ATG: Award Travel Guide

Using miles and points around major holidays and during school vacations weeks is best done ealy and ofter requires constant monitoring of availability.  Most airlines allow award bookings 330 days ahead of the time, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll necessary open much mileage ticket inventory yet.

Hotels don’t usually have strict guidelines on how long in advance they start having award rooms in their booking systems.  Some like Starwood treats standard rooms for points and revenue the same way, which means that if rooms are bookable with money they also should be bookable with points.

For both flights and hotel rooms vacation bookings are typically really hard 3-6 months in advance as that’s when lot of people start thinking about upcoming trips.

So how to get family of 4 (2 adults, 4-year old and 1-year old) from Boston to somewhere Caribbean during February school vacation week without breaking the bank?

It takes lot of flexibility, creativity and patience to try the gazillion possible combinations on airline and hotel booking engines.  In this case we had American Airlines Aadvantage, United Mileage Plus and British Airways Executive Club miles as Starwood Starpoints to use.  And some cash just in case.

Here’s are the series of bookings that we ended-up doing:

Outbound: BOS – SXM
-Flying out on Tuesday morning instead of the previous weekend due outrageous prices and no miles availability
-Buying revenue tickets at $164 = $30.10 taxes each (baby as lap child for 10% of ticket price)

Inbound: SXM – BOS
-Flying back one week later on Tuesday (sorry Mrs. Y., the 4-year old is going to miss one day of school)
-2 business class tickets on American Airlines using Aadvantage miles at 30,000 miles + $58.85 in taxes/ each
-1 business class ticket + 1 business class infant ticket* on same American Airlines flights using British Airways Executive Club miles at 35000 + 3500 miles and $85.20 in taxes (combined).

-Hotel: 7 nights at Westing Dawn Beach for 60,000 Starwood points

*Note:  Internationally airlines charge infants 10% of the adult fare even when they don’t have a seat.  This can be quite expensive for business and first class.  British Airways is the only airline that we know allowing infant award tickets at 10% of the miles.

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It took few nights and maybe 8 hours in total to find the availability and make the bookings and yet there certainly would be better alternative out there if one had kept looking.

Frommer’s Portable St. Maarten/St. Martin, Anguilla & St. Barts
Fodor’s In Focus St. Maarten, St. Barths & Anguilla, 1st Edition