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Spend Miles, Save Money
The Travel Tightwad · April 22, 2002

Charles Hathorn wanted to cash in his hotel loyalty points for six nights at the Hilton Prague, but his HHonors account came up a few points short. No problem, said a Hilton sales agent. Why not transfer some of your United Airlines miles?

The extra 10,000 points gave the Maine, NY, organization consultant six free nights at any Hilton property, including the one he wanted in the Czech Republic. Ordinarily, the hotel bill would have come to about $1,200, so redeeming his points and miles was a smart move. "I was pleased to get a great deal," says Hathorn.

You can get a good deal too if you know when to part with your points. In our second part of our Travel Tightwad series on making the most of your miles, we'll take a closer look at when cashing in miles makes sense. Last week we talked about when to combine miles with money. In this installment of the column, we'll figure out when you should unload only miles or points.

Let's start with the obvious. It's high season, prices are outrageously high, but you have to go. That's what happened to Jean Lariviere, a regional sales manager who lives in Montreal and is planning his honeymoon this summer. "We're going to Rhodes and Malta," he says. "A flight to Athens in business class is about $6,000 Canadian. We'll be gone for 24 days and of those, we'll be staying at the Hilton Rhodes Resort for 12 days, which costs about $3,000." Total cost to him so far: nada. He's used Air Canada miles and Hilton points to pay for everything. "I haven't opened my wallet once so far," he says.

Here's another time when redeeming miles is appropriate: If the offer is too good to pass up. Jacob Himmelstein saw a Diners Club promotion with British Airways that let him redeem two miles for each dollar charged. He took advantage of the deal and cashed in 65,000 British Airways miles for a round-trip ticket to the Seychelles. The best thing about the arrangement? "Only about 12,000 miles were the result of an actual flight." Himmelstein figures he saved at least $1,900 by using his miles at the right time and playing along with the promotion.

Another popular reason to give up points is for a last-minute ticket that would otherwise be too expensive. Edward Gehringer had a friend who needed to visit his ill mother in Edmonton. Walk-up fares in Durham, NC, were running about $1,800. "I had recently earned enough miles for my first Northwest award, so I decided to use them," says Gehringer. Once he calculated the per-mile cost, he found out he'd gotten a great deal. "I had redeemed the miles for more than eight cents a mile, versus the one cent that I usually get," he adds.

And finally, if you want to avoid steerage class, the only practical way is often to cough up your points. Business class and first class are so prohibitively expensive that using your miles will almost always save you a barrel of dough. Ryan Lynch used 140,000 AAdvantage miles to buy four tickets to Hawaii at the beginning of the summer. But wait, said the ticket agent. You can get two first-class tickets for just 100,000 miles. Considering that four first-class seats would have cost him $15,665, that's not a bad deal.

You might think that the old cents-per-mile formula we discussed in the first of these columns doesn't apply to the same extent when it's a premium class ticket. But it often does. Michael Ellenby, a vice president for a wireless company in New York, flies his wife and three-year-old daughter back to Australia once a year, for which American Airlines charges 105,000 miles per person in business class. "It works out to about two cents a mile," he says. "A real bargain."

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Key Largo, Fla. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.