One of the ways that Kara and I stretch our dollars (and RMB) a little further is by participating in travel hacking. Travel hacking for us is all about being very intentional about racking up frequent flyer miles getting the most value out of our miles by booking good value rewards tickets. We’re both ‘rule follower’ personalities so we wouldn’t do anything shady or illegal, so we’re not talking about cheating the system. It’s more about knowing the system and making sure you get it to work for you.
We’re from Minneapolis originally which was one of the big hubs for Northwest Airlines, which eventually merged with Delta. So for us the cheapest tickets were usually NW/Delta and most of the frequent flyer miles that we’ve earned by flying have been SkyTeam miles. We’ve also gotten a bunch of Skymiles through some credit card bonuses.
In July we flew down to Hong Kong on a couple of rewards tickets for 25,000 miles a piece, and for October break we did our best to find a couple of tickets to fly down to Thailand for a conference but I got started too late and wasn’t able to get tickets. Along the way I’ve learned a lot about Skymiles and Delta partners and how they work, so here are some tips if you’ve got Delta miles and want to book a ticket.
First thing, call the Delta China hotline and do all of your trip planning through Delta. You don’t need to contact the partner airlines, you will just work with an English or Chinese speaking agent at Delta. Plan on spending about an hour on the phone. You may have to call back again later.
1) Don’t fly Delta, fly on one of their partner airlines. Delta has three levels of rewards redemptions: low, medium, and high. For example to fly round trip to the US on Delta a low level ticket will cost 70,000 miles, a medium level ticket will be 120,000 miles and a high level ticket will be 160,000 miles. On top of that if your flight has more than one leg and just one segment is considered medium or high level the whole trip gets booked as high level. It’s almost impossible to find low level redemption tickets on Delta itself.
BUT…
All rewards tickets on Delta’s partner airlines are always booked at the low level. So I always look at partner airlines and basically ignore Delta. Delta’s partners that fly in and out of Beijing are China Eastern, China Southern, Vietnam Airlines, Korean Air, Malaysia Airlines, Aeroflot, Air France, KLM and China Airlines.
2) Avoid Chinese holidays. China Eastern and China Southern black out a lot of days around the national holidays so you can’t book rewards tickets. If there are a few seats they often get claimed really early so if you really want to travel for a holiday try to leave a couple days early/late and return a couple days early/late to avoid the actual holiday travel days and book your tickets really early (4-5 months out). You’re usually better off paying for plane tickets at the holidays and using rewards at other times.
3) Think creatively and call back later. A lot of the time you’ll hit an impasse the first time you call. For example when I was trying to book the October tickets I could find tickets from Guangzhou and Xiamen to Thailand but there were no tickets for inside China to get me to either of those cities because China Eastern and China Southern had blacked out their dates. I started looking at booking on Vietnam Airlines and Malaysia Airlines and then getting a flight from HAN or KL to BKK and avoid flying within China altogether. Think about multiple ways that you could get to your destination and be willing to make a stopover or two. Additionally sometime seats open up as the date of the flight approaches so if you can’t find any flights the first time, call back in a week and see if there are any changes. Don’t be afraid to ask the agent to check other partners and other routings.
Other notes: I often find it helpful to take notes for myself and figure out which flights go where I want to go. That way when I call I’m prepared and can ask the agent to check other options.
Here’s the Delta Awards Chart, so you can see how much it costs to go to various places. Note: they list the mile prices as ‘one way’ but that’s misleading, all flights (even one way flights) are booked at the round trip price.
One of the better value Delta rewards is actually to go to Hawaii (only 40,000), we’re going to try to get a couple of tickets for January or February.
If you really want to get into travel hacking, take a look at the Travel Hacking Cartel. I’m a member and definitely get a lot of value out of it.
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