Airline Book-o-Rama. Status Chase Locked In.

Yesterday morning was like the school book fair for me. Though instead of it being 5th grade me figuring out the best combination of books I could buy with my $7.35 saved up from allowance, it was today me (well, yesterday me 🤣) booking flights for trips over the next few months.

Visiting my inlaws in July

The main impetus was that Hawk and I were planning our next visit to her parents. Her mom is currently doing better, with her cancer treatments still on hold (though that's not really good news). We'll go out to visit her mom and dad in late July, catching them while MIL is still on an upswing in health (fingers crossed) and being there with her for the next string of doctor appointments when she gets assessments of what'll happen over the next few months.

Planning this trip was made more complex by the fact that prices for travel are going up. Prices on everything are going up, of course, so it's no surprise that travel is getting spendier. But oddly it wasn't flights that were so expensive. It's the cost of a rental car that's obscene. I spent easily 3 hours exploring different ways of getting to her parents' place to try to keep the car cost to something merely very expensive, versus holy-fuck-is-that-a-mortgage-payment expensive. 😨

Southwest Status Chase / Wild Goose Chase

Regular readers of my blog know that when it comes to travel I've always got multiple plates spinning at the same time. I'm solving simultaneously for cost, and time/effort, and... points and elite status. 😅 In particular I've been working on renewing Southwest A+ and CP elite status.

Going into yesterday's book-o-rama I needed 3,000 more points on Southwest— in addition to everything I already had booked/forecasted— to cinch both statuses. That's just one good, paid one-way trip on Southwest. But the flight I booked gave me nearly 6,000 points. That's 3k more than I needed. The optimizer in me thought, "Hmm, maybe I can change another booking from cash to points and still hit the numbers,." 😅

So I crawled through all my other Southwest bookings, looking for places I could rebook or make other tradeoffs. I found one. On a flight home from Charlotte, North Carolina in August I could cancel a Southwest flight with a poor schedule and book a nonstop flight on American for the hideously low price of 10,500 points per seat. Ooh, I had to jump on that 10.5k fare. They don't make 'em like that anymore. But canceling that Southwest flight pulled 5,000 points off my forecast. That swung me from 3k over target to 2k short. Oh, no, what do I do now? 😰

Southwest Plan Locked In

Last year I faced the problem of, "Dang, I'm a little short"— in December. It being late in the year my options were limited. Southwest offered a deal to buy status outright, but it was ridiculously expensive. I ended up flying a mileage run. I thought it would be drudgery but ended up mildly amusing. I thought I was flying to LA for dinner. Instead I flew to Los Angeles just long enough to take a piss and got back in time for dinner with my spouse.



As amusing a story as that December jaunt turned into, I don't care for a repeat this year. That's why I'm working to lock in status earlier in the year. That last 2,000 points I needed to make up after yesterday's bookings and rebookings? With several months left to go in the year I have lots of options. I decided yesterday I can do it with credit card bonuses. I just need to shift some big expenditures I was going to put on another card over to my Southwest card— et voilà! I'll now cinch both A+ and Companion Pass by mid-September.

Almost 1 Million Miles on AA... Quick, Spend Some!

Recently I realized that my American Airlines Aadvantage balance had reached over 972,000 miles— nearly a million! The most recent boost came from the latest AA-affiliated credit card I opened three months ago. As I've explained many times before, carrying a huge balance with points programs is a bad idea— and nearly 1 million definitely puts the "ug" in "huge". 🤣

An opportunity to take a bit off the top appeared yesterday morning when I was doing my airline book-o-rama. I found a deal on CLT-SFO tickets for just 10,500 miles each (one-way). That's a steal as flights haven't been that cheap in... well, practically forever. Even the days of 12.5k one-way/25k round-trip are over a decade behind us at this point.

To be sure, taking 21k off the top of 972k does not materially change the risk of carrying such a huge balance. It also doesn't set me far back from topping 1.0 million. ...Not that that's actually a goal, or anything. It's just something that would be amusing to log into my account and see.

You might recall the many times I've written about Million Miler status with United and wonder why I'm not more excited about this. These are not the same. With American I have nearly 1 million redeemable miles. On United I earned over 1 million elite qualifying miles. What's the difference? Elite miles come primarily from butt-in-seat travel. Redeemable miles can come from partner activity, like using the airline's affiliated credit card. Indeed most of my nearly 1 million AA miles are from the nearly dozen AA credit cards I've owned over the past 20 years. AA does have a million miler program like UA, and I do have lifetime miles in it... but fewer than 300k, versus my now 1.2 million with United.

That aside, I really do need to spend more of these still-nearly 1 million AA miles. I aim for this pair of cheap one-way tickets home from Charlotte, North Carolina in August to be just the tip of the iceberg.