our flights to Los Angeles on points
Thanks to points and miles, I travel the world for free and cheap. It helps us see the world at a fraction of the cost. We haven’t bought presents for our family in 10 years. We usually book a trip and enjoy the experience together. Yep! You are reading that correctly. I haven’t bought Christmas or birthday presents for anyone in my family (who lives in my house) in over 10 years. We are not a big STUFF family, but love our adventures together. This works well for us.
I start plotting trips around a year out. My husband and I love red wine. We have been to Napa Valley and the Douro Valley of Portugal. A few of the reds we love come from Paso Robles. I thought a trip there would be a perfect place to celebrate his birthday next year.
I started looking at flights to see if I could make this happen for him. There are several airports we could fly into to make this happen. I looked at us flying into Santa Barbara, it was ok on points, but the flight connection times made me extremely nervous. 25 minutes. No thanks! I then looked at flying to San Jose. It’s a large airport but all the flights I looked at had a long layover at LAX. We could drive to Paso Robles from LA faster than the layover I was looking at. So we decided to fly into Los Angeles nonstop and then drive to Paso Robles.
I used point.me to help me find my flights. I plugged in my dates and airports, and it did the rest. I was glad to see using Flying Blue was an option. I had almost 20,000 in my account from Prague trip that I had to cancel recently.
Before I booked any flights, I went to the Flying Blue award page and made sure the flights I wanted actually existed. I put the tickets in my cart. I was short less than a thousand miles, so I moved them from Capital One card to Flying Blue.
Flying Blue is a transfer partner of Chase Ultimate Rewards, American Membership Rewards, and Capital One. If you are new to transferring points, you can read the steps for Chase Ultimate Rewards here. All of them are pretty similar.
As you can see below, I was able to get 2 tickets to Los Angeles from Nashville for 9500 points each. I then had to pay the taxes on the tickets.
Receipt for flights
As you can see if I had booked the same flight with my Delta miles, it would have been twice as many points. That’s why I recommend using a search portal like point.me to help you search.
If I had pay for these tickets with cash it would have been $236 a ticket.
I love sharing my strategies to help you maximize your points and miles. I have been doing this for over 20 years and I am still learning.
