London and Paris - Flying for (sort of) free

---

This is the first of a series of posts on our trip to London and Paris. More on the destinations later, but first, let's talk about how we got there.

In a prior blog (part II, actually) on How we make it work, I gave an example where we were able to save quite a bit on a flight to Florida by being flexible and watching carefully for deals to nearby cities. Now, I'd like to take this tip a step farther and show how you can stack up multiple tricks, promotions, and deals to make flying internationally affordable.

The Deal

In short, this trip was paid for with US Airways Dividend miles. Normally, such a trip would be 60,000 miles per person round trip, and I wouldn't count this as a good deal, but this is just the start.

The catch?

I have never flown on US Airways.

The Promotion(s)

• US Airways is known as a seller of miles. Meaning that they frequently run promotions offering 100%!b(MISSING)onuses on purchased, gifted, or transferred Dividend Miles. Under the best promotions, you can usually buy miles for about 1.1 cents per mile, which is a reasonable value for miles. More frequently, they are in the 1.9 cents per mile range, which is really only good to get those last miles or if you can find a really good value for those miles when redeeming.
• US Airways also ran a bit of a game in the past called the Grand Slam, in which they gave away literally tens of thousands of miles for various activities including staying at a hotel, purchasing items online through their portal (which typically earns miles anyway), and even buying Biscotti spread.
• The US Airways credit card is normally not a great way to earn miles, but it does give up to 40,000 miles for signing up. Now, this does earn you a credit pull which can affect your report, but savvy travel hackers know that this impact is minimal and can in the long term help your credit by increasing total credit available.
• The second key benefit of this card is that it gives a 5,000 mile per ticket discount on US Airways award flights.
• Several airlines have discounted 'off peak' seasons in which you can get an award flight at a significant discount. In the case of US Airways, this 60,000 mile round trip to Europe becomes a 35,000 mile trip if you fly in the off peak season (Jan 15 - Feb 28), which is combined with the 5,000 mile discount for a net 50%!d(MISSING)iscount of <strong style="font-size: 1.4rem;">30,000 miles per person.



There are, of course, some taxes when redeeming miles which can be on the order of hundreds of dollars depending on the route, but we'll talk more about this later. Doing some math, is is apparent that you can essentially purchase an award ticket for around $330 + taxes by buying the miles at 1.1 cents per mile. This is a really good deal for Europe, but there are some catches.

The Tricks

The first major glitch with this plan is a common problem when redeeming miles...no available seats (at the cheapest award level). This problem is further complicated when searching for <em style="font-size: 1.4rem;">5 seats for our family. Now, every airline is different, but as an example, flights from Austin on US Airways typically do not have more than 2 award seats available unless you are booking a last minute flight. In addition, the terms of the promotions above require all travel to be on US Airways flights and not their more award-friendly partner United. In our case, we couldn't even split up our reservations onto different flights because there was not a single flight with 3 seats available (3 + 2 would have worked).





So, what now?



Be flexible. As was the case in the aforementioned post, being flexible can really help to make more options open up. In our case, we could also fly out of San Antonio (not helpful), Houston-IAH, and Dallas-DFW. I was also flexible enough to be OK with flying to any of a number of destinations in Europe, and even fly on an open jaw ticket, where you fly into one airport/city and out of another. As you can see, there are numerous combinations to evaluate, and it took me a solid 2 weeks of entering various routes and dates to find something that works. Some limitations that hindered my search were that we wanted to spend no longer than a 5 week days, preferably leaving/returning on weekends, and we all needed to be on the same transatlantic flight.



Be mindful of hidden costs. London worked really well for domestic connections. However, flying to London is cheaper than flying from London. Why? Most European countries levy hefty departure taxes which are dependent on the distance flown from their airport. The UK has one of the highest departure taxes. To get around this, try flying home from a different airport (possibly using an open jaw, which is free on award tickets). Brussels was a particularly cheap option, although there weren't any flights available on dates that we could use. Paris wasn't really cheap, but offered a bit of savings over London when multiplied by 5 travelers. Other advantages of Paris are that it is quick and easy to transit from London via Eurorail, and it allows us to visit 2 cities without having to pay for a return train to London.
In the end, we were able to find award space on two different domestic flights leaving from DFW, flying on the same transatlantic flight to London, then returning in the same manner from Paris. The two major consolations included being split up on 2 legs of the trip and having a tiring 6 hour layover in Philadelphia, arriving in DFW at 11:30pm on Sunday night. I was perfectly OK with this as-is, but had another Ace in my pocket...



Take advantage of schedule changes. Most people dread the schedule change. It means they have to change or rework their schedule to make do. In this case, I was betting on a change. Why? Because when a schedule change occurs, it gives a person a free change pass, even if award space is not available! So, I was hoping for a schedule change in order to combine our separate itineraries onto the same flight and improve our travel times.
Did it work? Well, I make the reservation about 11 months in advance, giving US Airways ample time to make changes. In the end, we actually were subjected to no less than 4 schedule changes which eventually allowed us to be on the same flight and reduce our layover down to a more reasonable few hours. It did take a bit of work to check for schedule changes periodically (made easy by Awardwallet) and make a few phone calls each time to change accordingly.

In the end

We were able to redeem 150,000 miles (half the normal saver rate) for a trip to London, leaving from Paris (with a really nice ride through the Chunnel in between). Total out of pocket costs included $145 per person for taxes/fees and about $100 per person for the purchase of miles to top off our Dividend miles accounts. The real cost of this trip, including the value of miles previously earned would total about $450 per person, a pretty good deal for a field trip to Europe.

---