Miles and Money: need creative ideas

I have 100K AA miles to use. We have 4 people who need to return from a cruise that ends in Venice August 20. Unfortunately, we have to return that exact date to any airport in Washington or Philadelphia. Cruise arrives in Venice 19 August afternoon, so early time of departure Aug. 20 would not be a problem. Two of us also need to fly from either WAS or PHL to TLV around August 1 (+/- 2 days).

Two people need only a one way flight from VCE to WAS or PHL. I have a 30K award on hold for one of them at AA on USAirways. There are other AA 30K awards, but most of them involve BA and a change of airports in London.

The best options I can come up with are the following:

1. Spend $1374 ($2748) each for two multi city tickets WAS-TLV and VCE to WAS, on USAirways. Also use 30K for the one way VCE to WAS flight on USAirways and another 65K for the last one way VCE to WAS ticket (same flight. Advantage of this plan is that the first two people still collect AA miles, and we're all on the same flights for the return.

2. Use 45K miles x 2 (90K total) for the first two people to obtain an AA award WAS to TLV on USAirways. Spend $2248 ($562 pp) for 4 one way flights from VCE to BWI on Lufthansa/Condor Airlines (including paying extra for seat selection, entertainment, and food). Disadvantage of this plan is that no one collects AA miles, connection time in Frankfurt is over 4 hours, and return would be later.

What are your thoughts on these 2 plans? Do you have any other creative ideas of how to maximize benefits of miles and money? We don't all have to fly on the same flights if the cost would be significantly less ($300) to split up.

I have 100K AA miles to use. We have 4 people who need to return from a cruise that ends in Venice August 20. Unfortunately, we have to return that exact date to any airport in Washington or Philadelphia. Cruise arrives in Venice 19 August afternoon, so early time of departure Aug. 20 would not be a problem. Two of us also need to fly from either WAS or PHL to TLV around August 1 (+/- 2 days).

 

Two people need only a one way flight from VCE to WAS or PHL. I have a 30K award on hold for one of them at AA on USAirways. There are other AA 30K awards, but most of them involve BA and a change of airports in London.

 

The best options I can come up with are the following:

 

1. Spend $1374 ($2748) each for two multi city tickets WAS-TLV and VCE to WAS, on USAirways. Also use 30K for the one way VCE to WAS flight on USAirways and another 65K for the last one way VCE to WAS ticket (same flight. Advantage of this plan is that the first two people still collect AA miles, and we're all on the same flights for the return.

 

2. Use 45K miles x 2 (90K total) for the first two people to obtain an AA award WAS to TLV on USAirways. Spend $2248 ($562 pp) for 4 one way flights from VCE to BWI on Lufthansa/Condor Airlines (including paying extra for seat selection, entertainment, and food). Disadvantage of this plan is that no one collects AA miles, connection time in Frankfurt is over 4 hours, and return would be later.

 

 

What are your thoughts on these 2 plans? Do you have any other creative ideas of how to maximize benefits of miles and money? We don't all have to fly on the same flights if the cost would be significantly less ($300) to split up.

A couple of questions...

1. How are the other two pax getting to your cruise departure city (I'm guessing Barcelona?)

2. How are you getting from TLV to the same place?

Looking at ITA, the 8/1 PHL-TLV and 8/20 VCE-PHL openjaw flights are now showing $1265 per person, so that sounds to me like a pretty good deal.

I'm not seeing any SAAver seats (30K) on VCE-PHL/WAS on the 20th, only "AAnytime" seats (65K). I can, however, see a one-way fare on Turkish Airlines (with a short layover in Istanbul) to IAD of $620 for the 20th, so it raises the question of how much are your miles worth to you. Maybe your SAAver seat is still on hold and it's only one person that's hung up, or maybe the hold has lapsed and now you're stuck with 2 pax with no easy mileage-using route.

The way I see it (and others are free to disagree) my miles are worth something, and the benchmark I use is 2.5c per mile. Some set the rule of thumb lower, but it's all about "opportunity cost."

Setting the $620 fare against a 65,000 mile award means that the equivalent value of the miles is under 1c apiece. Even adding one seat at 30K miles and the other at 65K (i.e. 95K miles for two pax) and multiplying the $620 TK fare x 2, it still comes out to less than 1.5c per mile used.

By comparison, your 100,000 AA miles could get two round-trip first class tickets within the USA (say PHL-SFO/LAX-PHL) that would cost $1500 each to buy, so a value of 3c per mile.

This is all a personal thing, but if I were in your situation, and not knowing the answer to my two questions, I'd probably go with the two PHL-TLV//VCE-PHL open jaws, and have the other two pax ride on Turkish (or Lufthansa/Condor) on revenue tickets, and save the miles for a more cost-efficient use.

As you can see, using frequent flyer miles for rifle-shot peak season schedules is a real crapshoot. If you had an extra day, it would be a lot easier, because you could position yourselves to somewhere else from Venice (which is a real bear for flights using AA or US miles because AA tries to push you to BA, and BA flies from Venice mostly to Gatwick, not Heathrow, in addition to adding its horrendous fuel surcharges to the price of award tickets.) For example, if you could get to Zurich on the morning of the 20th, you could get SAAver awards on US nonstop to PHL; same goes for Brussels and Frankfurt. But you can't - there either aren't connecting flights, or the cost of the one-way ticket is so high that it negates the benefits.

Now having said all that, I just looked at the US nonstop VCE-PHL flight and it's quite empty so far, with many of the low-bucket seats still for sale. There's nothing as of now in the SAAver award bucket, but it's entirely possible that additional 30K seats could be released long before the flight date. But that too is a crapshoot; it's impossible to know when the Hogwarts graduates in AA/US revenue management will decide to release more cheap award inventory.

One final question, maybe unrelated to anything in particular, but are you regular travelers to Israel? How about other travel - both domestic (US) and foreign? A lot of cruisers hop around the globe satisfying their addiction, if you get my meaning.

The reason I ask is that I'm a big proponent of round-the-world airline tickets, which are priced very differently depending on where you buy the ticket and start/finish the circle. And for the time being, with the strong dollar, Europe is surprisingly affordable as a starting and end point for RTW tickets sold by Oneworld airlines (AA, US, BA etc.) A 3-continent RTW ticket, good for 16 flights over 12 months, sold in any Euro-zone country, costs around $2200 plus taxes. Up to six of those flights are allowed within North America, and up to four each within Europe and Asia. The same ticket bought and started in the US is $4000 by comparison.

So imagine this... You use 30,000 of your FF miles to fly to, say, Berlin. Pick up your RTW ticket and fly on the first segment to Tel Aviv. From TLV, fly to (I'm guessing) Barcelona for your cruise. Then use the ticket to fly home from Venice.

Over the next few months, use the North American segments to fly - where? - to Alaska for a one-way cruise back down to Vancouver? To Miami for a Caribbean cruise, or maybe to LA for Mexican one? Anyway, before a year is up (from the Berlin-Israel flight) you cross the Pacific - maybe via Hawaii? - to Asia. Cherry blossoms in Japan? A beach in Bali? No sweat, then you fly back to Germany (any city) and the trip's done. Use more miles (you'll have earned a ton during the RTW trip) to get home.

All this for about $160 a flight - okay for Philly to Miami, helluva deal for Chicago to Hong Kong, or, well, Venice to Philly.

Here's just an imaginary sample of what this might look like over a year. Maybe food for thought?

You certainly did come up with a creative idea!

However, when I checked very early this morning and found that AA released an additional 30K award for VCE to WAS 8/20, I immediately put it on hold. So now I have two 30K tickets on hold for that flight. Because I was able to get the two Saver awards, I decided to go ahead and purchase the multi-city flights as mentioned above. You're right about BCN. All four of us will fly from TLV to BCN on Vueling. No, we're not regular travelers. In fact, I'll use up my entire vacation time for the year with this one trip, but I'll keep your suggestion in mind for when I retire.