OK - it’s summer time and I guess vacation season will preoccupy our minds. Mrs Credit Card and myself will be taking a short three day vacation by ourselves without the kids (location will not be disclosed!). But travelling during peak season is always more costly. But this is where using travel rewards credit cards. This is how we will be using our reward points.

Airline tickets - For this, I am going to use my American Express Companion Ticket scheme. What happens with this is that I buy a ticket and I will get one for free. The ticket has to be at least $299. If not, then I’ll still have to pay $299. We have to pay taxes for both tickets and a ticketing fee for the companion ticket as well. But hey, buy one get one free is great. Plus, we can also get air miles even for the companion ticket.

Hotels - Well, both Mrs Credit Card and myself are marriott rewards members. We figure we will use some points and also exchange 10,000 points from our Chase Flexible Rewards Card for a $100 Marriott Rewards check. In fact, we can use 20,000 points and exchange it for a $200 marriott check.

Car Rental - We’ll be using our membership rewards points for I believe the Avis car rental. Plain and simple.

I think by the time we use our points for our airline ticket and hotel rooms, we would have no more points for auto rentals. So for this short getaway, we would save on one airline ticket, a couple of days on the hotel bill. That is probably worth about $500.

We’ll probably end up spending a few more hundred bucks on food and other stuff. I have been using reward points for my annual vacations every year and I think it is such a great money saver. Regular readers of this blog will know that I use both cash back credit cards and reward credit cards. Though I like getting cash back from using my credit card, not having to pay for an airline ticket or hotel room feels very good psychologically. Don’t forget to use your reward points and save money on your summer vacation.

I will be going to Atlanta at the end of May over the weekend with my friend Jim for a seminar. It also occurred to me that my American Express Platinum Credit Card has a domestic airline companion ticket program that allowed me to get one free ticket. So I decided to see this works. This is my little story two days ago on how I saved money on two airline tickets :

I checked for flight availability from Philadelphia to Atlanta and it turns out that US Airways was the best choice. I then keyed in my preferred itinery into US Airways’ website and the total cost came up to $292, with taxes, it was about $312.18 (if I recall correctly).

So I called American Express Platinum’s 1-800 number. I selected travel and then chose the Domestic Companion flight menu and was taken to a travel agent. The company that runs this program for Amex is API (can’t remember what it stands for).

I was told that the minimum cost of an airline ticket (without the taxes) is $299. Hence for the flight that I wanted, I still had to pay $299 even though it was quoted at $292. But there were other taxes and fees as well. Here is the breakdown :

$41.18 - tax per ticket (multiplied by two since I was getting a companion ticket)
$15.00 - ticketing cost per ticket (ditto)
$411.36 - total cost

Being who I am and that fact that I wanted to blog about this experience, I asked the agent what the $41.18 tax consist of. This was the breakdown he read from his cheat sheet :

$20.38 - US Airways Tax - (huh! kinda like the ‘bogus tax’ that cell phone operators charge?)
$6.80 - airport tax
$5.00 - fuel tax
$9.00 - federal tax

If I had bought two seperate tickets, it would have cost $624.36. Hence, both Jim and myself saved $106.50 each. Had Mrs Credit Card been my companion, we would have saved $213.00. Given that the annual fee of the card is $395, I guess that a couple more free companion flights would cover the annual cost (By the way, you can use the companion ticket feature four times in one calendar year).

This was a very pleasant experience for me. I must say this feature is impressive because I can choose my own flights, unlike some other reward programs that only give you the flights if they have not sold out their ‘allocation’! I will using definitely be using this feature again later this year. It really looks like the $395 annual fee will be covered by my next trip with Mrs Credit Card.

A few days ago, a reader sent me an email telling me about his experience with Citi ThankYou Network when he redeemed points for an airline ticket. He mentioned that rather than requiring just 25,000 points for a roundtrip flight from Salt Lake City to Miami, he had to cough up 38,000 points.

Well, I also got on to investigate whether Citi has made any changes to the program. It took a while, but I finally found some new information on the ThankYou website and after a few calls, I managed to clarify how the airline ticket rewards work. The new program allows you to redeem points in two ways : the Fixed Option (where you have to phone the Citi ThankYou Network agent) or the Flexible Option method, where you can book your flights online. The old program resembled more the fixed option method. This is how it now works.

Fixed Flight Options

The Fixed Flight Options is available to elite citi cardholders (which includes most of their reward cards). This option is the way most typical reward program (or at least the way they used to run it) are run. With this option, you require a fixed number of points to redeem for a free airline ticket. The number of points depends on your destinations. However with this option, you have to book your travel 14 days in advance, have a Saturday night stay and the tickets you get are restricted tickets.

Variable Flight Options

If you do not want to be bounded by the usual restrictions of having to book your tickets in advance and staying a Saturday night, then there is another option, called the Flexible Option. All of the ThankYou Online Booking and Variable Flight Options are run by Expedia (yes, the Expedia). With this option, you book your flights online and the points you need for your free airline ticket depends on the cost of your flight. So if you get a cheap flight, you may only need for example 18,000 points or 22,000 points rather than the usual 25,000 points for a standard US roundtrip flight. (But as in the case of our reader, he needed 38,000 points - I suspect that is because his flight must have cost more than $300). With this option, as long as the flight is available, you will get a seat. Hence, there are no blackout dates and no requirements to book in advance.

What if you do not get the flights you want?

As with most credit card reward program, you may not get the exact flights you want. That is because airline reserve their seats for different agents. They reserve some seats for ThankYou Network, some for Worldpoints, some for expedia and other travel agents. When ThankYou Network’s seat alottment is taken up, then you cannot use your thankyou points even though you can get that flight from another agent.

Citi claims that you can request the flight through the “Fullfill your wish” program where you can request a reward which is not presently available in the program. I have not tried this yet, so I cannot report on it’s effectiveness.

I just want to highlight this so that you are more aware of the finer details of the program. If you have Citi Reward Cards and have used ThankYou Network for free airline tickets, please share your experience.