How do I Max out My Points Value by Booking an International Flight to China

Overview

        For this incoming Christmas, I was having a hard time deciding whether to go back to china or stay in Boston so I did not book any flight before(which is something I usually do). When I was trying to book my flight back, the non-stop flight(Hainan Airlines: BOS - PVG) price has been rocketed to $2500+ which is far more than what I usually pay.

        From travelings, I have been accumulated some reward points including ~10K SPG Points, ~35K Marriott Points, ~60K Chase Points and ~60K Amex Points.  I decided to try to use those to book my flight this time. This blog will cover 1) How to find how much points you need for booking. 2) How to transfer points between programs 3) How to book the ticket even when it is showing unavailable

Part I: How to find the award deals in (nearly) all the airlines

        The best way to do this is to log into each airline's website and search the award ticket one by one. However since I do not all the airlines' membership and also do not have enough time to do all the research, I decided to go for something called "reward search engine". There are couple website that can perform this but the one that I found really handy is called "AwardHacker".

        I found this website extremely helpful in a way that it is super fast and straight-forward. The drawback about this website is it does not tell you if the ticket is actually available or not (which you need to log into the actual airline website to confirm again). This website does include the link to lookup the award ticket which can make this confirm process a lot easier. Just put everything into the search box and you would get the result fairly fast.

        From the result above I found that I was a bit shy in my points so I ended up booking one way using points and the other using cash. Another cool thing about this website is it an tell you which points can be transferred into the airline which helps me a lot. (HINT: Considering the merge of SPG and Marriott, now nearly all the points are interchangeable! UR -> Marriott -> SPG ->Alaska for example)

Part II: How to transfer points between programs

The major thing that needs to be considered here is the timing. The transfer process is usually pretty simple but it really takes time to go through. The chart I found really helpful is the post from TPG - "How long does SPG Point take to transfer?"

        I ended up transferring my 30K Marriott Points (=10K SPG) and 15000 AMEX points (=5K SPG) to SPG (10K) to meet the miles requirement for 30K Alaska Airline. One thing noticeable here is that for every 20K SPG Point you transfer out you will get 5K Miles Bonus so I actually only need 25K SPG Points to get 30K Alaska Miles. From my experience, transferring points into SPG takes nearly no time and from SPG to Partner Airlines is the pain point (1.5 days for me).

3) How to book the ticket even when it is showing unavailable

        ***DISCLAIMER: This could be just an coincidence but I still found this experience really interesting and could be helpful for others.***

        Since I did not factor in the transferring time, when I looked up the ticket online through Alaska Airline 1.5 days later, there is no more ticket available on screen on my desired date which is Jan. 5th PVG - BOS. However, I did found that ticket available when I change the search to HGH (A city near PVG) - BOS on Jan. 4th.

        I immediately called Alaska to confirm the itinerary availability and they confirmed that all those three tickets are available for 30K miles redemption. When I then asked the person can I just take the third segment and not taking the first two, she confirmed with Hainan Airlines and also said yes! Really awesome customer service from Alaska Airlines, because when I checked with Hainan Airlines, they refused to let me only take one segment in a multi segments itinerary. If Alaska could have more flights in east coast I might choose to switch lol. I immediately got my ticket confirmation number from both Hainan Airlines and Alaska Airlines.

Conclusion

        Many people say (probably true) that the best way to spend the points and miles are redeeming the international first class tickets. However for some people who do not have a lot points, redeeming some last minutes economy class flights could be really beneficial as well. I did a quick point value calculation on my booking this time.

        The one way ticket price on this booking is 8760 RMB (~1300 USD). I book this ticket using 30K Alaska Miles / 25K SPG Points which would make the point value to be 4.3 cent per Alaska Mile or 5.22 cent per SPG Points. According to the Nov. 2016 point evaluation from TPG: Alaska points worth 1.8 cent and SPG Point worth 2.7 cent. I almost doubling down the evaluation on each! Even after I deduct the ~$200 taxes and fees which I paid at the same time with my points, I still get a very decent point value :)