Saturday, August 09, 2008
Travel Rewards Pay for the Trip
Time to start reflecting on the trip, the pros, the cons, the costs, and the benefits. Using the Delta Website, I looked up what 4 nonrefundable, coach class, tickets would cost for a flight from Pasco, WA, to Reagan National - leaving on a Tuesday and returning on a Tuesday two weeks later. The quote I got was $5884 or $1471 per person. Of course that reflects much inflation since we booked our SkySaver tickets in October last year. Our flights cost us 75,000 miles from Delta and 20,000 miles from Alaska, which translated to $40 in fees to book using miles. Even if the tickets had been $1000 apiece last October we still paid for the trip with the miles alone.
We also saved $2440 on lodging. That's what the reward nights amounted to in avoided room charges, excluding room and sales taxes, which could easily add another 10-15% to that total - as those charges are also avoided when redeeming reward nights. Granted, if we had to pay for our own hotel rooms, there would have been more budget choices selected. However, there are no real budget choices for hotels convenient to DC, Boston, or Chicago. So, the savings were calculated as though we would have stayed in the same properties and paid the AAA rate.
So, the flights and lodging savings amount to $8324 - the amount we would have had to spend to take the same flights and stay in the same hotels paying market rates. The next post will discuss the detailed costs we actually did incur. Rough figuring in my head, we spent $2000-$2500, but I need to pile up the receipts and do some math. Stay tuned.
We also saved $2440 on lodging. That's what the reward nights amounted to in avoided room charges, excluding room and sales taxes, which could easily add another 10-15% to that total - as those charges are also avoided when redeeming reward nights. Granted, if we had to pay for our own hotel rooms, there would have been more budget choices selected. However, there are no real budget choices for hotels convenient to DC, Boston, or Chicago. So, the savings were calculated as though we would have stayed in the same properties and paid the AAA rate.
So, the flights and lodging savings amount to $8324 - the amount we would have had to spend to take the same flights and stay in the same hotels paying market rates. The next post will discuss the detailed costs we actually did incur. Rough figuring in my head, we spent $2000-$2500, but I need to pile up the receipts and do some math. Stay tuned.
Labels: cross country drive budget, delta sky miles, how we did it, travel rewards, trip planning
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