Category: Travel Hacking

The Stunt

Sometimes travel hackers get stuck with a ticket that’s got a cancellation fee (I’m looking at you and your stupid $75 award ticket redeposit fee FlyingBlue) or a ticket that simply isn’t cancellable for any fee even if you’re Steve Buscemi (actually, especially if you’re Steve Buscemi). You’ve got two choices if your plans change and you’re not going to take one of those flights:

  • Pay the fee to cancel if you can, or just eat the ticket cost if you can’t
  • Play the odds and hope that you don’t need to do either of the above

Playing the odds means waiting for the airline to offer free changes or refunds due to one of:

When one of those things happens you won’t be taking off for Lubbock, but instead you’re headed to refund-town (but you’ve probably got to request the refund from the airline, and in some cases before departure). The odds aren’t great though; at best the chances of this working are somewhere between 1/6 and 1/10, unless you own a pregnant turtle.

The Gotchas

There are a few ways this can malfunction:

  • You forget to cancel before the cancellation window expires after the game didn’t work, which matters especially with programs like Virgin Atlantic that require you to cancel before the check-in window opens
  • You don’t request a refund in a timely manner from the airline
  • The airline disagrees about what a significant delay is (but 2+ hours is usually sufficient)

Personally I put a reminder in my phone for an hour before the flight or cancellation window, whichever comes first, to figure out whether the stunt is going to work and to pay the cancellation fee if I can and it didn’t.

Good luck!

AA’s new Flagship First catering meal concept: “playing chicken with an airline”. They’ll end up cutting the ketchup at launch for cost savings though.

Introduction

One of my favorite travel tools is seats.aero, a site that shows you inventory for award flight redemption availability across about a dozen mileage programs. It’s got limitations in that data is only available for certain routes, award discounts for elites and card holders aren’t included, data isn’t refreshed for hours or days depending on which searches have been run, and plenty of other small things too. But the tool is perfect for illustrating a concept in churning and travel hacking: By finding your perfect redemption, sometimes you also find someone else’s perfect redemption.

Background

I was looking for space to open on an international First award, and while I generally knew about when award space opened up on the potential routes that I wanted to fly, I wanted to fine-tune the timing with fresh data-points. So, a few weeks before when I thought the route would open:

  • I looked for where inventory was opening up on the routes I might take, using seats.aero and a couple of airline partner’s mileage programs
  • I saw that the routes I wanted usually opened up the morning US time, and usually 3-5 days out
  • I also saw that seats.aero wouldn’t see inventory right away, exactly as expected given how it works

My takeaway was that at five days out, I needed to search for the inventory I wanted every couple of waking hours, but especially in the morning.

The Ouchee

Starting five days out, here’s what happened:

  • T-5: No inventory
  • T-4: No inventory
  • T-3: No inventory

I did have a backup flight booked on British Airways, so there wasn’t a concern about getting home, but it’s British Airways. So late on the evening of T-3, let’s call it approximately T-2.5, I used seats.aero to look at business class availability on major routes from Europe to my preferred US airport to see what my best options were that weren’t British Airways.

Seats.aero showed plenty of cached results for my search, and I began investigating those on different airline websites. While I was exploring, seats.aero was running a real-time search in the background in another browser tab. I kept exploring and saw a notification from seats.aero pop-up, but because I’d just looked for space and it wasn’t there, I assumed the alert was for some other route that I was also monitoring.

Fast-forward a few minutes later to when I looked at the alert. It was for the flight and route that I wanted! So, I confirmed the space with a partner airline’s award search, then started to book it. But, the space vanished before I could complete the booking.

What happened? I’m certain that someone else had a seats.aero alert for the same route that I did, and they got the same alert after my real-time search showed that space had opened. Because I delayed by a few minutes, they got the flight before I did, and they found out about the flight because of me too.

The Band-Aid

I was annoyed at myself for a couple of minutes, but in my research I found that when one route had award availability open up, other routes usually did too. Since I’d only searched for one airport, seats.aero had only refreshed its inventory for that airport. No other alerts for other routes had likely gone out.

I searched my second best airport option, and First space was open there too. I booked that instead and got (mostly) the redemption I wanted.

The Takeaway

When you use a tool like seats.aero, PointsYeah, point.me, or Award Tool, that alerts based on the results it finds, you might trigger alerts for your competition too. When space really matters, consider skipping those tools and use airline award sites directly.

Of course the concept applies to manufactured spend, churning, and other branches of travel-hacking too, the implementation is just slightly different.

Happy hacking!

The magnitude of my ouchee.

Introduction

When snow starts falling, rental car discussion boards light up with questions like: “how do I guarantee I’ll get a four wheel drive car?”; “how do I make sure I’ll get an SUV?”; or “Help, Hertz filed a lawsuit for wrongful charges of car theft“. Yes, that last one isn’t a question, but unfortunately is real. Anyway, before we dive in to the travel-hacking side of those questions, let’s remember a few rental car basics:

  • Most car reservations are refundable
  • Most car reservations don’t have a no-show fee
  • Many car reservations don’t require a credit-card to hold
  • You can hold multiple car reservations, even at the same company

We can take throw each of the above into a blender and come up with a couple of strategies for getting a the car class you want, hopefully without paying extra.

The Strategy

The mechanics:

  1. Book cancelable reservations across several major companies
  2. Book the car class that you really want directly for 30 minutes after your original reservation
  3. Cancel the other reservations when you’ve got the car you want

When you show up at your destination, look in the company’s app or on the car lot for the type of car you want, and grab the one that has the best option. If you have multiple reservations with multiple companies, you’ll generally find something good. Assuming the best option doesn’t exist though, you can always fall back on the reservation booked in step 2. In practice, you probably won’t have to fall back often though.

Good luck friends!

Sneak preview of a future “Will it Blend?” episode: Hertz Lawsuit Papers.

When you’re traveling internationally, carrying a debit card that doesn’t charge foreign transaction fees or currency conversion fees, and that offers reimbursements on ATM operator fees is the second chapter of travel hacking 101. I conducted a non-scientific poll to see which card travel hackers prefer, and tallied the results from 10 probably made up respondents:

  • 8/10: Charles Schwab debit
  • 1/10: Random credit union debit card
  • 1/10: MEAB always spills too much or never enough

If you run a survey of popular travel blogs, you’ll find the same general distribution. The Schwab debit card is generally considered the gold standard, but regularly you’ll find stories about the card being fraud locked while you’re trying to use it. Those fraud locks require a call to Schwab to iron out, and while they’re quick, the friction is real.

There’s a better way though: Enable Schwab SMS account alerts, and rather than getting a fraud lock, you’ll get an SMS alert when an ATM transaction happens and you’ll be able to respond and clear the alert when Schwab suspects fraud. To enable:

Enable SMS and/or Push-notifications at Profile → Alert Settings. Just don’t confuse this with Profile → Alerts which is different somehow, duh.

Happy Wednesday!

Kermit demonstrates a different hangover recovery technique.

  1. The major airline shopping portals have a big holiday bonus promotion before black Friday, all of which are more lucrative than typical:

    – AA: 4,000 extra AAdvantage miles with $1,600+ through November 17
    – Alaska: 1,500 extra MileagePlan miles with $650+ through November 18
    – Delta: 2,000 extra SkyMiles with $1000+ through November 18
    – Southwest: 4,000 extra Rapid Rewards with $1,000+ through November 24
    – United: 5,000 extra MileagePlus miles with $1,200+ through November 22

    Giftcards.com is present on all of these portals.
  2. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards Mastercard, the Detlef Schrempf of credit cards, sent out beginning of the month offers:

    – 150,000 Shop Your Way points with $1,500 spend through December 31
    – 10% statement credit with $350-$400 spend in utilities each month through January (total $120)
    – $125 statement credit $600 spend in utilities, each month through January (total $375)

    My offer was stolen out of my glove by rabid baseball fans this month, or at least I assume that’s what happened. (Thanks to GoBolts, SPX, BrandonV, IAD_Flyer, and birt)
  3. AirFrance / KLM’s FlyingBlue has renewed its paid status match for non-SkyTeam airlines through October 2025. Notable in this iteration is that it’s possible for to match to a full 12 months of Platinum status in Canada for $499 CAD.

    I suppose an American with status in Air Canada could match too with a sleight of hand, and for the right use case Platinum is absolutely worth $499 CAD. I mean, what could that possibly be in US dollars? $20? $25? Yes I could look it up, but [insert excuse here].
  4. AirFrance / KLM’s FlyingBlue has released its November promo awards. North American cities include Boston, New York, Vancouver, Denver, Seattle, and Ottawa, with tickets at 15,000 miles to and from Europe each way in economy for travel through April 2025.

    I’m also seeing limited availability promotional business class awards from Seattle and Denver, the only two cities I bothered to check, for 50,000 FlyingBlue miles each direction.
  5. American Express Offers has new offers valid through December 31 for:

    – 30,000 Membership Rewards with $2,000 at ANA
    – $100 statement credit after $500+ with Delta
    – $250 statement credit after $1,000+ with Delta
    – $75 statement credit after $300+ at US and Europe Destination by Hyatt properties

    The easiest hotel play is to buy a gift card at the front desk. For airlines, it’s figuring out how to refund to a travel bank or travel wallet for future use. Gamers may find more lucrative options too.

Happy Monday!

More outsized value: Multi-country soda arbitrage.

Last week we had a brief interlude about how an unredeemed point is worth nothing. It’s definitely true, but there’s a corollary for travel hackers:

Outsized Value Requires a Baseline Stash of Points

Chapter 6 Title from MEAB’s fictitious book, “Churning, Travel Hacking, and Selected Croissant Recipes”

Most bank points can be converted to cash for around 1 to 1.5 cents each, and most airline points have a baseline value in the same ballpark too. With that metric it’s easy to say that a credit card sign-up bonus of 90,000 points is worth somewhere around $900 to $1,450.

When you get a stash of points, it’s almost never a bad idea to cash out, invest that cash or use it in your velocity roll, and start earning a new stash. Then the value of your cashed out points grows with other investments.

You can take cashing out too far though. What if, for example, you’re in Germany on vacation and looking to fly home in the nose of a 747-800 in Lufthansa First? You could buy a ticket for over $10,000, or if you’re lucky you can grab a First Class award ticket for about 90,000 points with Avianca Lifemiles; but only if you haven’t cashed out all of your points. That redemption is rather outsized at more than 10 cents per point in replacement cost value, obviously more than the 1 to 1.5 cents value on a cashing-out basis.

It’s easy to see a strategy emerge: Keep a baseline of points big enough to meet your short term travel needs, and cash out the rest. What does short term mean? That depends on how quickly you earn points I suppose.

Happy Thursday!

A sample recipe from “Churning, Travel Hacking, and Selected Croissant Recipes”.

The Game

Major US and European airlines will usually tinker with published schedules until about two months prior to departure, and most also let you switch to another flight or get a free refund when the schedule changes or a flight is cancelled. That leads to a game, especially when you can cancel tickets for little to no penalty if your game doesn’t work:

When you’re booking travel far out and your preferred date and time costs too much, book a flight that will likely have a schedule change so that you can switch to the expensive, ideal flight instead.

The Mechanics

How do you know which flights are most likely to have a schedule change? Look at both current flights and historical flights on a site like FlightRadar24 or FlightAware to see what an airline usually flies, then look for flights in the future with different schedules. Alternatively, take a look at what they’re selling in the near future and extrapolate.

For example, let’s say you want to fly from Salt Lake City, UT to Boise, ID on a Sunday. Currently, scheduled non-stop flights on Delta for Sundays in July leave at:

  • 8:06 AM
  • 11:00 AM
  • 3:45 PM
  • 10:50 PM

In Spring of 2025, the schedule looks almost the same:

  • 8:45 AM
  • 11:00 AM
  • 3:35 PM
  • 5:54 PM
  • 11:00 PM

But, the schedule has a smoking gun – that 5:54 PM flight doesn’t currently exist, and it probably won’t exist by the time Spring 2025 rolls around (#RemindMeOfThisPostIn2025). When that flight is inevitably cancelled, you’ll be able to switch to another day, a different flight on the same day, or if you’ve really got rizz, perhaps even switch to a different airport.

What Could go Wrong?

There are of course caveats:

  • Past performance doesn’t guarantee future results
  • Holidays mess up schedules
  • Football games and major concerts lead to one-off flights
  • Lubbock only has once daily frequencies

The best news is that you can probably play this game with three or four airlines at minimum, so you’ve got multiple shots at getting your way.

Good luck and happy Wednesday!

Honorary travel hacking shirt awarded only to those that can turn an SLC-BOI schedule change into an LAX-HNL flight.

Very few companies have a monolithic technology stack. That means you’ll often find different behavior with:

  • Mobile apps versus a website
  • Older terminal hardware versus newer hardware
  • Android apps versus iOS apps
  • Version 1.0 versus version 1.1

Ok cool. How about a few specific examples?

  • FlyingBlue will show different pricing and availability on AirFrance’s site than KLM’s
  • Turkish Airlines fails to ticket some itineraries on desktop, but they’re easily bookable in the app
  • Older Walmart terminals behave differently than newer terminals
  • Some Kroger registers auto-drain cards, others won’t
  • Old school bill payment platforms charge different fees based on what you use to start a payment

Ok, cool again. Now why should you care?

  • Different technologies get different results, which leads to conflicting data points. Not all conflicts are easily explained by different technology stacks, but a surprising number are
  • Fees, funding methods, and functionality often differ. Can’t get that payment to go through on the desktop? Maybe hit up the mobile app. Mobile app doesn’t work? How about the prior version?

Good luck, and have a nice weekend!

Even shoes have different technology stacks.