When should you optimize for spontaneous, planned, or predictable expenses?

I like to generalize travel hackers into three broad categories, although none describes any individual perfectly.

Roughly speaking, I think of opportunistic travel hackers as people who keep an eye on signup, referral, and manufactured spending opportunities in order to maximize the value of their earnings throughout the year. I doubt this is the largest category, although it receives the most attention from mainstream blogs, so in some ways it’s the easiest to get involved in. Frequent Miler, for instance, hosts a simple page indicating what current signup bonuses are available and how they compare to previous offers.

The flip side of opportunism is that because it’s opportunistic, it’s unlikely to directly or even closely correspond to your needs. For example, take a look at how Gary Leff is currently promoting the Citi American Airlines business credit card right now: “70,000 by the way is what it costs from the US to the Mideast, India or Maldives on Qatar. You can even fly Qatar’s Qsuites, which may be the best business class in the world.” Fair enough, but what does that have to do with me? The message delivered by and for opportunists is “apply now, earn now, figure out what to do with the miles later.”

The second bucket is tactical travel hacking, which is roughly what I did for our stay at the Grand Wailea: I had a plan for the Aspire signup bonus, a plan for the resort credit, and a plan for the Amex Offer for $70 off $350 in spend at Waldorf Astoria resorts, and as soon as I’d used them all, the card was closed.

Just like opportunism, tactical travel hacking has tradeoffs. By focusing on individual awards, you’re more likely to earn the miles and points you actually want to spend, reducing the chances of orphaned miles in random accounts. On the other hand, if you’re concentrated on a specific award, you’re subject to award availability for that precise award space. This comes up most frequently when looking for premium-cabin airline award space, but limited hotel award space is an increasing problem, especially at premium properties that play games with blackout dates, variable pricing, and of course what qualifies as a “standard” room; while writing up this post I couldn’t find a single date with standard award nights available at the Grand Wailea!

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot more about what I think of as logistical travel hacking. Rather than focusing on the highest signup bonuses (which I may never redeem, or redeem at a fraction of their supposed value), or individual high-value trips which may or may not have award availability when I need it, I’ve been focusing on rewards that I am highly confident I’m going to be able to redeem, even if I don’t know when or where.

This has resulted in a subtle transformation in how I go about earning and redeeming miles and points. For example, I’ve written extensively about how companion tickets like those offered by the American Express Delta credit cards and the Bank of America Alaska Airlines credit cards didn’t offer significant savings when compared to manufacturing spend on higher-earning credit cards. And I still think that’s true, as far as it goes. But the higher your confidence that you’ll be able to redeem your companion tickets at something close to face value, the smaller that trade-off becomes.

Take, for example, the Alaska Airlines companion fare. For roughly $121, plus a $75 annual fee, you can book a second passenger on any Alaska-operated economy ticket, including destinations in Mexico, Alaska, and Hawaii, and including some pretty zany routing rules. The same $196 spent on, for example, office supply store prepaid debit card activation and liquidation fees might earn 100,000 Ultimate Rewards points on a Chase Ink Preferred card, worth $1,250 or $1,500 in airfare, depending on your local opportunities and the frequency of in-store and online in any given year.

From an opportunistic perspective, the companion fare makes no sense, since it would be trivial to get more than $196 in value from 100,000 Ultimate Rewards points. From a tactical perspective, you can imagine signing up for the card when you have a specific, expensive Alaska-operated ticket in mind. But the logistical perspective is different: if you always buy Alaska-operated tickets with your companion fare, then you have the opportunity to optimize the rest of your earning and redemptions around the remainder of your travel needs.

Conclusion

I’ve always said, the point of travel hacking is to spend as little as possible on the trips you want to take, and the least valuable point is the one you don’t redeem. That’s still true, but a few years of travel restrictions have managed to convince me that it’s at least partially incomplete. From the opportunistic perspective, if availability suddenly opens up on a premium carrier or at a prestige property, you need to have the points available to redeem immediately. From the tactical perspective, you grind out the points, miles, and status you need to book the trip you want. But from the logistical perspective, you might choose to cover predictable, recurring expenses with tools like annual free night certificates and companion fares even if you might have short-term opportunities to spend less for the same night or flight. As the joke goes, the Pentagon overpays for toilets but they get a great deal on F-35’s.

Like a lot of people getting started in travel hacking, I first dabbled in opportunistic strategies but found I just didn’t care that much about stockpiling points it would take me years to eventually redeem, at uncertain value. Over the course of a few years, I shifted over to tactically earning bonused points in the currencies I was planning to redeem for specific trips: Chase Ultimate Rewards, Hilton Honors, and US Bank Flexpoints, in particular. And in the last few years I’ve increasingly been focused on logistics: if I know I’m going to book a ticket for two on Alaska Airlines or Delta, or stay at a Hyatt or Hilton, then what those companion tickets and free night certificates do is take those redemptions off my mind, letting me focus on the rest of the pieces of a trip, like deciding when to book through Hotels.com and when to book directly.

Don't sleep on Hilton's (extremely) variable award pricing

For some time now Hilton has employed variable award pricing to maintain a rough value of 0.5 cents per Honors point. That isn’t set in stone, and it’s not uncommon to see values as low as 0.4 or as high as 0.6 cents per point, but it’s clearly the benchmark redemption value they aim for across the entire Hilton portfolio. Outsized value of course is available when prices are unusually high and when booking stays in multiples of 5 nights, since the 5th night is free for all Hilton elites (when means just about everybody).

As my tone suggests, variable award pricing is usually treated as a defect in the program, but it has a silver lining: award prices also vary downward, as I found to my advantage during my recent stay at the Hampton by Hilton Glasgow Central.

I was redeeming US Bank Flexpoints at 1.5 cents each for the first night of my stay, and a topped-up Hotels.com award for the second night, which left me with two nights I planned to book using points. Here’s my booking history:

• 7/8/22: booked night 3 for 35,000 points

• 7/11/22: canceled night 3, rebooked for 33,000 points

• 7/13/22: canceled night 3, rebooked for 32,000 points

• 7/21/22: canceled night 3, rebooked for 31,000 points

• 7/22/22: booked night 4 for 34,000 points

• 8/6/22: rebooked night 4 for 32,000 points

That final reservation was just 2 days before night 4 — I had already checked into the hotel, but was still able to rebook that night and was instantly refunded 2,000 points! In total, these shenanigans saved me a total of 6,000 points, which you might reasonably consider to be kind of insignificant in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, saving those points was a matter of clicking a few buttons on my phone, something we do for far less reward all the time!

Further considerations

In the list above I attempted to draw a subtle distinction: for night 3 of my stay, I was canceling and rebooking my stay, while for night 4, I rebooked my stay without canceling. This is because of a quirk in the Hilton reservation system: when editing an existing award stay, you must have enough points in your account to cover the full price of the updated reservation. When I was tinkering with night 3, I didn’t have the 31-33,000 points in my account, so I had to cancel the existing reservation before using the refunded points to rebook that night.

By the time August 6 came around, enough additional points had posted to my account that I was able to edit my existing night 4 reservation without canceling it first. I simply selected the same dates, the same room type, and 2,000 points were immediately redeposited into my account. This was ideal since I had already checked into the hotel at that point and all four of my reservations had been linked. If I had canceled the 4th night, I would have had to check back in and have the keys remade. A minor inconvenience, but one I was happy to avoid.

That brings me to a final consideration: if you’re not taking advantage of the 5th-night-free benefit, you may find it best to book each night of a 2-4 night stay separately, for the simple reason that when one night goes down in price, another might go up. If one night falls by 1,000 points, there’s no opportunity to rebook if the price of another rises by 1,000 points or more: separate reservations make it easier to capture intrastay price shifts.

Deconstructing a point-to-point hiking tour

[update 8/13/2022: I heard back from the luggage transfer service I mention below and they quoted me a total of £60, substantially less than I guessed from their website]

A popular way to explore the United Kingdom among outdoor enthusiasts and lunatics alike is the hiking tour. The UK is positively saturated with public walking paths and rights-of-way across private property, so the possibilities are almost literally endless. For part of my recent holiday in England and Scotland, we booked a prepackaged 5-day point-to-point hiking tour in the Lake District.

What’s a hiking tour?

There are a number of companies that sell prepackaged tours; the one we happened to book was the “Lake District Short Break” through Macs Adventure. This 5-day tour consisted of 4 nights at 3 different bed-and-breakfasts (the first 2 nights were spent at the same B&B), and 3 days of hiking. The first hike day we made a loop arriving back at our B&B in the evening, and the second two hikes took us to two new towns. On the two days we moved, Macs Adventure arranged to pick up our suitcases in the morning and deliver them at the next town by the time we arrived (this is not particularly impressive, since the towns are only 20 or 30 minutes apart by car, despite being 5 or 6 hours apart by foot). We paid a total of $1290, although it seems the price has gone up since then to $1420 for two adults.

The tour we took is not bookable as a solo traveler (this will become important shortly).

Deconstructing the hiking tour

That’s the trip sold as a single package. But it doesn’t take a genius to see that the package consists of a few discrete parts, which makes it easy to break down the actual value of the package:

• 4 nights lodging

• 4 breakfasts for two

• 2 luggage transfers

• walking directions / GPS-supported map (built into Macs Adventures’ fairly cumbersome app)

Two nights in the cheapest room at the Brantfell House costs £192 ($233), a night at the Old Water View £120 ($145), and a night at The Beeches £90 ($109), although I was unable to verify that final number with a sample booking.

It seems that all three properties include breakfast with all their rates, so let’s assign that a value of $0 for now.

Macs Adventures obviously doesn’t handle luggage transfers themselves; they sell tours all over the world and aren’t going to own a fleet of minivans in every country. In our case, they contracted our luggage transfers out to Brigantes Walking Holidays and Baggage Couriers. They don’t have prices listed for our exact itinerary, but it appears their minimum charge is around £80 per person, or £160 ($194) for two (I put in a quote request for our exact route and will update this post when or if they get back to me).

Finally, while walking directions are free from a variety of websites and apps, it is nice that Macs curates specific routes for each day, and the downloadable maps (for offline use) and GPS integration are worth something too, so let’s assign that a generous $25 in value.

So the total value provided by Macs Adventures, should you book the component parts separately, is about $706, which is actually somewhat more than the per-person cost of the trip ($645). Of course, that brings us back to the point I highlighted above: this trip can’t be booked for solo travelers, so we paid $1290, or $584 more than the trip would have cost à la carte.

Obviously that’s not to say Macs Adventures made $584 in profit; presumably they negotiate bulk rates with their hoteliers and luggage transfer services, so their per-trip profit is somewhat higher than that.

Other alternatives

Above I broke down how to recreate an existing point-to-point package tour to save money, but there are a few obvious alternatives it’s worth briefly mentioning.

First, we needed a baggage transfer service because we were spending a week in the UK before and after our tour, but if you’re a serious hiker and that’s all you plan to do on your holiday, you can simply pack a backpack with everything you need, and indeed many of the people we passed on the trails had the heavy duty backpacks you’d expect to see on the John Muir or Appalachian trails. In Ambleside I even found a laundromat to wash my first week of clothes, so packing light doesn’t have to mean wearing soiled clothes or washing them in the sink every night.

Alternatively, instead of a point-to-point hiking tour where you check out of one room and into another every day, you can avoid the need for luggage transfers by setting up a base of operations in a town with a variety of nearby trails. And remember, you don’t need to walk all day: on our first walking day we took a ferry to our starting point and then walked back to our B&B. Likewise, there’s no shame in walking out from your B&B and taking a bus or taxi back.

Conclusion

This was our first hiking tour, and it was plugged into the middle of an already-complicated itinerary, so I was grateful that we were able to pay someone to arrange everything for us, and it turned out to be a wonderful time, albeit with a few hiccups we would have encountered either way.

Having said that, we’ll almost certainly never book a packaged tour like this again, since all the tour company did in this case was stitch together pieces that could easily be booked on their own. There are exceptions, like tourist attractions that can only be visited as part of a package tour, but in most cases the savings are significant enough that it’s worth recreating almost any tour simply by breaking it down into its component parts.

Beginner's guide to UK passenger rail

[Note to the reader: in this post I’m using specific examples of specific cities in the UK, but I am not bothering to give any information about them because it’s irrelevant to the post. If you want to know where Saxmundham is, Google is just a keystroke away.]

For the last 3 weeks I’ve been on vacation in the UK, and will be sharing some interesting, valuable, and/or fun lessons I learned along the way. In today’s edition, I want to dump everything I learned about booking and saving money on passenger rail in England and Scotland.

What is Network Rail?

To give a mostly-accurate potted history, the UK nationalized their rail industry after World War II. In the 90’s under New Labour, they privatized the operation of freight and passenger rail, but kept ownership and management of the tracks and stations in a public entity. That public entity is now called Network Rail (it had some other names in the past).

What is National Rail?

National Rail is the public-facing brand of the privatized passenger rail companies. Why National Rail matters is that it operates “underneath” the private operating companies and creates a kind of interoperability between them. This has the potential to be convenient, a bit like the baggage interline agreements that allow airlines to check bags through on connections operated by other carriers, although there are some important pitfalls to watch out for, which I cover below.

What are Railcards?

The second, much more important reason that National Rail matters is that they sell Railcards. There are several different Railcards, but they all operate roughly the same: when you purchase a National Rail ticket, select which Railcard you have, and you’ll receive a discount, usually 1/3 of the price, if the fare is eligible. Virtually all trips after 10 am and on weekends and public holidays are eligible for the discount, as are some trips beginning before 10 am. There are basically 3 buckets Railcards fall into:

1. Group-based. “Family & Friends” and “Two Together” Railcards provide discounts when traveling in specific group formations.

2. Age-based. There are Railcards for 16-17 year olds, 16-25 year olds, 26-30 year olds, and seniors.

3. Status-based. People with certain verified disabilities and veterans of the UK Armed Forces are eligible for status-based Railcards.

These are listed very roughly in order of money-saving potential, and as you can see, most people are eligible for one of these “good” Railcards, with the exception of adults between the ages of 31 and 59 who always travel alone. They are still eligible for the generic Network Railcard, which offers discounts only in “London and the South East.”

Finally, it’s essential to note that you can have more than one Railcard, and use a different Railcard for different trips depending on what generates the most savings.

How do Railcards work?

This is the easy part. Whenever you’re booking a train in England, Scotland, and Wales, you’ll see a dropdown box allowing you to select your Railcard. Here’s an example from Greater Anglia:

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The price shown on the booking page will then reflect your Railcard discount. Here’s the exact same trip for 2 adults between London Liverpool Street and Saxmundham before and after applying a “Two Together” Railcard:

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As you can see, the Two Together Railcard saves £7.50 on a single short trip. For longer trips, Railcards can pay for themselves in a single reservation. Advance tickets for two adults from London to Glasgow on an Avanti West Coast service, for example, cost £65.60 without a Railcard, and just £43.20 with one. On close-in reservations the savings can be much higher: the same two tickets booked for tomorrow cost £285.20 without a railcard and £188.20 with one!

Most Railcards are good for an entire year, but my Two Together Railcard paid for itself several times over in less than 3 weeks.

The Family & Friends Railcard is the most gimmicky of the Railcards, but offers the most potential savings. Each £30 Railcard can have two named adults; one of those adults must be traveling on any ticket purchased with the Railcard (the Two Together Railcard requires both named people to be traveling on the ticket). Up to 3 additional adults can travel on the ticket. In addition, at least one child aged 15 or younger must be traveling on the ticket. The adults receive the standard 1/3 discount, and the children a 60% discount. A roundtrip ticket on the same Avanti West Coast service as above for 4 adults and 4 children ages 5-15 would cost £314.40 without a Railcard and just £222.40 with one.

Note that children’s tickets in general are pretty cheap; most of the savings being realized here are on the more expensive adult tickets. However, you do need one ticketed child in order to unlock those larger savings on the adult tickets.

Do you really need a Railcard?

Everything I said above is based on the rules laid out in black and white on the Railcard website. In fact, it is not clear to me that you need a Railcard at all in order to realize these discounts. That’s because ticketing is available online, tickets can be picked up at unattended kiosks, and most importantly, British ticket inspectors do not appear to me to care at all about the rules.

Of the 8 trains we took in the UK, our tickets were only inspected 3 times, and not one conductor asked to see my digital Railcard. Like a dumb American I volunteered to show my Two Together Railcard on the first train, but didn’t even bother doing that on the rest. If you lived in the UK and traveled frequently with adult friends and minor children, or with your adult partner, then you may as well buy a Family & Friends or Two Together Railcard since they’re so cheap and the savings are so significant, but if you’re just visiting and taking a train or two, you’re probably safe bluffing it.

Should you book “direct?”

Remember up top when I mentioned that train operators are private companies in the UK? Thanks to National Rail, all or most of the passenger rail companies in Great Britain can sell tickets on each other’s services, and there are no price differences on any of the routes I checked. This is roughly the equivalent of United allowing Delta to sell tickets on United for the same price as United charges when booking directly.

But this does not make the booking channels interchangeable. There are three big differences between the various booking channels.

First, seat reservations. The only trains we took with reserved seats were on the Avanti West Coast line between London and Glasgow, and because I booked our tickets through Greater Anglia (because they operated the first leg of our trip), I was not able to select our seats. If I had booked the ticket directly through Avanti West coast, I would have been able to pick them before even booking the ticket to make sure our seats were together, facing the right direction, etc.

Second, routing. While pricing is uniform across booking channels, unsurprisingly each operator’s routing algorithm works better on routes it actually serves. This came up on our trip when Greater Anglia booked us on an Avanti West Coast train from London to Preston in order to change to a Northern Railway train to Windermere. Plugging the origin and destination into Avanti West Coast directly gives the much preferable change at Oxenholme Lake District. Fortunately, the conductor on our Avanti train told us to just wait until Oxenholme to change, but if the conductor hadn’t asked what our final destination was and taken the trouble to sort us out, we would have tried to change to the slower Northern Railway train earlier than we needed to and risked our connection.

Finally, to circle back to Railcards, while pricing and discounts are uniform, the validation algorithm varies widely in quality, which may work to your benefit. For example, Avanti will (incorrectly) price out a Friends & Family Railcard discount for a reservation with 4 adults and no children, while Greater Anglia’s otherwise much less glossy booking engine will not, instead (correctly) returning pricing for four full-fare adult tickets.

Ground transit add-ons

Depending on your origin and destination, you may be offered the option to prepay for a bus or subway connection at the beginning or end of your trip.

For example, if your train originates in London, you’ll be offered the chance to buy a Travelcard that works on the London Underground and buses on the day of your departure. Unfortunately, the Travelcard costs £14.40 or £20.30, the maximum that can be charged for Zones 1-4 and 1-6, respectively, when using London’s Oyster payment cards. If you travel any amount less than the maximum, you’re overpaying.

On the flip side, arriving in Glasgow on a Railcard ticket lets you pay £2.70 for a PlusBus card that lets you take buses all around Great Glasgow on the day of your arrival, which offers at least a modest discount over an all-day bus pass.

In other words, savings are possible at specific destinations, when you’re purchasing tickets using a Railcard, but don’t assume booking your rail and transit tickets together will automatically save you money.

A final note on routing

I mentioned routing above in the context of the different passenger rail companies’ ticketing engines, but there’s a slightly separate issue that’s worth mentioning: it can be hard to figure out what your origin and destination are even supposed to be, especially when you plan to make connections by bus or taxi instead of rail.

I don’t have an easy solution except brute force: use Google or Apple Maps to search your origin and destination, then narrow in on the pieces operated by National Rail, then plug those routes into a few different operators’ websites, keeping in mind you might need to book legs separately or through different operators in order to get the best available routing and discounts.

Background and review of my week living an all-scooter lifestyle

Over on my personal finance blog I wrote about the range of programs offered by the so-called “micromobility” companies to provide free or reduced cost access to the scooters and e-bikes that clutter the streets and sidewalks of even the nation’s small- and mid-sized cities. Having experimented with the programs for a little over a week, I want to share my experience using dockless scooters for virtually all my errands.

Experience applying for access programs

Here’s a quick rundown of my experience applying for each of the micromobility access/equity programs:

• Capital Bikeshare for All (online signup appears to be unavailable right now): our local docked bikeshare system is actually administered by Lyft, which also administers their "Capital Bikeshare for All” program. The only program that’s not free to sign up for, once approved you’re eligible for a $5 annual membership which allows you unlimited rides up to 60 minutes. This is actually more generous than regular $95 annual memberships, which offer unlimited 45-minute rides, presumably to reduce the risk of low-income riders accidentally incurring overage fees.

• BIKETOWN for All: I spend a lot of time in Portland, OR, and happened to be there when I started working on this project, so I looked into whether their docked bikeshare program had an accessibility program. Sure enough, BIKETOWN for All, also administered by Lyft, offers an identical benefit of unlimited 60-minute rides, including ebike rides (excluded from Capital Bikeshare for All). I created a BIKETOWN account and applied for BIKETOWN for ALL on June 27, 2022, and later that evening I received confirmation I was eligible and told to sign up for an annual free membership.

• Lime Access: I applied for Lime Access on June 23, 2022, and didn’t hear anything in the “couple of days” promised, so sent a follow-up e-mail to access@li.me on July 1. Finally, on July 8, I received an e-mail confirming I’d been approved. Instead of free rides I was given discounted pricing of $0.50 per unlock and $0.07 per minute. I appreciate the gesture, but I’m not here to pay money.

• Helbiz Access: I wasn’t able to apply for Helbiz’s accessibility program online, but after e-mailing access@helbiz.com with my ID and eligibility documents on June 27, 2022, I received a prompt reply on June 29 confirming my enrollment in Accessibility+, which includes 100 free 30-minute trips per month.

• Bird Access. Like the other micromobility companies, Bird offers a confusing array of discounted and free programs depending on the city you apply from. I started by submitting a support ticket for Bird Access online on June 23, 2022, and less than an hour later received a form e-mail explaining the process of enrolling in Community Pricing (their version of Lime’s discount program). I replied by e-mail that I wasn’t interested in Community Pricing, but rather the free Access program. Again after less than an hour I received a reply correctly explaining the Access program, and asking me to send a photo of my proof of eligibility, which I did the next morning. On July 6 I sent a follow-up e-mail, and less than 30 minutes later received a confirmation that I’d been enrolled for unlimited free rides.

The rest of this post will be dedicated to my experience using Bird scooters, so I’ll just offer a few remarks on the other programs first.

I paid the $5 Capital Bikeshare for All membership fee and did a little tooling around the neighborhood, but I don’t own a bike helmet so until I get one I’m not comfortable doing longer-distance rides (subscribe to the blog to support my newfound biking hobby!). I didn’t get a chance to take any BIKETOWN rides before I left Portland.

Lime is the only dockless scooter I’d ever used before, and I thought it was “kind of neat,” but the problem is that it’s very expensive. The $1 unlock fee (plus per-minute fees) means that for rides of any length whatsoever the bus or subway will be cheaper by an order of magnitude. Obviously a discounted fare will be cheaper than a full-price fare, but for almost all trips I’d rather walk or take the subway.

I have nothing to say about Helbiz because I have never been able to unlock the cable lock now required by DC on all dockless bikes and scooters. I can start a ride, I can push the unlock button, and nothing happens. If anyone has ever successfully unlocked a Helbiz cable lock, please, reveal your secret in the comments!

This isn’t a Bird ad — let’s do the criticism first

I’ve been deliberately taking Bird scooters everywhere for the last week to get as nuanced a sense of the advantages and disadvantages as possible, and I’ve simply fallen in love with them. Since this is going to be a glowing review, let me start with the downsides, of which there are many!

First, and this is a bit silly, Bird requires you to buy a minimum of $10 worth of “Bird Cash” before you can unlock any scooters. I consider this basically a $10 lifetime membership, since I never plan on spending any of it, but it’s twice the price of a $5 annual Capital Bikeshare for All membership, so Bird Access isn’t exactly free.

Second, while I’ve had a lot more luck with Bird cable locks than with Helbiz locks (0%), it hasn’t been 100%. I would estimate around 15-20% of the time Bird cable locks fail to open, whether for mechanical or mobile connectivity reasons. Fortunately, in my city Bird scooters are fairly ubiquitous, so it rarely poses a problem, but if you’re counting on a particular scooter you see available in the app, keep a backup or two in mind because the lock may simply not pop when you need it to.

Third, and of course this is true of all the scooter companies, maintaining balance with heavy groceries requires some practice and involves some danger. This isn’t a big deal when you’re just out for a joy ride, but if you plan on doing regular grocery or other shopping you probably need to invest in a well-balanced cargo backpack (and a helmet wouldn’t hurt).

Finally, give yourself a few rides to get used to the acceleration and speed of electric scooters. Electric motors famously have almost-immediate acceleration to top speed and if you’re not used to it you will be caught off balance. Start slow, get a feel for the throttle, and drive more defensively than you have ever driven before. In my city scooters are electronically regulated to 10 miles per hour which sounds slow, and would be if you were planning to scoot cross-country, but is faster than you are, realistically, able to walk or even jog. Going uphill I regularly pass bikers, and on side streets either keep up with or beat traffic most of the time. In short, 10 miles per hour in city traffic is faster than you think.

Bird Access has been amazing

With that out of the way, unlimited free usage of Bird scooters has been awesome. The easiest way to describe it is that it lowers the hurdle to doing anything. I’m far from a homebody — I walk 5 or 6 miles a day — but when walking even I consider my direction, elevation, route, etc. Bird Access throws all that out the window.

When a 15-minute walk to the grocery store takes 3 minutes, then forgetting to pick up an onion isn’t such a big deal. When a 30-minute walk to a new takeout place takes 5 minutes, you try new takeout places. When an hour-long walk to the comedy club takes 10 minutes, you try out new comedy clubs. On a purely literal level, easy access to rapid point-to-point transportation makes the tradeoff between space and time much more flexible. Walk short distances, scoot medium distances, take transit long distances, with the definitions of “short,” “medium,” and “long” left entirely up to the reader.

Bird has an interesting feature that I had to figure out for myself, since like most apps these days, it doesn’t come with any documentation: you can “lock” a scooter without “ending” your ride. If you’ve never paid for one of these scooters that might sound like nonsense, but essentially it means you can keep anyone else from taking “your” scooter while you pop into a store to shop, so that when you’re finished shopping you don’t need to pay for another unlock fee. This isn’t terribly relevant if you’re riding for free, but it’s slightly more convenient than going through the rigamarole of “ending” and “beginning” rides every time you want to pop in for a baguette or a stir-fry (as I did the first few days until I discovered this feature).

One thing I was worried about when I adopted my all-scooter lifestyle was that I’d be getting less exercise. If scooting is so easy, surely I’ll spend less time walking. But this is a simple well-known error: increased access to (non-car) transportation on average increases physical activity, and indeed a quick glance at my iPhone’s step-tracking app doesn’t show a blip on the day I started scooting.

Conclusion: Scoot Free or Die

Bird Access has a funny feature: when you end each ride, it tells you how much you would have paid if you were paying. Over the last week I’ve take about 37 rides, which I would ballpark at around $100 (partly because I didn’t find the “lock” function mentioned above until about mid-week). In other words, you would have to be insane to pay money to live my all-scooter lifestyle. The logical, sensible thing to do would be to simply buy a personal scooter: even the high-end models top out at a few hundred bucks, after all.

But I don’t want to own a scooter. I don’t want to worry about it getting stolen, I don’t want to worry about maintaining it, I don’t want to worry about whether I’m over-charging it or under-charging it, and I don’t have anywhere to put it. What Bird Access offers is the best of both worlds: unlimited free access to scooters whenever and wherever I want them, and absolutely no responsibility for their care or maintenance. I hesitate to even call it a “business model,” since none of these micromobility companies has ever or will ever make any money, but as long as the rides are free, I’m scooting.

Heathrow Express versus Elizabeth Line

I’ve had a very interesting time over the last few months wrapping up planning my first international trip since 2020. One of the first things that surprised me when I started looking at getting to and from Heathrow was how cheap it was.

Now, there are lots of airports that offer cheap connections to downtown on public transit (the Silver Line connection from Boston’s Logan airport to South Station and travel onward on MBTA is completely free), but what surprised me was that ever since they opened Heathrow Express, the nonstop train between Heathrow and London’s Paddington Station, I’ve only heard complaints about how expensive it is. So here I was, staring at my computer screen, trying to figure out what I had done wrong. Why were they just charging me £5.50 for a 15-minute, nonstop train that drops me off at the front door of my hotel? What were people complaining about?

A few weeks went by as I finalized our return plans, then I hopped back onto the Heathrow Express site to book tickets back to Heathrow, and the price had jumped. It wasn’t extortionate, but now tickets from Paddington to Heathrow were £16.50. A price I was happy to pay, but I had to get to the bottom of it.

Fortunately this didn’t take very long: it turns out Heathrow Express runs a kind of primitive dynamic pricing system, with tickets starting at £5.50 “around” 90 days out, and increasing to £25 in roughly the two weeks leading up to your travel date. I say primitive because there appear to be a finite number of price points: £5.50, £10, £12.50, £16.50, £18, and £25, and they increase at roughly 2-3 week intervals, although sometimes prices dip and sometimes they pop, presumably around dates that are manually entered as “high” or “low” demand days.

What this means is that even if you are unsure of your travel dates, you are better off booking a couple of dates at the lowest rate far in advance than waiting until your plans are firmly settled, let alone booking a ticket on your day of arrival; if I had booked before finalizing my plans, I could have booked tickets on 3 different days for the same £16.50 I ultimately paid. Either way the tickets would be non-refundable and good only on the day of travel, but I could have preserved the optionality of a 3-day travel window, a worthy consideration given the current mess facing busy, understaffed airports in the UK and Europe.

Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Elizabeth Line

All of London is in a tizzy over the long-awaited opening of the Elizabeth Line, formerly known as Crossrail, which runs from Reading in the West to Shenfield in the East, with a spur running from Paddington to Heathrow, which reproduces the functionality of the Heathrow Express, although adding 10-20 minutes to the trip by making several intermediate stops.

My initial assumption was that the Elizabeth Line, as it is integrated into the London Underground, would be a low-cost alternative to the Heathrow Express, but oddly, this doesn’t seem to be the case, because the Underground charges fares on a point-to-point basis, and the Elizabeth Line fare is £10.80 (off-peak) or £11.50 (peak). Obviously that would be a sensible option if the alternative was paying £25, but if you’re able to plan even a month in advance, the Heathrow Express seems obviously superior in both cost and convenience.

The one wrinkle here appears to be that Transport for London caps the total amount you can be charged each day within their “zones 1-6,” which includes Heathrow and central London, at £14.10, and the £11.50 charged for the Elizabeth Line counts against that “cap.” That means if you do end up outside the cheapest Heathrow Express booking window and find yourself taking the Elizabeth Line instead, you should also use the same cap period (beginning at 4:30 am and ending at 4:29 am the next day) to explore as much of London by transit as possible, since you won’t pay more than £14.10 no matter how much you use the system within zones 1-6.

Conclusion

Given the current labor and COVID crisis in the UK I’m totally agnostic about which pieces of this trip will fly by seamlessly and which will require last-minute adjustments and accommodations, so I’m just trying to be as forearmed as I am forewarned. What else do I need to know about transit in London and the UK?

Hotels.com exemplifies the importance of redeemable intervals

Affiliate bloggers (and Secretaries of Transportation) love assigning a dollar value to miles and points, which makes it easy for them to compare the value of signup bonuses across currencies and manipulate their valuations when a particularly large referral bonus comes along.

There are naturally people for whom this approach makes sense, like mileage brokers who sell award tickets and hotel stays to folks who don’t know or care where they come from: selling a hotel stay that might cost $10,000 in cash for $5,000 can be a good deal for all involved if you only paid $1,000 for the points.

But this approach has never made any sense to me, since miles and points aren’t fungible. I can’t opportunistically earn 20,000 American miles, 20,000 Delta miles, and 20,000 Spirit miles and redeem them for a 60,000-mile United flight. If the United flight is the one I need to take, my other three currencies aren’t worth 2 cents each, or even one cent each: they’re worthless.

This is one reason I work to keep many of my balances as low as possible. I only have 797 Mileage Plus miles in my United account, and have no intention of earning more any time soon (despite having flown United last month and flying them again next week!). If any potential use does come up, I can transfer the precise number of United miles I need from Ultimate Rewards, and then draw my balance back down into the 3 digits, just where I want it to be.

There’s no better way to illustrate this than with the example of Hotels.com.

Stamps, rewards, and the importance of thinking in tens

To refresh readers’ memory, Hotels.com has an extremely simple rewards program: when you book a night through them, you receive a “reward stamp.” Collect 10 stamps, and you receive a “reward night.” You can then redeem reward nights at virtually all the properties on their platform for the average nightly rate you paid for your 10 reward stamps.

Importantly, however, if the stay you’re trying to book costs more than the value of your reward nights, you can simply pay the difference in cash to “top up” the value of the night. This makes the risk of breakage single-tailed: you can lose some of the value when booking a room cheaper than the value of your reward night, but you’re not penalized for booking a room that’s more expensive (although you won’t earn a stamp on those “top-up” nights).

There are therefore two ways of thinking about the value proposition of the Hotels.com rewards program:

• it offers a 10% rebate on each paid night you book through the platform;

• after the 10th night you book through the platform, you receive a voucher worth up to the average value of your last 10 nights.

Regardless of the approach, the value of the voucher doesn’t change. What changes is the value assigned to each night you book through Hotels.com. If you take the first approach, then when you book through Hotels.com you can mentally multiply the cost of your stay by 90% to reflect the 10% rebate the program offers. If you take the second approach, the first 9 nights you book through Hotels.com generate no value whatsoever — only the 10th night you stay generates any value at all.

I prefer the second approach, because focusing on redemption thresholds makes it easier to compare the relative value earned by booking through different channels, as a recent experience illustrates.

Last month we visited the Midwest for a week to see some friends and family, and the best price I found was, as usual, at a centrally located Hyatt Place downtown. The lowest rate I could find was $136.85 per night, plus tax, which is irrelevant regardless of the booking channel.

Where the booking channel comes in is that $958 spent on a paid Hyatt rate would earn me 4,790 base World of Hyatt points, and 958 bonus points as an Explorist member, for a total of 5,748 points.

Now look at this through the same two lenses as above. On the one hand, since I redeem World of Hyatt points I’ve transferred from Ultimate Rewards fairly regularly, the points I’d earn on this stay could be valued at a minimum of $71.85 — the value of the same Ultimate Rewards points when redeemed for paid airfare.

Through the second, redemption-focused perspective, 5,748 World of Hyatt points are essentially worthless, since 5,000 points is just barely enough to book a Category 1 property, and only during off-peak and standard pricing periods! That story would be completely different if I had an upcoming high-value Hyatt stay and insufficient points to book it. In fact, I have plenty of Hyatt points and free night certificates, so the additional points would simply sit in my account growing stale.

That may well have still been my best option. After all, 7 Hotels.com reward stamps are just as worthless as 5,000 World of Hyatt points. What changed the calculus is that I already had 4 Hotels.com reward stamps in my account that had been rolled over all the way from 2019! That meant “crediting” my Hyatt Place stay to Hotels.com would put me over the redemption threshold and earn me a reward night, in my case worth $141.88, which I promptly redeemed with a small top-up for a night on our upcoming trip to the UK.

Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed one small but potentially critical error I committed: I was sitting on 4 existing reward stamps and then credited another 7 nights to Hotels.com — leaving me with a worthless “leftover” reward stamp! It may have been strictly superior to credit 6 nights to Hotels.com (securing my reward night) and the cheapest of the 7 nights to World of Hyatt (to save future Ultimate Rewards points). I say “may” have been because I didn’t bother checking the rates for individual nights, and it may have turned out the one-night rate was substantially higher than the longer-term stay rate I ultimately booked, erasing the value of the additional World of Hyatt points.

Two additional considerations: cashback portals and the Hotels.com credit card

Just as I set aside taxes and fees above, since as far as I know they are not included in the earning calculation with any loyalty program, I also skipped over cashback portals, which typically offer 1-4% cashback on hotel bookings (including Hotels.com bookings), although with periodic outsized offers, like the current 9% cashback rate at IHG properties offered by TopCashBack. Since those offers are for cashback, and have relatively low cashout requirements, you should always check where your total rewards (loyalty program + cashback + credit card earnings) offer you the most redeemable value.

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Finally, it’s worth mentioning the no-annual-fee Hotels.com credit card. The card has a paltry signup bonus (three $125 reward nights after spending $5,000, which can’t be stacked but can be topped up), but the earning structure does offer one interesting opportunity: for every $500 spent on the card, you receive one Hotels.com reward stamp. As mentioned above, each reward stamp has an assigned value which is averaged into the value of your reward night. Hotels.com assigns these credit card reward stamps the value of $110, so if you put exactly $5,000 on the card (for example, to meet the signup bonus), you’d end up with a fourth reward night worth exactly $110.

If you squint at it just right, that means someone trying to sell you this card could in principle convince you the card has a $485 signup bonus and earns 2.2% on ongoing spend (a $110 reward night for every $5000 in purchases). But that’s not the interesting opportunity offered by the card. Instead, since you earn a $110 reward stamp every time you spend $500 on the card, it’s ideal for topping up your reward stamp balance when your existing stamps have a relatively high average value (and you don’t have upcoming Hotels.com stays booked).

To give a simple example, if you have 9 reward stamps with an average value of $250 each, manufacturing $500 in spend on the Hotels.com credit card doesn’t yield $11 in rewards (2.2%). Instead, it yields a reward night worth $236 ($2250 plus $110 divided by 10).

I wouldn’t say this “supercharges” the Hotels.com rewards program. What it does do is reduce the downside risk of orphaned reward stamps, so at the margin makes it more appealing to book hotels based on price through Hotels.com, knowing that every time you accumulate 6 or 7 reward stamps through stays you can easily calculate the final value of the resulting reward night you manufacture with the credit card.

And if, like me, you have no interest in active participation in loyalty programs like Marriott or IHG, but notice that their properties are occasionally attractive in terms of price, location, or amenities, especially outside of big cities, it may be worth taking a look.

Conclusion

I tailored this post to Hotels.com rewards but hopefully I’ve made clear the point is universal, and not just for people who keep their balances as low as possible like me. If you’re saving up points for a week-long stay at the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island you might well need 600,000 points and a free night certificate, for example. But you don’t need 610,000 points and a free night certificate — only the points you redeem have value, the 10,000 leftover points are just gonna sit there, getting stale.

Hilarious, humiliating admission by Bilt Rewards

I woke up this morning and, compulsively reaching for my phone, saw a tweet so embarrassing I had to read it 3 times to make sure I understood it correctly. Twitter user @playalaguna asked Richard Kerr, the Senior Director of Travel at Bilt Rewards, a perfectly sensible question: “Why is BILT rounding dollar amounts down on points, $2.99 crediting as $2. Most cards round up, at least when it is $.50 and above...”

Now, you may find this user’s tone a bit more aggressive than absolutely necessary, and you may find quibbling over a maximum of 3 Bilt Rewards points (since the co-branded credit card earns 3 points per dollar spent on dining) to be a bit extreme, but the quibble is a perfectly reasonable one, especially since as playalaguna mentions, virtually all rewards credit cards solve the problem by “erring” on the customer’s side.

Now consider the possible responses you could make as a high-profile figure in the travel hacking community and brand ambassador for your company. A few obvious options:

• Neutral: “Thanks for bringing this to our attention! We’ll reach out to our credit card partner and make sure points are awarded correctly going forward.”

• Apologetic: “Sorry about that! A lot goes into launching a brand new rewards program and credit card partnership, and we overlooked that. That’s why your feedback is so important to us.”

• Legal/Technical: “For privacy reasons our current relationship with Wells Fargo only allows us to see whole dollar amounts for transactions so we are only able to award points in whole dollar increments. We’re working to change that and we hope you’ll be patient as we resolve this issue.”

What did Richard Kerr say? “Economics for a startup worked on whole dollar spent. Now that we’re a year in, we’re looking at making all these rules and idiosyncrasies as rewarding as possible. Send me a DM and I’m happy to award you the point.”

This is an astonishing admission. Kerr is saying that not only was this “rounding down” a known issue, it was not a bug, but a feature of the program! Bilt Rewards deliberately short-changed its credit card users in order to award them as few points as possible, in order to keep people from reaching redemption thresholds as long as possible, in order to spend as little money as possible, in order to stretch their startup funding as long as possible.

To call this “customer-unfriendly” would be a gross understatement. It’s downright customer-hostile: the customer is the enemy at the gates, trying to get as much value as possible from our program, and our corresponding duty is to give them as little value as possible.

But more than that, it flies in the face of everything we know about how loyalty programs succeed. Rewards programs attract customers when they offer frequent positive reinforcement, even when the actual value of the rewards is negligible. A few weeks back I received my REI “dividend,” a coupon that can only be redeemed at REI, so I’m going to buy my new bike helmet at REI instead of on Amazon or at a local bike shop. A $15 quick endorphin hit is going to net REI a $45 sale, plus whatever else I pick up while I’m in the store.

Bilt took the opposite tack: overpromise, then underdeliver, or even better from their perspective, don’t deliver at all.

Quick hits: what's on my mind in June 2022

It’s been a pretty slow month in the travel hacking world, and nothing’s jumped out at me so far in terms of killer deals that needed to be passed along immediately, but I’ve been taking notes about a range of opportunities and situations that I thought it would be useful to dump into a single reference post for folks who may have missed them.

Summer hotel promotions

I try to keep my Hotel Promotions page mostly up-to-date, but even if I miss a promotion, it’s always essential if you’re staying at a chain hotel to do a little light Googling to make sure you’re registered for any promotions you’re eligible for. All the chains but Marriott are currently offering universal promotions, so be sure to register for them before you stay.

Hotels.com for non-chain and secondary chains

I recently made two reservations through Hotels.com, one for a 7-night Hyatt stay, and another for a 3-night stay at an independent hotel in England.

There are two important things to keep in mind about Hotels.com. First, stays do not earn elite night or stay credit with Hyatt. Second, they earn rewards through two separate mechanisms: through the portal you click through to Hotels.com, and through Hotels.com “stamps” and “reward nights.”

For non-chain hotels this is usually a no-brainer: a portal rebate (currently 4% cash back through TopCashBack) and a 10% rebate through Hotels.com each time you earn 10 stamps and a “reward night” equal to the weighted average of your Hotels.com rates.

For chain hotels the calculation is somewhat more complicated, since you need to take into account the value of any points and elite status you might earn, especially during particularly lucrative promotions or when chasing particularly valuable elite status.

Hilton 5th Night Free math

Hilton Honors points are almost mechanically worth between 0.4 and 0.5 cents each, although with the caveat of massive upside value at particularly expensive properties, and when using them for 5-night-free redemptions on particularly expensive nights.

There are two important things to keep in mind. Just as Hyatt conceals the total price of an award reservation unless you have sufficient points in your account, Hilton will not reveal the total price of a 5th-night-free reservation unless you have enough points to book the first 4 nights. Instead, Hilton will only show you the price of the first night of the reservation.

This raises the obvious question: is the 5th night “free” in the sense that the average price per night is reduced by 20%, or is the precise 5th night of the reservation free? The answer is that the 5th night is free, which means during periods of dynamic pricing, it’s ideal to time the 5th night of your stay to be the one charging the most points, in order to maximize the value of the benefit.

How to buy Hilton points: Points.com or Hilton reservation?

I needed about 9,000 Hilton Honors points to lock in one of our hotels in London, so my natural first instinct was to click through the TopCashBack portal to Points.com to check out how much those 9,000 points would cost me. The answer: $50, which minus the 2.5% cashback comes to $48.75.

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I then checked out the price of simply “topping up” my existing Hilton balance during the reservation process, and was quoted 34.65 GBP, or just $42.52 USD.

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In other words, it’s cheaper to top up a Hilton reservation through Hilton than through Points.com — even during a promotion, and even when clicking through a cashback portal. It’s a story as boring as it is true: if you don’t shop around, you won’t get the best price.

American Express Hilton Honors Surpass lounge access

This is a bit of a silly one since most obsessive travel hackers have at least one ultra-premium credit card that offers unlimited Priority Pass lounge access, but since I’ve returned to traveling in 2021 and 2022, I’ve really enjoyed the 10 free Priority Pass lounge visits provided by the American Express Hilton Honors Surpass card. The overwhelming majority of our trips are non-stop, but the occasional long layover or delay in Seattle and New Orleans in 2022 has been a terrific and genuinely valuable benefit at times when air travel can be stressful and overwhelming.

Bilt Rewards

Finally, earlier this year a slew of bloggers started promoting Bilt Rewards when they offered 500 supposedly-transferable points when you linked your World of Hyatt account to your Bilt account. I, like a lot of suckers, linked up all my loyalty accounts, and ended up with just 1,400 Bilt points, 600 points short of the amount they require to actually transfer your points to loyalty programs (it would have been 1,500 but I’ve never been able to successfully create a Turkish Miles&Smiles account, for whatever reason).

I’m not here to say whether Bilt is an “ethical” or “unethical,” “profitable” or “unprofitable” company. I’m only here to say that while it exists, you have to hammer it as hard as possible, and one piece of that is only linking your loyalty accounts during promotions. When Hyatt is offering 500 points, link away. When they offer 100 points per account, you will never earn enough points to get any value from the Bilt program; make them come to you.

Double booking into the same Delta award space

So-called “fare buckets” are a curious feature of the airline ecosystem. For the overwhelming majority of flyers, even frequent travelers, the wide-ranging alphabet of letters, usually shown in parentheses after the class of carriage, is simply irrelevant: most people book on some combination of convenience and price, or have little or no choice if they’re required to fly on tickets booked by their corporate travel office.

So fare buckets don’t matter at all — until they’re the only thing that matters. For example, American Express Delta Platinum companion tickets can only be used to book into the L, U, T, X, and V fare classes. If those fare classes aren’t available for the flight you want, you simply cannot use the companion ticket on that flight.

The other important use of fare buckets is for finding award space on foreign carriers, especially ones that won’t show you availability unless you have sufficient miles in your account. Expert Flyer has a paid service that allows you to see the inventory available in each fare bucket for hundreds of airlines.

It’s important to note that there’s nothing magical about fare buckets. There’s not a “fixed” inventory in each fare bucket that never changes. While I assume most if not all airlines assign inventory to fare buckets algorithmically, the algorithms were still written by humans. An algorithm might say, “if there are 6 or more seats available in First Class, make one available for awards.” If that award seat is then booked, the algorithm might run again and make another single award seat available. One of the Japanese airlines is famous for doing exactly this.

Double booking the last available seat on Delta

As I wrote last month, although I’d finally booked my outbound tickets to England with SkyMiles, the price in Mileage Plus miles had ticked back down to 30,000, and I hoped to cancel the Delta award ticket and rebook using worthless-to-me United miles.

Having successfully completed that switcheroo, and with my Delta award ticket instantly refunded, I turned to booking flights to Wisconsin for a June wedding. There’s a single nonstop flight per day, and I found a ticket available for 26,000 SkyMiles. Almost like the good old days! But when I confirmed the dates with my partner and started booking seats for two, the price had jumped to 28,000 SkyMiles each! A 4,000-mile penalty just for waiting a day to book?

You probably see where this is going: the lower-priced ticket was still available, but there was just one seat available in that fare bucket. When I searched for two tickets on a single search, I was shown the lowest fare bucket with two seats in it.

What to do? Well, as Derek Trotter would say, “he who dares, wins!” So I had my partner fire up her laptop and log into her own Delta account. With both of us searching for a single seat, we both saw the 26,000-mile award available.

We each selected a seat, plugged in our payment information, and gave it a dramatic countdown: 3, 2, 1, click!

And we both got the last 26,000-mile seat.

This is obviously, in one sense, an almost trivial anecdote. We both had 28,000 SkyMiles in our accounts so if either of our purchases had errored out with “this fare is no longer available” whoever lost would have restarted the search and forked over the extra 2,000 SkyMiles.

But upon a moment’s reflection, the opportunities begin to come into view.

First, there are lots of tickets that cost more than 26,000 SkyMiles! For example, a one-way flight to Maui from Los Angeles in First Class costs 66,000 SkyMiles on December 3, 9, and 10. But on December 9, only one seat is available for 66,000 SkyMiles — try to book two, and the price jumps to 85,000 SkyMiles each. More realistically for a travel hacker, that means 66,000 SkyMiles for the first and 85,000 SkyMiles for the second, still a difference of 19,000 SkyMiles.

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Second, lots of people travel in groups of more than two passengers. If scalable, for groups of 3 or more the savings start to look astronomical. A family of four might save 57,000 SkyMiles flying in First Class to Hawaii; almost the cost of the first ticket!

I think this is a pretty neat trick, but to bring down the temperature let me state the obvious caveats.

First, to simultaneously book awards you need multiple accounts with sufficient miles in each. For a lot of people in “two-player” mode that’s not a big deal, but if you’re trying to book your kids or parents who don’t play the game, you will quickly struggle to find enough miles in enough separate accounts. If you have friends or colleagues in the travel hacking community that’s a good option, although it will likely involve at least some Zooming and screen-sharing to make sure all the booking details are right for each passenger, plus getting the timing exactly right.

Second, I don’t know how scalable this is: maybe it works for two passengers but not three, maybe for three but not four. Presumably at some point when the cabin is actually full Delta will reject issuing the ticket, so it’s essential to select your seats (different seats!) during the checkout process to make sure there’s room in the cabin for everyone.

Finally, I have no idea if this works on partner or international awards. I was booking nonstop, Delta-operated domestic flights. Would connections break it? Would partner award availability break it? I simply don’t know.

Conclusion

Like everything in the travel hacking game, your mileage will vary. If anything comes from this post, let it be the recommendation to search for individual seats before you search for seats for your whole family, since whether or not this trick works for you, securing one or two low-level seats before paying more for more expensive seats is an easy way of saving miles anyone can enjoy.

While this trick almost won’t certainly work for everyone, on every flight, in every class of service, I wanted to pass it along because it worked for me.