As I’ve mentioned the past two Sundays, I want to use Sunday’s post as an outlet. With my Sunday posts I hope to write about what I’m thinking about the world of travel, miles, and points. This won’t be any hard-hitting how to material, but instead just a broad generalization. So if you came to this post hoping to learn something, feel free to tune back in later in the week.
With that, I want to discuss something that really upsets me the more I see it. I want to discuss the whole “Travel Is Free” concept. Before you ask, no I’m not picking on the website with that same title. Instead, I’m talking about the literally 100s of “Influencers” who post photos of themselves in business class cabins and claim the experience is “free.” Even more specifically, I’m picking on the folks who follow you on Instagram only to unfollow you later in hopes to gain more followers…
Reward Travel Is Absolutely NOT Free
First off, before we dive any deeper, with any reward ticket there are taxes, fees, and occasionally fuel surcharges attached to the ticket. For example, when booking an American Airlines transatlantic business class fare you must pay a small fee of $5.60 on top of the 57,500 miles. There you have it, not free.
If you plan on trying to use your miles to fly with British Airways First Class you’re going to end up paying at least a few hundred dollars in fuel surcharges. I’ve been trying to book a seat on British Airways Flight 001 from London City Airport to New York (JFK). I want to fly that flight because it’s operated by an all business class Airbus A318. However, that ticket is going to cost me 57,000 miles and over $500 in fuel surcharges, each way. Again, not free.
It’s essentially the same story no matter what carrier you look at. Now, it’s worth noting that some rewards programs do not impose fuel surcharges. For example, if you’re booking a Lufthansa First Class ticket you can either use 110,000 United miles and pay a $100+ fee, or you can use Avianca Lifemiles and use 87,000 miles and pay a small $5.00 fee.
It Takes A Lot Of Time To Learn This Stuff
Before I just mentioned it above, did you know about Avianca Lifemiles? Did you know that you can credit every single one of your domestic United flights to the Avianca program? Lastly, did you know that you can transfer your Starwood Preferred Guest hotel points to Avianca? My guess is that you did not. If you did, congratulations, but you are 100% in the minority on this.
The truth is, there are literally hundreds of rewards programs and understanding them all takes a ton of time. When I started doing this I tried to learn as much as I could. I studied up on the OneWorld Alliance first as American is my primary carrier. Next, I started to learn about Star Alliance with is even larger and more complicated. Eventually, I gave up and decided to dedicate all of my focus toward OneWorld, for now.
It’s Not Always Easy To Find What You Want
Great, so let’s now assume that you do have a good handle on all of this and you’re ready to take your first incredible award flight. You’ve put your PTO request 6 months in advance and you’re ready to take that dream trip to Italy and Spain. You want the trip to be special so you decided that you’re going to use all of the miles you’ve earned over the past few years flying to Omaha to fly business class.
At this point you’re extremely excited about the prospect of finally sitting in the front of the plane. So, you log in to your frequent flyer account and begin searching for flights. You type in your dates and hit submit. As you sit there, waiting for the flights to load you’re imagining all of the Champagne and warm nuts you’re going to get on the plane. Then, boom, no flights mach your criteria. That’s right, the dates you wanted to travel do NOT have business class flights available. Well, there’s one, but you have to overnight in Columbus Ohio.
That’s right, it’s often difficult to find exactly what you’re looking for when searching for award travel. The fact of the matter is, if you really want to fly for “free” you need to be flexible. While that’s easy for some of us, others don’t have the luxury of taking PTO whenever they please.
Miles And Points Cost Money
Sure, you may be earning all of these points and miles from business travel where you’re not paying out of your own pocket, but someone is. Likewise, each time you swipe your credit card to earn points you’re spending money. Those awesome 50,000+ sign-up bonuses cost money. Often you have to spend $3,000+ in 90 days to earn any substantial mile bonus. I wouldn’t dare argue that $3,000 is free.
The truth is, if you’re not willing to open/close multiple credit card accounts and you don’t travel extensively for work, it’s hard to earn any substantial number of miles. Let’s say you have the Chase Sapphire Reserve card and need 50,000 points for your perfect award flight. You’d have to spend nearly $17,000 on that card on Travel & Dining (3X points) to earn that. I don’t know about you, but I find $17,000 to be a pretty substantial amount of money. I would definitely argue that $17,000 isn’t free.
All of that being said, if you’re smart and you maximize your purchases, you can earn a lot of miles. But unless you’re manufactured spending (a topic I know very little about) you’re not going to be earning enough points or miles to fly business class every week like your favorite influencer.
Final Thoughts
I realize this post is a bit of a rant, but it’s something that’s been on my mind all week. Earlier this week someone on Instagram followed me (and shortly thereafter unfollowed me) so I visited their page. Their collage of curated posts featured them sitting in business class cabins (not even first class what a loser) with each post captioned “learn how I booked this seat, for free, link in bio.” I’m sorry, but that person is selling a complete lie. I don’t doubt that they got one some of those flights for very little money, but to claim that all of those flights were “free” is just absurd.
Well, that’s that, thank you for sticking with me on this. I hope you learned, something? If not, I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time, now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Bonus: Here’s a picture of me sitting in my Singapore Airlines Suite from New York to Frankfurt looking like a complete idiot.
Backstory to this photo, I was quite drunk and taking pictures of the bedding when the flight attendant asked if I wanted a photo of myself in the seat. I declined, they insisted, now I have this awkward photograph.
