I love getting deals on airline tickets. For a little effort you can maximize your savings. A friend of mine values tickets at 2 cents/mile to redeem or earn. Well Hawaii is always a trip to buy your ticket unless it's a holiday. The miles are usually outrageous and it's not worth using more than 25k miles on a ticket. Why?
Well I just got a roundtrip ticket from the West Coast for $379 each into Honolulu. We still probably have to pay more for an inter-island flight but that is a great price. Of course it was a hacker fare, ie we're going on one airline and coming back on another. And I have a huge headache after dealing with Hawaiian Airlines.
First off I bought tickets yesterday but you have 24 hours to cancel a reservation free so I always check and rebook until the last possible second. Yesterday I bought 3 roundtrip tickets each for $506 = $1518 total for me and two kids. Today I just spent $1107 round trip for the 3 of us! I saved us $411 or the price of an entire ticket. It's unlikely I'll get a better deal so I'm ready to rest on my laurels.
How'd I get a deal? Well we're going each for $210 one way for me and the kids. Then coming home we are paying $159 one way for each of us. The ticket coming home was $210 so the true cost of the airfare roundtrip is $420. However we had a $50 credit each on our tickets bringing the one way price to $159.
The headache? Using the $50 voucher each. Booking each return ticket individually is fine if you are an adult. But the website makes it impossible to book as a travel alone minor. UGGGH. I was on hold dealing with websuport and being transferred from department to department. It was so frustrating.
But in the end I saved $150 in vouchers and the ticket prices dropped from $506 to $420 so I saved $86/per person which is why I spent time working on our flights.
Hawaii here we come. Now if we got the cheapest mileage ticket at 25k each which equals 1.68 cent/mile. That's not bad, but typically for hawaii I will pay something ridiculous like 80k miles round trip for $1600 ticket so it's above 2 cents/mile which makes the mileage worth using.
I'm not an expert but a friend of mine is. He games the system and has done mileage runs for maximizing miles and getting platinum upgrades. So he usually evaluates my deal and tells me to buy or use miles. He said for the average person getting 2 cents/mile payout on your miles is phenomenal, while 1 cent/mile is average. Anything less it's worth holding the miles for emergencies.
I can't wait to go home with the kid. I also postponed buying our tickets to see if DH would get into his bootcamp which he did. That means he'll be too busy to miss us and we can afford the trip on our budget.
Hacker Fare and $50 savings
December 12th, 2015 at 09:29 pm
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