Wiped Out My Points Today

[ozscot]

Six of us going to LA, Boston & Edinburgh ex Melbourne for a family thing in September. 800k points + $6.9k fees & taxes on a OW partner award. Pretty good availability given it's school hols. Good value use of points I think - now I've only got 16k left!

I'm also looking at a DON4 for work. Was going to be July but am pushing it back to June and will schedule 2 weeks on the West Coast and hope

Cheers,
Steve.

 

[samh004]

Wow that's a lot of points gone in one go!




 

[adrian]

Six of us going to LA, Boston & Edinburgh ex Melbourne for a family thing in September. 800k points + $6.9k fees & taxes on a OW partner award. Pretty good availability given it's school hols. Good value use of points I think - now I've only got 16k left!

I'm also looking at a DON4 for work. Was going to be July but am pushing it back to June and will schedule 2 weeks on the West Coast and hope

Cheers,
Steve.

$6.9k in fees and taxes???????

 

[ozscot]

Yeah the taxes are a bit of a con really, but still better than paying the whole fare + those fees and taxes in cash.

Original post got truncated, was going to say hoping WWDC is in first half of June whilst I'm there.

 

[Simo]

Gee that must bring a tear to the eye when u look at your statement

 

[KLN]

Yep, have done it myself and nearly cried..............but back up there again, and it's worth it.

 

[Saji]

Have a fantastic holiday ozscot.

 

[amaroo]

Thats the way to do it

We've toasted all out points before however, they build up very quickly - you'll be back in the game before you know it.

 

[Kangol]

Gee that must bring a tear to the eye when u look at your statement

On the other hand to have that amount of points in the first place to burn would not bring tears...

 

[nonpop]

Out of curiosity, if you had put your hand in your pocket for the full amount, what would it have cost ?
And just to compare, did you look at alternative carriers when also working out real cost if you had to purchase ?
(We do this exercies whenever we look to burn a big chunk of points as somtimes we've found that for not much more, we can buy tickets and redirect the points elsewhere).

 

[ozscot]

When I fist saw the extent of the extra charges on top of the points, I did price it out as a normal booking.

Our route is MEL-LAX-BOS-LHR-EDI-MEL.

I did briefly look at Star when I got my DJ WP match for the Continental flight NYC direct to EDI but it wasn't cheap and the whole RTW offering from DJ is messy compared to *ONE4.

On OW the normal multi-city cost was coming in at low $20k. With points plus pay putting 850k points to it the cost went down to $13k. The award booking gave me mostly the sectors I'd select anyway. We have one poor sector LAX-BOS via MIA but otherwise good.

So compared with a normal booking the points are worth around $14k - less than 2 cents each, but that'll more than pay for hotels, car hire, theme parks and everything else. Well hopefully ;-) Points plus pay would have given us point & sc earning but we're in Y anyway so I didn't value that at an extra 7 grand. I don't have trouble keeping WP in any case.

To put it in perspective though, the 840k points it cost takes me around 18 months to accrue due to running some business costs through my cards.

 

[Globetrotter]

I'm also looking at a DON4 for work. Was going to be July but am pushing it back to June and will schedule 2 weeks on the West Coast and hope.

How does one book a DON4? Is it a discounted J fare available to the general public?

 

[ozscot]

Boom boom! Typo I'm afraid