Full Circle

It was a little less than a year ago that I began playing the miles game.

It was probably just about a year ago that I spent just under $8000 on plane tickets for my family of five to fly to Japan.

So it felt pretty good yesterday to complete the booking of our trip to Japan this summer using only American air miles and about $400 in booking fees and taxes.

I ended up booking five round-trip tickets in economy from Portland to Oakland to Honolulu to Kansai international and back.

I used 250,000 American airlines Aadvantage miles and 60,000 Starwood miles (which converted to 75,000 Aadvantage miles) all obtained through credit card churns.

I’m certainly no expert in booking award travel, but I learned a lot in the process and I figured it might be worth sharing some pearls (from a novice perspective.)

So here are the lessons I learned from this award booking.

1. Book segment by segment starting with the most difficult segment.

In this award the most difficult segment was between the Bay Area and Honolulu (surprisingly) so I built the trip around the availability of this part of the route.

2. Starpoints are incredibly powerful both for their 1:1.25 transfer ratio to most airlines, as well as to their extreme flexibility in terms of airline partners.

3. When booking with two award accounts, the way you book the tickets makes a big difference in terms of fees. I was originally going to split the families one ways each way between my wife and my accounts which would’ve doubled our telephone booking fees.

By rebooking them as three and 2 separate roundtrips we got around this.

4. Free one ways on American Airlines are close to impossible if you are not originating your travel from an international gateway city.

5. With a family of five you simply cannot have too many miles or miles currencies.

6. Although the best thing about learning the miles game is that it gave me the skills and confidence to pursue early retirement, there’s something pretty darn magical about booking a trip like this for such a reasonable price.

So this was definitely proof of concept.

And although we will not be flying first class anywhere or sampling any of the excellent premium class products this time around I definitely feel as if I won the lottery.

Only in America is such bounty readily available.  Only in America.