A question we get quite often: "Which miles should I earn?" Our response is usually: "What are your travel goals?" -- just as vague as the question asked. The aim is to get the person thinking first about what they want to do and then earn points towards that goal. If the answer is "Europe [...]
Category: points
Use miles and points first then money as a last resort!
Those of us who have been in the miles and points "game" or "hobby" for a long time and have amassed large balances in our miles and points accounts can sometimes struggle to spend them. We all have/had visions of the "perfect redemption" sometimes with very specific flights, routes, aircraft, even specific seats in mind. [...]
Reducing or Removing the cost of paid cash airfares
Here at AwardBookingSerivce.com our focus is to help clients use their miles to book flights. This usually means redeeming miles from major carriers for long haul international itineraries. We get our clients flights for pennies on the dollar since they only have to pay the taxes and fees out of pocket. This is where your [...]
Award Booking Tip: Get more than one opinion!
We recently completed a booking for a client who wanted to use his Miles & More miles (Lufthansa) to get from Europe to Australia. We were able to locate availability in business class for his desired travel dates and we began the process of actually booking the ticket. Since some of the flights were on [...]
Delta Airlines make SkyMiles devaluation again without notice!
Just 2 days ago Delta used to charge 70,000 SkyMiles one way for a USA - India (or vice-versa) in business class. That price has now jumped to 97,500 SkyMiles one way for the same flight at the lowest level. That is a 40% increase with no warning. They still have not said anything since [...]
United makes stealth devaluation of award tickets without warning!
United announced a little while back they would be making a change the MileagePlus program to severely limit stopovers on round trip award tickets. This was not good but we have seen worse devaluations in the miles and points world recently. I thought we could live with it. The change took place on October 6th, [...]
Paying Cash for Airfare can make sense — but not most of the time
Award Booking Service focuses on redeeming your miles for flights for international trips. These represent the best general value of using miles and points for travel (most of the time). One downside of miles and points--for the most part--is they cannot be used for every single flight on the schedule. They are capacity controlled either [...]
Delta Skymiles: NOW Is the time to redeem!
Delta recently announced that they will be switching to "dynamic pricing" for awards. This means they are no longer follow a set of award charts and can and will charge whatever they feel like in terms of miles required to redeem. This is effective immediately for flights booked and flown from June 1, 2016 and [...]
How to be successful booking your next award ticket
In the past year or so using your miles and points to book award tickets has become more difficult. Availability is decidedly less than it was less than 2 years ago. The main reason behind the decline in reduced award seat availability is the improved global economy. Airlines are selling more seats for cash and [...]
Now is the time to redeem your Delta Skymiles!
Lately we have seen quite a bit of negative press surrounding the still unannounced changes to the Delta Skymiles program. This has caused many to start redeeming their Skymiles as soon as possible. These negative changes include: Complete removal of award charts from Delta.com No low Level 1 awards on Delta flights less than 21 [...]