✈️ Don't Pay $3,500 for Your Flights: Use Points Like a Pro Instead

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Good morning ☀️ from Booked It On Points: A curated collection to keep you traveling for less money and more know how 👊🏽

Let’s dive in.

Here’s what’s on today—

📉 Virgin Air has some pretty rad deals to cross the pond and this one is no different. Don’t want to splurge for business class at 49k points? Economy tickets are going for 6k 🤯

✈︎ Points + Miles

TOP STORY: Step by Step: 70k to fly my family (4) to Asia

Once we lived in a van for a year. It was our first experience in taking a “gap year” opportunity.

Fast forward to 2.5yrs later→ the itch came back (well it never actually went away for me), and we’re up for gap year #2, this with our kids enrolled in a world school overseas.

And I’m on a mission to book all of our airfare using points + miles because, well, we simply can’t afford it otherwise.

In a few weeks we start with 4 one-way tickets to Spain- more on that booking soon.

After Spain, we’re heading to Indonesia. This weekend I found 4 tickets to Bali using 70K points and $480- a hell of a value.

4 Simple Steps to Book Like a Pro aka, what I did:

1) Search on pointsyeah.com to survey all the option:

I filtered out using the specific bank points I’m using and opened the date range over 3 days for flexibility.

2) CONFIRM THE FLIGHT EXISTS! (this is meant to be in caps bc it’s that important) 

This is SUPER important before transferring any points anywhere. I found the flight I liked and then logged into my loyalty program (by logging into KLM.com) to CONFIRM THE FLIGHT EXISTED.

Pro tip→ There is such a thing as a “phantom” flight- a flight that shows up in results on a search engine but doesn’t actually exist, so ALWAYS do step two prior to transferring your points out of your bank.

**Check other alliance/partner airlines (use google, or this post to see who they are) in case they’re offering lower points or taxes/fees for the same flight. For this KLM flight I looked on virginair.com and Delta.com to see if they offered anything else, they didn’t this time.

Do you see how on the KLM.com website above they list flights other than KLM. This is why it’s important to search other partner websites when finding the absolute best offer out there.

3) Log into Chase.com to transfer points.

There was (and still is) a 20% bonus transfer going on (yay!) so I transferred 73k points (family of 4) to my free loyalty account in KLM.

✨ Pro tip→ Look at the option above for “Chase Travel”- This is used if booking travel WITHIN THE TRAVEL PORTAL. You see 94,729 pts are worth $1,184.11.

But I just transferred 73k OUT OF THE PORTAL to a travel partner and booked 4 tickets valued at +$3,950. This is the magic, friend ✨

4) Book the flight within the KLM website. 

Once the points posted (which was within minutes) I booked the flights and paid taxes and fees of $480 using my Capital One Venture X card for travel insurance purposes.

These points valued at 4.4 cents/mile which is HUGE. A good deal is anything >1.5 cents/mile. Want to know how to I did that? Here you go!

Got questions? I’ve got answers, just reach out!

• Want to know more about the gap year we’re taking with our kids and Boundless.Life? Hit reply, I love chatting about this stuff!

✈︎ Travel News

Quick Hits:

• Frontier with the first class offerings.

• Southwest tweaks Cash + Miles offering, and it’s good news!

• After 5 ½ years, Notre Dame is set to reopen to the public

• A new train ride opening up Japan’s harder to reach corners with ease.

• Still looking for a Christmas gift for your traveling loved ones? Here’s our favorites.

A quote I’m loving to end today:

“ i hope your life is full of
 i can’t believe I did this
instead of
 i should’ve done it” - @poets

Thanks for being here and have a great Tuesday!

Allie