The Big Chill

The winter in the Midwest can be brutal, and with a recent cold snap that pushed through, I’ve been wanting to go somewhere warm and absorb some sun.   I’ve looked at winter flights casually, then this morning I found some nice flights to Hawaii and on my website no less!  More specifically, the flight feed was from my website, and the actual fare deals were on Fly4Free and FareDealAlert.

Went to the Flights page on MillionMileGuy and typed “MSP” as a focus term

After seeing the Hawaii fares at sub $400 I went to Kayak to see if I could replicate the price.  For whatever reason the flights were pricing out high, so I did a quick search on Google’s (secret) site

www.google.com/flights/explore

and was able to match the price there.  I clicked on the days that I wanted to travel, wrote down the flight numbers and departure times, then quickly logged into my Flexperks account and went to the Rewards area.  Long story short, I did a flight search and matched the same itinerary from before.  In the end, only 20,000 Flexperks were needed to cover the cost of the flight, getting me 1.87 cents (of a maximum of 2.0 cents) for the domestic redemption.

Flexperks are changing award booking rates from a sliding scale to a fixed 1.5 cents per point rate.  The old chart (pictured below), adds 10,000 Flexperks to the cost of a flight for every $200 in price increase.  To maximize the award redemption, the closer you can find flights near the maximum values ($400, $600, $800, etc.), the higher your rate of return is for the points used.  In my case, $374 was close to the $400 max amount, so I felt very good about the redemption, not to mention the fact that I’ll be on the beach soon.

Old Flexperks points award chart. This is being replaced by a fixed 1.5 cents per point redemption rate.

Flexperks is devaluing, which isn’t great news since I do have over 250k points still in my account.  Making use of those points on cheap fares, probably in economy for both domestic and international flights, should be the best use of those points going forward.

Finding Flights

There are roughly a dozen or so great websites for finding cheap airfare.  I’m going to do a post on how to use my website to find cheap fares.  It sounds boastful, but I don’t mean a word of it in that way, but using my website is often the best (free) way to find cheap flights.  The reason is that my website pulls in fare listings from the best fare websites in the world into a single source.  I don’t get paid or receive a commission for any of the flight links that direct users to the fares on other websites, but do so just as a curtousy and thank you to those sites for having great info and options for people who visit my website.