Planning Trips with Points is Different: 3 Mindset Shifts to Make it Easier

Transcript

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As you start to build up your points dash, you're going to need to make a shift in the way you plan and book trips.

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This mindset shift can help you to stretch your points further and have less stress while booking.

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That's what we'll be discussing today.

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Welcome back to Points for Normal People.

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I'm Katie and I'm here because I know that travel costs add up, but I believe that travel isn't just for the rich.

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That's why, on Points for Normal People, I share the tips and tricks that my family has been using for over a decade to help you use everyday expenses and credit card welcome offers to supercharge your travel points so that you can pay for entire vacations every year.

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I wanted to spend a whole episode on the big picture of how planning trips with points is different than planning trips when you're just trying to get the best deal with cash as a quick aside.

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In the travel points world, people use the phrase booking with cash as the opposite of booking with points.

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It doesn't literally mean booked with cash, but it just means with money rather than with points.

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Now you can keep planning, researching and booking the same way that you do now and use points to do that, if you're going to do that with Chase Ultimate Rewards, which is what we're focused on in Season 1,.

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You could still work through my three-year plan and earn lots of Ultimate Rewards.

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Then you could redeem them as cash back or via Chase Travel.

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In the first year of my three-year plan, you earn 219,000 Ultimate Rewards.

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If you cash those out as cash back, that's $2,100 in cash back.

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If cash back is what you want most of all, go for it.

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If, instead, you use those points and book within Chase Travel, which I sometimes refer to as the Chase Portal, you'd be able to book $2,600 of flights, hotels, rental cars or tours.

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Both of those still represent a good return on your time invested.

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And again, what I most want for you is for you to book the kind of travel experiences that you value, but there are some options out there that I want to talk about when it comes to hotels and flights.

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These options can help you stretch your points further.

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It also might mean you could use the same number of points to upgrade your experience in a way that matters to you.

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Maybe it's to book a fancier hotel, or maybe it's to get a direct flight, maybe it is to add another destination onto your trip for free, or maybe it's just the flexibility of having a fully refundable reservation.

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In order to get some of these bonus perks from your points, you're going to have to start learning about two things sweet spots and transfer partners.

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And once you learn about sweet spots with points, you may, like us, start planning trips differently.

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I want to acknowledge that at first it takes a while for all of this to come into focus.

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Earning points is the easiest part of this hobby to grasp.

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Making the decision on how to use your points is a lot harder for most people.

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Part of that is that it takes a while to shake off the scarcity mentality you may have.

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If you're used to only earning 30,000 points each year, that scarcity mentality will fade over time, or at least it usually does.

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As you start on your way to earning a million points.

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You'll want to understand how your trip planning processes may be different now that you're using points.

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This also helps set your expectations as far as what you can achieve with points with a limited time investment.

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We'll discuss each of these aspects in this episode, but to give you an overview up front, here are three mindset shifts that can help you plan trips with points more efficiently and with less stress.

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First, start with sweet spots and work backwards.

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Next, flexibility Ideally you'll be flexible with either your destination or your dates and last plan in advance.

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Especially if you don't want to be very flexible, planning in advance and booking up to a year in advance can really help.

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Let's talk about sweet spots first.

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As a reminder, this episode is more about how to mentally prepare that planning trips is different with points and less about specific sweet spots.

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Don't worry, we'll dive into sweet spots in season one and I hope that those episodes will inspire you on how you want to use your points.

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Picking one of those sweet spots as a goal can be a really good way to start, because it helps you get a win really early on.

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The good news is that, just like you can follow a proven plan as far as deciding which credit cards to open, you can also follow proven sweet spots to book with your points.

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By following these, it can help cut down on decision fatigue and analysis paralysis.

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Most sweet spots come from transferring your points to airlines or hotels, or sometimes by earning points directly with airlines and hotels.

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As I've said, if you use your Chase Ultimate Rewards for cash back or in Chase Travel, these will offer you a fixed redemption rate.

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So those are stable and predictable.

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But when you introduce points transfers it becomes much more open-ended.

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Chase Ultimate Rewards has a long list of transfer partners, both airlines and hotels.

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You can transfer your Ultimate Rewards to Hyatt, united and a whole lot more Typically, your points will transfer at a one-to-one ratio.

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So if you transfer a thousand ultimate rewards points to Hyatt, you'll end up with a thousand Hyatt points.

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If you transfer a thousand points to Aeroplan, which is Air Canada's program, you'll have a thousand Aeroplan miles, which is Air Canada's program, you'll have 1,000 Aeroplan miles.

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The trick here is that all airline and hotel loyalty programs are not created equally.

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The way they price airlines and hotels in points can be different with each program.

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While you can transfer ultimate rewards to Hyatt, ihg and Marriott, so three different hotel partners typically it only makes sense to transfer your points to Hyatt.

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To start understanding the why behind this, you need to first understand the two broad ways that airlines and hotels price using points.

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On the one side are airlines and hotels that use award charts.

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If an airline uses an award chart, typically this will be a chart that you can actually look up and it looks kind of like a multiplication chart and you can look up what a flight costs between any two zones.

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So it might say that anywhere in North America to anywhere in Europe is 30,000 miles each way, and then it might say that anywhere in North America to Japan is 40,000 miles each way.

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Us airlines like United and American used to price all flights this way, with this kind of award chart, but now they only price some flights this way.

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I'll explain that more in a minute.

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There are some airlines that use an award chart, but a different kind of an award chart.

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This would be a distance-based chart chart, but a different kind of an award chart.

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This would be a distance-based chart.

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So this is true for Aer Lingus, for instance, which is one of the places you can transfer your ultimate rewards to.

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On Aer Lingus it costs 13,000 miles or in this case they call their currency, avios for a flight that's between 3,000 and 4,000 miles.

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This distance band includes flights from certain airports in the US to Ireland, like Chicago, boston and Philadelphia are all within this distance band, so flights from those airports to Ireland cost 13,000 miles each way.

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If you go up to the next distance band, it costs 16,250 avios, so that would be flights between 4,001 and 5,500 miles, including airports like Orlando, miami and LAX.

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Keep in mind that sometimes the number of points needed to book a route can change, so it's possible that by the time you listen to this that number will be slightly different, but overall the principle is the same.

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Time you listen to this, that number will be slightly different, but overall the principle is the same.

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When airlines have a chart like either one of these zone-based or distance-based they also usually have a limited number of seats on any given flight that are bookable with points.

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So if those Aer Lingus 13,000 Avios seats sell out, you can't necessarily book onto that flight with Avios anymore.

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I think these zone-based and distance-based charts are easier to navigate because pricing is predictable.

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You can set a goal of going somewhere and know how many points you have to save up to book your tickets.

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But the disadvantage is with these charts because award seats are limited.

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You need to plan ahead.

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When you have a sweet spot you want to book like this, you will need to book in advance in some cases much further in advance than you might be used to, sometimes up to a year in advance to get the most available seats.

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When I asked my Instagram community how they had to change how they planned trips.

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One of the top two things they told me was that, after learning points, they had to make an adjustment to booking way in advance.

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This is especially true if you have limited flexibility in the dates of travel, like if you're a family traveling around school holidays.

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Booking earlier can help open a lot more options and deals.

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If the idea of booking travel a year in advance gives you hives, don't worry.

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You don't have to book a year in advance if you are okay with being flexible with your dates or destinations.

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That's what we do.

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I find it really hard to mentally book trips more than six months out.

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Even six months out would be planning way ahead for us.

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We are always able to find somewhere to go with our points, but that's partly because we don't have a bucket list.

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As a family, we're very open to new destinations.

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This same kind of award chart also exists with hotels.

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So there are hotel chains like Hyatt that have award categories that designate each of their hotels into a pricing category.

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So a Category 1 hotel has a standard price of 5,000 points per night and a Category 7 hotel has a standard price of 30,000 points per night.

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These rates are only good for standard rooms at these hotels, which are usually the lowest kind of rooms that you can book at these hotels, which are usually the lowest kind of rooms that you can book.

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So if the standard rooms sell out, you won't be able to book that hotel with your Hyatt points.

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Like with flights, the earlier you book, the better chance you have of finding availability.

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You can also set up alerts in case someone cancels a standard room so that you could book it if one becomes available.

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Again, especially with those hotels and airlines that use award charts, the earlier you can be planning your trip, the more options you will have, and I'm talking up to a year in advance.

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Most, but not all, sweet spots usually stem from these airlines and hotels that have award charts with predictable pricing.

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So what's the opposite of award charts?

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It's dynamic pricing.

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You're used to hotels and flights being priced dynamically.

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It just means that price changes based on supply and demand.

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A lot of airlines and hotels now have loyalty programs that use dynamic pricing with points.

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United and American, for instance, have switched to dynamic pricing if you use their miles to book their own flights.

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Southwest uses a form of dynamic pricing where flight prices in points are tied pretty closely with the price in cash of a ticket.

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Quick caveat that I do consider the Southwest Companion Pass to be a major sweet spot when it comes to flights, and this is included in my three-year plan.

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So there are some sweet spots like the Southwest Companion Pass that are a little bit more unconventional.

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Dynamic pricing isn't always bad news.

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If you fly in off-peak times you might find prices in points that are cheaper than they used to be, and it typically means that now, instead of having a flight be unbookable because the award seats are sold out, it now means it's almost always bookable but just costs more points, sometimes double or more.

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The same is true for hotels.

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Ihg and Marriott switched recently from a predictable award chart pricing to dynamic pricing.

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Does that mean there are no good deals with IHG and Marriott?

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No, not at all.

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There are lots of ways that we still use IHG and Marriott points.

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It just means it's a little harder to predict and budget for costs in points.

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I want to mention one more piece of background knowledge on airlines here, and then I'll move on to an example of how we recently booked a trip.

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Almost every airline is in some sort of partnership or alliance with other airlines.

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So United is in the Star Alliance, which means it has a partnership with airlines like Lufthansa, tap, portugal ANA and many more.

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American is in the One World Alliance.

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Delta is in SkyTeam.

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Within their alliances, they have reciprocal relationships that allow you to use miles on a partner airline.

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So, using United Miles, you could book onto Lufthansa flights and vice versa.

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The good news here is that almost all airlines still use award charts for flights on their partner airlines.

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And, even better, sometimes partner airlines will price the same flight cheaper.

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But again, it doesn't mean that every flight is bookable with points.

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There are a limited number of seats that airlines allow their partners to book using points, so you need to plan in advance to snag them and, as I said before, being flexible with dates and destinations can really help.

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You don't have to know all the details of which airlines are the cheapest for every route.

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You just have to know where to find this information when you go to research and book flights for yourself.

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Now it can be very hard to find good information for this on economy flights, which is why I'm in the process of building out comprehensive resources on my blog which will show economy sweet spots to every inhabited continent, so I'm avoiding Antarctica here.

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No-transcript.

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Later in episodes, when I dive into flight sweet spots, I will talk more about other ways you can find these sweet spots for different destinations.

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For the purpose of this episode, I just wanted to give you the background information on why these sweet spots exist.

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By earning points like Chase Ultimate Rewards, you have access to more sweet spots because you have more airlines that your points transfer to.

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It gives you a lot more options than earning directly with United, for instance.

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So here is an example based on how we recently booked a trip to Iceland and Scotland.

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The specific points we used are not a kind that you can get from Chase Ultimate Rewards, but were ANA Mileage Club miles.

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We had gotten them by transferring points from American Express cards and we have a bunch in our account because we had booked a round-the-world trip, which is a specific ANA sweet spot, and then later decided to cancel it.

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We used about half of those points from that canceled trip already on a trip to Europe, but we still had about 200,000 points left.

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We didn't know exactly how we wanted to use our leftover points, but they were going to be expiring, so we knew that we needed to use them In December.

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We started looking at options.

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At this point, like I said, we had about 200,000 of these points.

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We decided we wanted to use them when our kids' nature school was done for the school year or over the next Thanksgiving break.

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We were flexible on our destination and while we had a specific time frame, we had a lot of flexibility within those dates.

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We knew we wanted a two to three week trip and I'd also done some research on their award chart and knew that we had about enough points to do a round trip to Europe.

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Any given sweet spot is going to have some parameters, so it might be certain routes or booking onto certain partner airline, or it might be booking a certain amount of time in advance.

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In this case I wasn't so much starting with a sweet spot as starting with points I had to use up, but I still had parameters to follow.

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Ana is in the Star Alliance and so I knew I could look at other Star Alliance carriers as an option.

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I also knew I would not be flying on ANA itself because ANA is a Japan-based airline.

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So I started with a website called flightconnectionscom and looked at what are the non-stop routes between Chicago and Europe on Star Alliance carriers.

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I knew in this case this would most likely be United flights, since United is in the Star Alliance and is a United hub.

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I ended up coming up with a list that included options to Lisbon, istanbul, edinburgh and Ireland.

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Some of those were only available in June and some were only available in November.

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I will go into more detail in the future on how to search for award flights in future episodes, and I also do have this information in my free course available.

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Eventually, we decided on Edinburgh because we've been trying to visit a friend in Scotland for over five years.

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I was actually pretty surprised to find award seats available on the United non-stop between Chicago and Edinburgh, because this is a seasonal route which usually means United will release very few seats to partners to book.

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We found flights coming home from Edinburgh that would work, but we still couldn't find available flights on the nonstop from Chicago to Edinburgh when we wanted to depart.

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This is another way we change our mindset with points, because we don't always look for a simple round trip.

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We then started to look at where else we could fly into and then get ourselves from there to Edinburgh.

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In that process, I found there happened to be availability on a few routes from Chicago to Europe on the date that we wanted in June, we could pick from Iceland, london or Brussels, and we opted for Iceland.

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So eventually, what we booked with our ANA miles was Chicago to Iceland, and then, about 19 days later, we have a flight from Edinburgh to Chicago.

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We booked our middle part of our itinerary between Iceland and Edinburgh with cash separately.

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Before booking, we made sure that there was an easy nonstop cash option between Iceland and Edinburgh, so we knew we could do this.

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In this way, by being flexible, we're able to visit two different places that we've wanted to visit in the same trip.

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Another easy option could have been flying into London and out of Edinburgh and taking the train from England to Scotland.

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So this is just one example of how we used flexibility to our advantage when planning a trip.

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I got a message on Instagram from someone who said it's kind of like doing a logic puzzle.

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So if you like logic puzzles, you'll like doing some of this work.

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It's different than just plugging in a round trip on certain dates and hoping that there is availability to book with points.

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Now, as another quick example if we had wanted to go to Istanbul, that was only available in November.

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That's because that was on Turkish Airlines and you need to book further in advance to get that availability.

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On the nonstop between Chicago and Istanbul.

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It was possible, but it was only really possible if we booked nine months or more in advance.

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Overall, our flights cost us 55,000 ANA miles round trip per person.

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Plus we paid $160 per adult in taxes and $54 per kid in taxes.

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If we had booked those award flights directly on United, we would have paid 88,000 points per person.

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So that would be the same flight.

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Via ANA it costs 55,000 points per person.

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Via United, it would cost 55,000 points per person.

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Via United, it would cost 88,000 points per person.

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So this is a way that, by booking via a partner, we saved points.

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Like I said, this specific sweet spot isn't available with Ultimate Rewards, but a similar sweet spot would be using Singapore Miles to book onto United.

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Singapore is a transfer partner for Chase and they are in the Star Alliance and their award chart prices US to Europe at 61,000 miles round trip.

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There are some additional advantages to booking this way too.

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We aren't on the lowest level of United economy.

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When we book with points, we get to pick our seats and check a bag for free.

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We can also change and cancel our trip.

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I'll link my guide to booking flights to Europe on points in the show notes if you want to look into that more.

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Now, when it comes to ultimate reward sweet spots for hotels, hands down the best option is Hyatt.

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Hyatt is a program that I consider a sweet spot overall because it's such an easy way to stretch your points.

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Sweet spot overall because it's such an easy way to stretch your points Personally.

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In an effort to simplify our life, we started using almost all of our Chase Ultimate Rewards by transferring them one-to-one to Hyatt for hotel stays.

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Hyatt consistently provides good value and it cuts down on our decision-making time.

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So if we want to book a hotel with Ultimate Rewards, we browse hyattcom to see what our options are with Hyatt points.

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Are there destinations Hyatt doesn't cover?

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Of course, if you go deeper into travel points, you'll build up a diverse stash of points.

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So this is part of our overall mindset shift.

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When we start thinking of booking a trip with our ultimate reward stash, we don't just browse the internet for ideas of where to fly or where to stay.

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We start with a list of known sweet spots and see which of those match where we want to go.

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I'll link in the show notes an article on nine favorite sweet spots with ultimate rewards, which you can browse and hopefully get inspired.

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Starting with a sweet spot that matches how you want to travel will help you stretch your points further without doing a ton of research or legwork.

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Before I go into action steps, I want to give a shout out to Emily for her review.

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I appreciate so much when you take a minute to review the podcast or share it with a friend, as it helps us get the word out to more people that they, too, can learn to travel with points.

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Here's what Emily had to say.

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I've been following Katie for a long time on Instagram and I'm so glad she's making a podcast.

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She's down to earth, gives realistic tricks for families, beginners and people who aren't full time travel influencers Just us normal people who want to travel hack easily and quickly and not feel bad about using a points for economy class, and that is so much what we're trying to do here.

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I never want someone to feel bad for using points in economy, because that's how we use our points.

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It's a very realistic way to use points that brings a lot of value to our life and I'm so glad to be able to be sharing more about that for the average, normal person who just wants to fly and make memories.

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So here are your action steps for today.

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I want you to look into a few sweet spots.

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Like I said, I'll link an article on nine ultimate reward sweet spots in the show notes.

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You can use that and browse from there.

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If you pick one to two that interest or inspire you, that can help you have a small goal to start with.

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If you haven't downloaded my free guide on six steps to slash travel costs with points, I encourage you to grab that in the show notes too.

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When I asked my community on Instagram what they would tell a newcomer to points about how their trip planning mindset had to shift, they had so much good advice.

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I'm going to link a few of those tips and stories in the show notes too, so you can read those there.

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Thanks again for spending time with me today and I look forward to seeing you next time, where we'll continue to unlock these secrets of travel points together.

Planning Trips with Points is Different: 3 Mindset Shifts to Make it Easier

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Planning Trips with Points is Different: 3 Mindset Shifts to Make it Easier

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