when we got to the return trip we ran into the $40 discrepancy I mentioned before. We did a little digging and it turns out that airlines list groups of tickets for flights at different price points. There were only 4 seats left at the price point I was originally looking at. Had I booked through the portal myself I wouldn't have known that and would have bought all 10 seats at the higher price. Because I was talking to the agent, though, we were able to book the remaining 4 seats at the lower price and the remainder at the higher one. This saved me $160, a worthwhile amount for the hour I spent on the phone! The agent was patient and very helpful. She engaged with me well and I would totally recommend calling if you need to.
As a result of booking our flights through the Chase Travel Portal, we earned 22,588.6 Chase Ultimate Reward points - enough to stay at some Hyatt hotels for a week!
Here's the Thing: Is working the points and miles system quick and easy? No. Is it worth it? Definitely! I'm so excited about these experiences and I look forward to many more!
*The Chase Sapphire Preferred links in this post are my personal referral link. When you use it, you will receive Chase's best offer on the card (currently 60,000 bonus points) and I will receive bonus points as well. It will not cost you any extra to use this link, but it will support my travel adventures!
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