I literally just published my opinion on Alaska Airline’s new close-in policy that saw them not allowing redemptions or upgrades on Cathay Pacific, JAL, or Hainan flights within 72 hours. That included upgrades into higher classes of services like Business or First.
Alaska Airlines has now taken to Twitter to announce that they are reversing that decision:
I had mentioned in my previous post that there seems to be a lot of fraudulent activity that is based in Asia and this tweet only serves to reinforce that idea as intra-Asia flights are still prohibited for booking/changes within 72 hours of departure.
This is obviously welcome news though it still does leave a bit of a hole for last-minute upgrades within Asia but if this is the compromise, I’m happy to oblige.
Effective February 8th, 2018 you will no longer be able to book award travel using Alaska Airlines’ Mileage Plan if your plan falls into the following criteria:
You are booking with Cathay Pacific, JAL, or Hainan Airlines AND
The travel you are booking departs within 72 hours
Now I suspect that most of you will generally never run into this issue but there is an issue with both JAL and Cathay if you want to fly in their world-class First Class Cabins.
Close-In Changes
I called in and spoke to a supervisor at the Alaska Airlines Partner Desk and he confirmed that this policy is in place even if you book your ticket far in advance and try to upgrade within 72 hours of departure.
Both JAL and Cathay do active inventory management so unsold First Class revenue seats often get released into award inventory. My experience for Cathay is that First Class award inventory gets released much in advance of the 72 hour cut off. In my last two First Class bookings with Cathay, I found the availability 8 and 5 days in advance of the flight, though it’s certainly not unheard of for Cathay to release premium inventory within 72 hours of departure. I haven’t booked JAL before but my initial research seems to indicate that they also release premium cabin inventory as far out as two weeks before departure.
Why Is This Happening
For the casual observer, Travel Hacking is simply people trying to extract a lot of value from the points they earn, however, there is a dark underbelly that most people don’t talk about.
Hacking Points Accounts
There are some very unscrupulous folks out there that target poorly guarded miles and points accounts, usually through brute force password attacks. Once these criminals gain access to your loyalty account, they book tickets out of the account and sell those tickets to make a profit. This is obviously something that is completely illegal and potentially devastating to the victim. The easiest way for these tickets to be flown without being canceled is having them booked last minute. By booking the ticket within 72 hours of departure, it robs the Loss Prevention Team of the loyalty program the time needed to act.
Points Brokerages
Unlike hacking points accounts, miles and points brokers aren’t doing anything illegal. However, they are violating the terms and conditions of every loyalty program out there because they are buying and selling points. Like it or not, loyalty miles and points are a quasi-currency and as such, there is money to be made by being the middleman in any transaction. Typically, these brokerages are in place to sell miles/points to people that need to quickly accumulate them in order to book an award.
While most loyalty programs are willing to sell their currency to the end user, they almost always overvalue their miles/points to such a degree that brokerages can undercut those offerings, often times at a significant discount.
I have personally never used these brokerages to buy/sell miles but I understand why they exist and how they can be an attractive option. That being said, in order to protect their business model, loyalty programs actively hunt and prosecute these brokers. When I say prosecute, I mean that they cancel award tickets and close accounts as a way to discourage the practice. As I had mentioned, what these brokerages do isn’t illegal but the loyalty program is within its rights to shut down activity they deem detrimental to their business.
Asian Travel
For whatever reason, the dark underbelly of Travel Hacking seems to attract a lot of people traveling to and from Asia. This is not to say that this is an Asian problem but rather that the people seeking these services conduct a lot of business or vacation throughout Asia. So while this new policy seems to perhaps unfairly target the airlines that service Asia (Hainan, Cathay, and JAL), I think there is a very valid business decision behind this move.
The Future of Close-In Bookings
The supervisor I spoke to at Alaska indicated that he believed that it was only a matter of time before this policy is implemented with other partner airlines. As most of us tend to book much further in advance than 72 hours, this should not be too much of a concern, but understand that the freedom to book a last-minute flight because you have the miles/points might not be feasible in the near future.
Conclusion
While this is an unfortunate change, I understand Alaska’s rationale behind it though I wish that this policy was only enforced for brand new booking within 72 hours. By including any changes, including class upgrades within 72 hours, Alaska has potentially hamstrung people that are legitimately waiting for First Class availability to open up.
If we think about this logically, if someone had a ticket booked 3-6 months in advance and called within 72 hours of the flight to upgrade to Business or First Class, they are likely not to be the policy violators you are trying to stop.
As this is a brand new policy, I can only hope that Alaska updates it in the future to allow for last minute upgrades.
When you are new to booking reward flights, you’re just happy to find availability but once you’ve been doing it a while, you start to get a little choosy about what you are willing to use your points on. In fact, you may go out of your way to avoid inferior products.
As an example, if I had a choice between flying YYC-SFO-NRT with United (UA) or taking a longer route of YYC-YVR-TPE-NRT with EVA (BR), I would most likely go with EVA because their product is much more superior to that of United, even if it means more connections. Now I may be a psychopath but I feel that those that have been doing this for a while would do the same … assuming time wasn’t a factor.
So the question then becomes, how do I know which products are best? Well, I’ll walk you through my thought process and my workflow.
Know Your Routes
The first thing we need to know is what airlines can get you where you want to go. When you are looking at isolated places geographically or somewhere not very popular for tourism or business, you simply have little choice. However, if you are looking at somewhere that is a popular hub then you usually have a lot of options.
Let’s look at Paris for example. If we were to rely on Aeroplan, you would think that you would need to route from Calgary to Frankfurt to Paris and while that is an option on some decent airlines, we know that you can get to Paris a lot of other different ways.
If we flip over to the Star Alliance Route Map, we can see that there are 54 different cities that service CDG directly, meaning there are lots of airlines that can get you to Paris.
Your job now is to go through the list and see which airlines service CDG and see if there are viable options to get you there.
Assuming you have found your availability and you have some options, you now need to figure out what plane services the route that you are planning to fly. This is very important because large airlines can have a large variety of planes that they use and finding the right one is important. Typically, for international flights, I like flying on newer planes like the A380, 777-300ER, 787 and the A350. But how will you know if you have that plane on your route?
Let me introduce you to FlightMapper. I’ll warn you that it’s not the most user-friendly or pretty site out there but it really does provide you with everything you need to know about what plane is servicing your flight.
In order to figure out what plane is flying your route, you must place two pins on a map. The pins go on the origin and destination. You don’t have to be perfectly precise because FlightMapper pulls up all the routes in the vicinity but be as accurate as possible for best results. Here we are looking to see what aircraft operates between Montreal (YUL) and Zurich (ZRH).
As you can see, the first result at the bottom of the map is SWISS. If we click on the word SWISS, we open up a new page and at the bottom of the page is where the information gold is.
As you can see, this route is serviced by the Airbus A330-300 (333) and it’s effective until March 23, 2018. What about after March 23rd? Well, there’s an option to choose another day in the calendar to see if there is an equipment swap. While this won’t predict last-minute equipment swaps, it will definitely tell you what the planned aircraft is.
Now What?
Okay great. You have your routing and what aircraft services the route but how do I determine whether it’s going to be a good or bad product. Well, that’s going to take some legwork but here’s what I use to get a sense of what to expect.
RouteHappy
RouteHappy is a search engine that pulls up information about your specific flight and lets you know what services/amenities are on board. All you need to do is plug in your routing, class of service, and date of flight and they will provide you information on everything you can expect on your flight. RouteHappy provides you with their proprietary score for comfort, which is nice because you can compare different options at a glance.
While RouteHappy provides the aircraft, I cannot guarantee the accuracy, which is why I recommend FlightMapper for that part of the equation.
RouteHappy provides you with general information about the hard product, I find that there’s an even better resource for seeing what the entire experience is like.
YouTube
This may or may not be blatantly obvious but if it isn’t, YouTube is an EXCELLENT resource for flight reviews. I searched “Swiss Business Class Montreal Zurich” and the first result was this review:
YouTube is littered with these reviews and they are my go-to resource for determining if I want to fly an airline/aircraft. My wife hate that I watch these things all the time but it’s how I relax … don’t I deseve a little Jayce time?
FlyerTalk
If you want to ask specific questions regarding what to expect, why not ask an expert that has actually flown the product? Head over to FlyerTalk and go into the specific airline’s forum and do a search. If you can’t find your answer then feel free to post a new thread about it.
Conclusion
Chasing after the best flight experience can be a daunting task but it’s not without its rewards. By using the tools I’ve described above, you eliminate any surprises and if you do it right, it’ll give you a bit of that wanderlust everybody loves.
Pssst … come closer … I have a secret to tell you. One of Canada’s best minds in Travel Hacking has started a new blog and he’s sharing his knowledge with you.
Smart Travel Hacking (STH) is a new blog that has been written by an anonymous source so that he freely share his secrets without risk of bodily harm. I know STH personally and I can vouch for his knowledge in the Travel Hacking game … he’s certainly taught me a thing or two.
Getting to Know Smart Travel Hacking
Why are you throwing your hat into the Travel Hacking blogosphere?
I’m going to have to give a shout out to PointsNerd, Prince of Travel, pekflyer, and A Whistle and A Light for making this happen. They’ve been bugging me for what seems like forever to start blogging and I don’t think I would have started without them. Prior to meeting them, I’d been very much flying solo and figuring things out on my own. They’ve shown me just how amazing it is to be in a community of like-minded people. How long have you been doing this?
My first award redemption was in 2008. At that time, I was spending a ton of time flipping computer parts and equipment and I thought getting a Sony E-reader as a credit card bonus was amazing. A lot has changed since then! What do you envision for your blog and what makes it different?
I think I’ll be diving into more esoteric things that people wouldn’t necessarily think of. I’ve got some ideas for articles related to strategies and picking apart opportunities that I think would be a fresh approach to things. Having said that, I’m still figuring things out so stay tuned! What’s been your favorite redemption?
Definitely the Emirates First Class. There’s just something magical about being able to shower on the plane and then walk to the back of the plane to hang out at the bar. As luck with have it, I ended up having quite a long chat with a bartender on one of the flights and he was from Toronto! Canadians are everywhere I tell you.
Why the secrecy around who you are?
I’d rather people not know how much cash I’m walking around with when I do my MS runs.
