Tag: Booking Awards

Rebooking A Singapore Airlines Advantage Award Ticket When Your Saver Award Waitlist Clears

Before I started planning our trip to Germany, I didn’t pay much attention to Singapore Airlines’ KrisFlyer program. I knew the basics, such as they’re partners with all three major bank’s transferrable points programs so it’s relatively easy to earn points in their program. I was also aware that Singapore opens up many more award seats to their own loyalty program members than they do to partner airlines. If I wanted to try and book flights on Singapore from New York to Frankfurt, Germany, I’d need to learn more about KrisFlyer.

Thankfully there are numerous articles about how to transfer miles to KrisFlyer from your Citi ThankYou, AMEX Membership Rewards or Chase Ultimate Rewards accounts. Once I moved enough points into my KrisFlyer account, I just had to wait for award space to open up on my desired flight.

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How I Overcome My Biggest Weakness When It Comes To Booking Award Travel

If you take a good look at yourself, there’s a weakness you have when it comes to making travel reservations. It’s different for everyone. Some people feel anxious when going to spend points and miles and to those of you with this problem, spend your points already! Others are never happy with their reservations, in particular, hotel reservations, and continually change plans right up until the final cancellation date. We used to joke with a friend of ours when she’d tell us her plans because deep down we both knew there was no way the reservation would hold until the trip.

Some of the more advanced members of the travel community have their own set of weaknesses. There are those who can’t give up their loyalty status or pass up a good mileage/mattress run opportunity. Then there are those who’ll book a crazy mistake fare even if they previously had no intent to travel where the flight goes to or even where it departs from. I’d bet that these people would argue these aren’t weaknesses but strengths, and to that I say, Whatever makes you happy.

For me, it’s a different weakness and unfortunately, it affects a significant part of booking award travel.

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This New Way To Search For Awards Found Me A Ticket For 8,000 Miles

A fact you learn when you get started with miles and points is that the earning part is relatively easy. You don’t have to learn a lot to get going and jumpstart those balances. This can cause problems down the line if you get too enthusiastic so here’s a list I made of what you should do if you’re rather new to the game.

Redeeming your miles and points for rewards can be a bit more difficult. For starters, there’s the availability problem. Unless you’re in a fixed value program like Southwest or JetBlue, not all flights have award tickets available.

Even if you find an available flight, if you have transferrable points there are numerous programs you have access to, and each of them might charge a different amount of miles and fees for the same award ticket.

If you can keep track of every award in every program, good for you. I know I can’t. But that’s not as much of a problem as it used to be…

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Award Ticket Guide: Who You Gonna Call? (Or Which Airline’s Website Should You Use)

Using your miles to book airline tickets seems like a straightforward process. You earn miles and then redeem miles, a process points and miles people call “earn and burn.” Hopefully you’ve learned that by taking advantage of airline alliances and partnerships, it’s possible to redeem miles for flights on airlines other than the one you earned them from. In other words, you can book flights on Lufthansa with United MileagePlus or you can fly on Cathay Pacific by redeeming American Advantage miles. This knowledge opens up an entire world of possibilities.

There’s one part of this process that confuses people new to miles and points the most. Which airline should be contacted for each step of the booking process, up to and including getting on the plane?

Here’s a simplified list of who to contact for each step of traveling on an award ticket booking for an airline partner (alliance or non-alliance):

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Here’s A Totally Legal Way To Transfer Membership Rewards To A Family Members Airline Or Hotel Account

When it comes to using credit cards to pay for travel, the earning of the points is the easy part. Booking the award travel is where the process gets complicated. This post is about a specific situation that I imagine more than just a few people have found themselves in. It involves the transferring American Express Membership Rewards points to an airline frequent flyer program to make an award booking.

Using flexible points in this manner is the best way to get oversized value for your points and the basis for all for posts from people flying in Business and First class seats to locations all around the globe. For this example, I’ll use the flights I booked with ANA for my dad and his wife to fly to Bali. Without them knowing, I went ahead and booked them on the EVA Airways Hello Kitty plane 🙂 Continue reading “Here’s A Totally Legal Way To Transfer Membership Rewards To A Family Members Airline Or Hotel Account”