How To Survive Flight Delays and Actually Come Out Ahead

October 9, 2016

This entry is part 1 of 14 in the series How To

This morning, a friend of the family was travelling to a wedding and flying to one of LA’s secondary airports, Ontario International Airport. What she didn’t account for was heavy fog and snow surrounding the Calgary area. Due to the inclement weather, her flight was delayed and she was rerouted via United’s automatic system. While the system does work, the new suggested route got her to her destination after 9pm and she needed to be there before 5pm.

I helped her through her ordeal with a good result but it begs the question, what do you do if you face flight delays or cancellations?

Start Your Trip Right

The first thing you should do when you book your flight is to use a credit card that has flight delay or flight cancellation insurance. The American Express Gold card for example will cover up to $1,500 of expenses if you trip is cancelled for a covered reason and even the people in your party would be covered to a maximum value of $6,000. Most travel credit cards will provide you with some sort of reimbursement for help offset the cost of accommodations, food, personal items and even alternate travel arrangements.

While this insurance likely won’t get you to your destination any faster, it will at the very least provide you some compensation for your out of pocket expenses.

You see, in Canada and the United States, there is no consumer protection measurements that cover off travelers that experience delays or cancellations. It is really up to the airline to provide compensation based on the criteria they feel is fair and in my experience, it isn’t even close to enough.

Compensation is Great But How Do I Get to My Destination?

Because airlines write their own rules on how they get you to your destination, you have two choices:

Accept what the airline says
Take control of the situation and tell the airline what you want

We are obviously here to talk about Option B.

I will first say that the key to finding something that will work for you and your traveling party depends largely on two parties, yourself and the airline agent you deal with.

I’ll teach you how to be prepared on your end but I can’t teach politeness. Many times, I have seen gate agents and folks working the customer service desk being treated like garbage. I get that people are frustrated that their travel plans have gone awry but I can guarantee two things. The first is that they had nothing to do with messing up your travel plans and the second is that they can absolutely make it worse. Treat people like garbage, expect garbage results.

With that being said if you treat these people with respect, they are much more willing to help.

I have personally had excellent experiences with customer service representatives because I have been prepared to tell them what I want while also doing it respectfully. Bringing them a fresh coffee doesn’t hurt either.

Know What You Want

Ever been in the situation with your significant other where you both want to go out to eat but neither of you want to make the decision of where you want to go? Well, much like that situation, if you don’t know where you want to go, any route will get you there.

What I’m trying to tell you is to prepare before you make your request with the airline agent. Find out what route options might work for you and see if the agent can rebook you on that flight. These airline agents have a lot of authority to help you get to where you want to go.

As an example, I was supposed to fly from YYC-SFO-HKG but because of a weather delay, the United system automatically rerouted me from YYC-YEG-DEN-SFO-HKG the next day. I spoke to the United agent and asked if I could be rerouted through Vancouver to catch an Air Canada flight the next morning and guess what? She accommodated me. What’s more, she gave me a hotel voucher to stay at the Fairmont at the Vancouver airport … and that’s an amazing hotel.

Long story short. I provided the agent with a reasonable option and treated her with respect. In return, she got me where I wanted to go and I ended up in Hong Kong 12 hours later than my original itinerary but didn’t have to take the United milk run that was automatically assigned to me and I was very well rested.

ITA On the Fly

The best tool out there to help you know what revenue seats are available for purchase is the ITA On The Fly application. The application is available for both Android and Apple.

What this application does for you is it looks for all the flights that are currently available for purchase for any route you need. It’s like many others out there like applications supplied by Kayak or Expedia but the difference here is that I personally find this application is much faster while providing you with a lot more precise control over your search options. The other nice thing about the application is that it provides you with nearby airports so that you can open up your search. For example, if you were flying in to LAX and there were no seats left, you could look to fly into Long Beach (LGB), Burbank (BUR), Santa Ana (SNA), Ontario (ONT) or Santa Barbara (SBA). More options, especially during weather delays that affect more than your flight, is a good thing.

Armed with information about the route you want to use to get to your destination, approach the agent and respectfully ask if they can reroute you to your destination via your selected route. You can let the agent know that you have searched the route and have found availability. This allows the agent to quickly search for flight and verify the information you provided so that you can be rebooked.

It’s Not All Bad

Most people would be satisfied with successfully diffusing a situation where a delay or cancellation might derail a vacation or other travel plans but you can actually extract value out of this situation.

As I had mentioned above, be sure to collect any compensation you are due from your credit card insurances but also remember that if you are rebooked due to a delay, they may rebook you on a revenue ticket.

What does that mean? Well it means that if you are travelling on points and are rebooked on a revenue ticket, you are now able to collect points on the flights that you are rebooked on.

For example, in my situation where I was on an award ticket from YYC-SFO-HKG and rebooked from YYC-YVR-HKG, I was able to collect Aeroplan points for the new routing. If our original plans would have held, I would not have seen any points because you cannot collect points on a reward flight.

So while I was delayed by 12 hours, I was given a hotel stay at the Fairmont, a voucher for breakfast and collected points on my onward travel. Now compare that to taking the originally suggested YYC-YEG-DEN-SFO-HKG milk run where I would not have collected any points.

The lesson here is to be prepared and respectful and in almost all situations, you will be able to resolve your delay with a satisfactory result.

Lemons into lemonade.

Credit Card Review – Alaska Airlines World Elite Mastercard

Jayce

October 7, 2016

This entry is part 7 of 12 in the series Credit Card Review

Today I am reviewing the Alaska Airlines World Elite Mastercard because as I have discovered over the past year or so, Alaska Airline’s Mileage Plan is an incredibly powerful program that not a lot of people know about. I will post a review on the program in a later post but some highlights include:

Canada to Asia on Cathay Pacific Business Class for 50,000 miles one way or 100,000 roundtrip
Canada to Australia on Fiji Airways Business Class with a stopover in Fiji for 55,000 miles one way or 110.000 roundtrip
Canada to Australia on Qantas Business Class for 55,000 miles one way or 110.000 roundtrip
Canada to Peru on American Airlines Economy Class for 15,000 miles one way or 30,000 roundtrip

If you know the Air Canada redemption chart, you will know that you need way fewer miles to fly to dream destinations with Alaska Miles than Aeroplan.

So how do we start accumulating these miles? Well, it’s fairly difficult to accumulate these miles as a Canadian but we do have access to one credit card that is an INCREDIBLE value if you use my method.

Overview

The Alaska Airlines World Elite Mastercard is a card offered by MBNA and comes with a very reasonable $99 annual fee. Stick around to the end of the article for how to reduce that to $39!!! With that annual fee, you are provided with two key benefits:

30,000 Alaska Airlines Miles
A companion pass

30,000 miles is provided after spending $1,000 within the first 90 days of card approval. As far as the companion pass goes, you need to pay $121 (USD) for a companion to travel with you on any Alaska Airlines economy class flight (no partners or codeshares). This could be a good value for travel to Hawaii depending on where you live and the price of the the ticket. For the most part, the big benefit here is the 30,000 miles.

Churning

Churning is not a term that I have used in my articles until now but it refers to applying for a credit card, receiving the bonus and then cancelling the card and doing it over and over again.

MBNA cards are currently churnable but that’s not to say that this will continue on forever. It used to be that you could have 2 Alaska Airlines World Elite Mastercards at the same time so you could churn twice as fast but they have eliminated that loophole so you can only hold one card at a time.

I have anecdotally heard stories of people churning this card every 3 months. Personally, 6 feels more realistic but I’ll leave that up to you. I usually apply, get the bonus and then hold the card open for 3-4 months and then cancel. I then re-apply 2-3 months later.

No Other Benefits

I like to highlight all the benefits of the cards I review because you never know if it makes sense to have this particular cards as your daily driver. Unfortunately with this card, the benefits end with the miles and companion pass. As this card does not have a high annual fee you give up all the insurances you normally see in a travel card (flight delay insurance, lost baggage insurance, etc.) as well as any other benefits like price protection.

The full list of benefits from this card are below:

Receive 30,000 Bonus Miles after your first eligible purchase
Earn 1 Bonus Mile per $1 spent on every eligible purchase
Earn 3 Bonus Miles per $1 spent on Alaska Airlines tickets, cargo purchases, in-flight purchases and vacation packages
Receive an annual Companion Fare from $121 (USD) ($99 base fare, plus taxes and fees from $22)
Redeem Miles for flights to over 700 destinations worldwide

How to Save $60 on the Annual Fee

I haven’t spoken about shopping portals yet but they serve as an excellent way for you to get money back for the online purchases (or applications in this case) that you would already make.

The way that these companies work is that by referring you to a credit card company, they receive compensation for the referral. Because they received money from this referral, they kick back a percentage back to you. That money is then either transferred to you via PayPal or via a cheque.

When I tell people about this, they roll their eyes because it sounds too good to be true but I swear to you on the life of my daughter (that’s pretty serious right there folks) that this work. I personally have received well over $1.000 back through these online stores. Here’s proof:

So how do you take advantage of these online stores to reduce your Alaska Airline’s World Elite Mastercard Annual Fee? It’s easy.

Create an account at GreatCanadianRebates
Go to the MBNA Alaska Airlines World Elite Mastercard Credit Card
Click on the link and you will be automatically redirected to the MBNA page for application
When your card gets approved, wait a couple of days and you will see confirmation that you received your $60 (or whatever the current offer is)

Here’s what it will look like:

You will need to wait 45 days for your rebate to come to you as this is the holding period that GreatCanadianRebates implements. This is to protect the GCR in the event that a return happens on a purchase from an online store, which leads me to another point. Use these portals to make all your online purchases. It’s free money.

Some Math

So let’s think about this. We have a credit card that has an annual fee of $99. We have a rebate of $60. This leaves a total annual fee of $39!

If we look at the cost for each point, referred to as Cents Per Mile (CPM), we need to use the calculation of cost/points:

$39 / 30,000 x 100 = 0.13 CPM

This is an UNREAL value.

I know that I preach having a plan before you speculatively collect points but at $39 for 30,000 miles, you cannot go wrong.

A very prominent travel hacker has valued Alaska Miles at 1.8¢/mile (USD) so you are getting $540 USD value for $39 CAD. A absolute no brainer. Get this card now!

Tools I Use – FlightConnections

Jayce

October 6, 2016

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Tools I Use

Yesterday, I covered off one of the Star Alliance Map as one of the tools that I use for finding routing information. I find the tool to be my go to when I am searching for reward redemptions for Aeroplan but where it falls short is finding routes with other airline alliances and non-alliance airlines.

This is where FlightConnections.com comes in handy. In my experience, it is a very lightweight and robust system that provides you with a lot of information without much effort. Let’s take a look at how to use this powerful tool.

The first thing you might notice is that there is only one place to type anything, the “Search from Airport” field.

Here you can either search for all routes from an airport or you can look for specific routings. If you want to search for all non-stop routes from an airport, all you have to do is type in the IATA code for the airport or the name of the city. If you really want to get proficient with Travel Hacking, I would recommend that you familiarize yourself with the IATA codes for both airports and airlines as it will speed up your searches.

For a complete list of IATA codes, search the IATA website at http://www.iata.org/publications/Pages/code-search.aspx.

Let’s search for all direct flights out of Calgary (YYC).

As you can see, there are quite a few. You can use the zoom in feature to find out what cities are serviced and it works just like Google Maps so you should be familiar with the interface.

From here, we can zoom in and see which airline flies to which city directly from Calgary. I have clicked on Tokyo and see that Air Canada flies this route.

What’s more is that I can now see what days the route is flown from the result on the left hand side of the screen. Here we see the YYC-NRT route is flown every day of the week.

This information comes in handy because there are routes that do not fly on certain days. If you know that going in, you won’t make the mistake of waiting for availability to open up … because it never will. I’ve made that mistake before and trust me, you’ll kick yourself for wasting a bunch of time that would be better served searching for other route availability.

If you look at the top of the left sidebar, you will notice that you can choose how many stops your route has. This comes in handy if you can’t find non-stop availability. Here you can now search for cities that can act as a connection point so you can expand your search.

Simply click on the cities listed in the left hand side and each airline that flies that route will be shown, again with the flight schedule for each day of the week.

This is my go to tool when I just want to get a sense of routing and often times, it’s enough information for me to begin my search. The only reason I go to the Star Alliance Route Map is because FlightConnections does not allow for sorting by airline alliances, which is often key if you are looking for award availability.

A way to sort by alliances and airlines is one of the key feature I would love to see in the tool with the other being a mobile app or mobile site. As a Travel Hacking junkie, I often find myself wondering about routes when I’m nowhere near a computer. Don’t get me wrong, the site works on your mobile browser, it’s just not optimized is all.

All in all, FlightConnections is a great tool that you should have in your Travel Hacking arsenal.

Tools I Use – Star Alliance Routing Map

Jayce

October 5, 2016

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Tools I Use

Today, I am starting a series called Tools I Use so that people new to Travel Hacking will have these tools in their toolbelt because it’s much easier to teach people to fish than it is to give them a fish everyday.

As we live in Canada, the most prevalent points collecting program is Aeroplan. Aeroplan allows for booking on Air Canada and Star Alliance partners so one of the first things you should familiarize yourself with is how to determine your routings using Star Alliance partners. In a previous post, I covered off airlines with low/no fuel surcharges so reference that article to find out what airlines you should fly (if cost is an issue for you).

There are two parts to finding and booking award flights. The first part is finding the right route to fly and the second is finding availability. For the purposes of this post I will not be covering finding availability but stay tuned for the next part in this series where I cover off my favorite tool to find availability.

To help you understand the best way to use this tool, I have selected a route to demonstrate the tool. That route is Calgary to Sydney, Australia.

Star Alliance Route Map

The Star Alliance Route Map found at http://star-alliance.innosked.com/ is the go to resource for finding what routes the Star Alliance flies. Because it is run and controlled by the Star Alliance, you can be sure the routes are accurate and up to date. There are other tools out there but this is my go to tool.

You will notice a few menu headings at the top of the page, Destinations, Routes and Flights. I only use the Destinations option because it provides me with everything I need to move onto my next step, which is finding availability

Methodology

So here’s where you need to trust me. It may seem a bit counterintuitive but from experience the best way to move forward is to start at the end. What do I mean by that? Well, what I do is find the routes that connect to my final destination. In this example, it’s Sydney, Australia.

The first thing we do is click on Destinations and type in Sydney or SYD, the IATA code for Sydney.

Make sure you do not check the “Include Connections” or “Include Codeshares” checkbox as that will confuse the issue. Click on Search and you will get a list of airports/airlines that fly to Sydney.

While the map is sometimes useful, we are after the information in the tab labeled “Departures Results List”.

When we open that list up, we are given all the airports and airlines that fly to Sydney direct. This is an important points if you are looking to reduce the number of connections you have in your award travel (I know I do).

Now this is where experience comes into play. As a beginner, you won’t know what routes you should fly but referring back to my list of airlines that do not charge fuel/carrier surcharge is a good place to start. Look at the list that is returned from the route map and cross reference from the no/low fuel surcharge list. You then need to think geography with your goal being to get home.

What I have done below is highlight a few airports/airlines that I would use to continue my search.

I have highlighted the following routes:

SYD-AKL – I know that Air New Zealand does not charge fuel/carrier surcharge and there is a direct route from AKL-YVR (Vancouver). I also know that there are a ton of daily flights from YVR-YYC (Calgary) and there is typically a lot of award availability.
SYD-SFO – I know that United does not charge fuel/carrier surcharge and that there is a direct flight from SFO-YYC but award space is sometimes limited and due to the flight schedule, you may be required to overnight in SFO …. and because I love the city, I don’t mind that at all.
SYD-HND – I know that ANA was known to charge fuel surcharge but because Japanese law does not allow for it to be collected, I am safe to use this airline. HND (Haneda in Tokyo) is also the sister airport of NRT (Narita in Tokyo) and can be reached with a bus. I also know that NRT is directly serviced by Air Canada with a daily flight and while Air Canada charges fuel/carrier surcharge, they cannot because the flight is originating out of Japan.

With this information, I would likely look for the route from SYD-HND/NRT-YYC because it offers the most direct route.

So now you have the way home, all you need to do if turn the route around and you now have your way to Sydney.

YYC-NRT/HND-SYD

Start at the end and end at the beginning. It’s as simple as that. Again, as a beginner, you will need to experiment with the route map to see. You may be tempted to take a shortcut and use the Flights menu item in the map but the results will be limited and won’t give you the best routing especially if you care about fuel surcharge.

As you can see, if you took the shortcut, you would be left with Air Canada flights from Toronto or Vancouver (think very high fuel/carrier surcharge) or a United flight from Calgary to San Francisco to Sydney (no fuel surcharge but very questionable hard/soft product).

Let me know if you have any questions about the post above through the comments below. I’m happy to help answer your questions.

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