When planning our trip home from Australia and New Zealand we originally booked an economy class American Airlines flight from Auckland to Los Angeles that departed Auckland on Sunday afternoon. About a month before our scheduled departure I called American to check on the status of our Systemwide Upgrades and thankfully reached a fantastic American…
In just over a week I’m going to once again get on a plane and head to Asia. Next weeks flights are the last in a series of Cathay Pacific flights I booked in late 2018. Likewise, with these flights I’ll finally have earned enough miles to once again qualify for Executive Platinum status. While…
As I began my Cathay Pacific First Class mileage run I had to first find a way to Asia. This meant booking a JAL First Class flight just a few days prior to my scheduled departure. Since I booked the flight just days in advance I wasn’t sure what to expect when I arrived at…
In the final hours of 2018 Cathay Pacific published what have become known as the fares of a decade. Mistake fares happen, but are becoming ever more rare. Which each mistake there is a mad dash to book them as quickly as possible before the fare dies. The old adage is book now, figure it…
Well, in less than a month now I’ll be heading back to Asia. I’ll get back on a Cathay Pacific plane and fly from New York to Vancouver to Hong Kong to Vietnam. With that however, all of my booked travel will come to an end… in Vietnam. So, in order to get back from…
I’ve written about this several times before, but of all the credit cards in my wallet, the Chase Freedom card offers the most value… some of the time time. See, at face value the Chase Freedom card is simply a 1% Cash Back credit card. Which doesn’t seem that great. However, every quarter, the Chase…
The other day I saw a rather interesting email from Chase regarding my Sapphire Reserve card. It was a standard marketing email, but one that caught my eye. It caught my eye because it was promoting a use of points that I would never advise and one that is typically a terrible value. That is,…
When people learn about my travel addiction hobby, they almost always ask for at least one tip that they may not know about. That is, if they are still standing there listening to me rambling on about loyalty programs… For a while my advice was the basic stuff about joining a loyalty program or opening…
To get home for our trip to Australia and New Zealand my girlfriend and I decided to fly directly from Auckland to Los Angeles. This meant we wouldn’t get to go back to the incredible Qantas First Class Lounge Sydney, but we did get a great price on an economy ticket (which we later upgraded)…
Every year hotel chains offer some pretty fantastic promotions to earn points more quickly. Obviously I’m never going to turn down free points, but I often find hotels points become much less valuable over time. Because of this, the only way to get truly great hotel redemptions is to take advantage of promotions and earn…
