Frequent Miler on the Air - Hidden City Ticketing: Techniques, Challenges, and Ethics | Ep188 | 2-4-23

Episode Date: February 4, 2023

Hidden city ticketing could save you a lot of money or miles, but it comes with both challenges and risks. Some find it appealing, others find it unethical. Greg and Nick discuss the details. Join our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ 00:00 Introduction 00:42 Giant Mailbag 05:19 Mattress running the numbers: Now exchange points between Choice and Radisson https://frequentmiler.com/now-convert-radisson-points-to-choice-privileges-at-a-21-ratio/ 13:04 The News: Delta 15% discount on awards for cardholders https://frequentmiler.com/delta-launches-takeoff-15-cardholders-save-15-on-award-flights/ 18:25 Awards we booked this week: JAL business class for 5 https://frequentmiler.com/wide-open-japan-airlines-business-class-space-not-all-phantom/ 26:00 Main Event: Hidden city ticketing: techniques, challenges, and ethics What is it? https://frequentmiler.com/hidden-city-ticketing-can-save-you-an-absurd-amount-of-miles-with-some-key-caveats/ 30:25 Drawbacks / warnings 30:36 You can never skip anything but the final segment 33:01 Keep it simple: don't check bags 36:40 Irregular Operations (IRROPS) 39:39 Make sure you qualify for entry to the destination of your ticket 40:40 Techniques to find hidden city ticket opportunities 41:05 Skiplagged 42:36 One more warning: Airlines don't like this practice 45:39 Google Flights 49:17 Use cheap prices as a starting point for looking at awards 52:30 Look at flying to Mexico or maybe Canada 53:04 Look where regions meet 56:01 Mixed-cabin award pricing (Avianca LifeMiles, Cathay Pacific Asia Miles, and Virgin Atlantic for Air France or KLM) https://frequentmiler.com/cathay-pacific-asia-miles-mixed-cabin-award-pricing-first-class-for-less/ https://frequentmiler.com/avianca-lifemiles-awesome-mixed-cabin-award-pricing-first-class-for-less/ 00:13 Downside of hidden city award tickets 1:01:32 Seats.aero for finding these opportunities 1:03:50 Ethics: Is this practice unethical? 1:18:55 Question of the Week: Is relying on close-in award availability a viable travel strategy, or am I setting myself up for a world of pain? Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, hidden city ticketing. Techniques, challenges, and ethics.

So, hidden city ticketing, it's a way to save bundles of miles or cash when booking flights. And it is complicated. There are pitfalls. There are ethical questions about it. So we are going to get into that for our main event today. First, of course, giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Andrew, who said, great content on episode 176. Do you remember 176, Nick? 176. That was the one where, well, yeah, go right ahead. I remember it well.

Okay, you remember it well. Anyway, that's the one that was called Award Travel is Free, No, It's Not, where we debated back and forth whether when you book awards with Miles, if that's actually free. And he says, love listening to your conflicting points of view. episode was going to discuss ways to use points and miles to offset those ancillary costs that go along with free travel, such as taxes and fees, ground transportation, entertainment, food, and other costs involved with travel that may or may not be able to be offset using points, miles, travel credits, gift card sales, and cash equivalents. So he's talking about things like

using the Capital One Venture card to erase travel charges so that you can feel like your entire trip was free, not just the actual like flight or hotel. And I don't know, I thought this was good to bring up just because it is something we don't talk a lot about it. And I'd say, and you know, correct me if you have a different opinion about this, that the reason we don't talk a lot about it is it's not usually an opportunity to get outsized value for your points. So it is a perfectly fine way, in my opinion, to get free travel if you don't want any cash outlay and you have points that can offset charges. But you don't usually get better than, for example, one cent per point when you're doing that. And so there's not a lot to say about

it, I guess, is another way of saying this. No, I agree. And like you said, I mean, I can totally understand that many people probably would be interested in offsetting the total cost of their travel so they don't have to pay any money, quote unquote, out of pocket. I look at it, though, from the perspective of the fact that my dollars and cents have a finite value, but my points have a much higher potential value than whatever the cash value is to offset the cost of a rental car, let's say. If I use those points to offset the cost of the rental car to keep cash in my pocket, that's not unreasonable, but I have no ability to take the cash in my pocket later and get a business class flight to Europe with it, whereas I do have that capability with my Capital One points, for instance. So I don't prefer to use points that way most of the time. I would rather, honestly, if my goal were to not spend any, quote unquote, out-of-pocket

cash on my travel, I would probably rather focus on some bank account bonuses throughout the year because two or three good bank account bonuses could cover a lot of those costs. And then I'm not taking away points that have a better potential use in the future. I'm using money that can only be used a dollar and cents anyway. So I would rather do it that way usually and use the cash. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the trick then is to maybe have accounts like that, that you've opened for the bank bonuses or whatever, and just define them as this is my free travel budget. It's sort of a mental thing, right? It's cash. So it'll still probably feel like you're paying

cash for stuff as opposed to if you're erasing charges with points, but there's really no practical difference. It's more of a mental thing of like, can you get yourself into that mental state of feeling like, well, since this is my travel cash that I got for free by opening bank accounts or by opening credit cards that had cash bonuses, then, you know, hopefully it'll feel like free to you when you're using that bank account. Hopefully. I mean, I know that's a little bit more mentally difficult. It takes away some of the joy of free, but I don't know. That's just, I think that's my preference when it comes to, uh, you know, those types of redemptions that are not going to be better than, you know, the one cent per point in value, uh, or something of the sort. Now I, I, I've got a segment that's going to come up in a minute now that just came

in. If you heard my phone ring, there's a reason why it rung. And I'm going to talk about that when we get to a segment in a minute. But first, and Greg knows he's probably laughing because he knows that I've been expecting a call the last few days. And I knew it would come in right when I couldn't answer the phone. So anyway, let's talk about mattress running the numbers. So mattress running the numbers this week is what? It's not really a mattress run opportunity. What it is, is it's a new way of booking hotels to get potentially great

value. We've talked before about how Citi, if you have the Premier card or the old Prestige card, will let you transfer points one to two to choice privileges. So, you know, if you have 50,000 city thank you points, you could turn them into 100,000 choice privileges points. Well, now choice privileges and Radisson America are teamed up. So you can convert points from choice to Radisson one to two in that direction or two to one in the other direction you convert your radisson points to choice and it drops in half when you go that direction so the the opportunity for now is that if you can find a decent value radisson America's awards, you could start with City Points and quadruple them or four-pull them, if you prefer, into Radisson Points and potentially get great value for

your City Points. So cool thing there. I think that's really interesting. I think it's interesting. And it's weird that I think this is interesting because I'm not excited about Radisson points. I've been waiting on pins and needles for when I finally would finally be able to convert my Radisson points into choice points. And so that moment finally arrived. And my first reaction was, oh, finally, I can get some decent

value out of these. And I have to say, if you have not looked at Greg's past posts about preferred hotels and resorts, it's worth taking a look. We've gotten some tips from readers that there are more hotels bookable now. And just yesterday, I was looking through some preferred hotels and resorts options around the world where I was like, wow, this place looks really nice. And if you were converting city points at one to two, man, it's a terrific value in this expensive city or that one. So I think it's really worth taking another look at preferred hotels and resorts. If you initially kind of were like, I don't know, I don't really need to complicate my life with another hotel program. I think it's

worth it. So initially, my excitement when I saw this was totally to move points from Radisson to Choice. But then Greg brought up this point that, yeah, one city point becoming four Radisson points actually can become a pretty good value in some instances. There are some nice Radisson properties. And again, when you look at their point values, most Radissons range, most I would say mid-range Radissons range in the 30 to 50,000 points per night area. And so if you're dividing that by four, that's like category one level stuff in most hotel programs. So I think that's a really interesting play Greg came up with and mentioned just before I published that post. And I was like, oh man, that is a fantastic point. So I think it's worth not ignoring Radisson now. And the fact that you may actually

want to move choice points to Radisson or at least move city points to choice and then on to Radisson. Right. And luckily, if the Radisson thing doesn't work out, you can move them back to choice. I mean, it would still cut them in half when you move them back, but that's where they started at. So, yeah, that's not a big problem. Let me, if anyone's thinking about moving a third time, yeah, from Radisson Americas to Radisson International so you could book those like nice property. Well, there's a lot of Radisson, not a lot.

There are some Radissons internationally that are very nice. Problem is Radisson International changed their program recently where points are only worth about a fifth of a cent each and it's kind of fixed like in this like around there and so even with four pulling your city points that's only making them worth about um eight tenths or four fifths of a cent right so that's not a good value and so even if you found a better value in that, you're not going to get much better than one cent per point value with your city points going that way. So that's a non-starter and choice has actually some great international options, especially in the Nordic countries. So I would look more there at doubling your city points to choice and going from there.

So anyway, how did we do, Nick? We predicted at the beginning of the year, we had predictions about choice and Radisson and how, you know, whether they were going to allow transfers this year and what the transfer ratio would be. How do you think we did on that? Well, I mean, let's just go right down the list and see. So, I mean, Greg first predicted accurately that this year they would announce what would happen with Choice and Radisson

conversions. All right. I win. I got it right. You got that part of it right. But all the important parts of it, we didn't quite get there, Greg. Or Greg didn't get anyway, because he said, first of all, that they would transfer one to one. And of course, they're not. They're transferring one choice or two Radisson points to one choice point. And then, of course, the other piece of it is he said it wouldn't happen this year. It would be sometime next year that it would happen. And wow, I mean, Choice announced this in January. So yeah, that prediction out of the

water and made it live right away. So, you know, you were 11 months off on that. Yeah, I have I have a habit of predicting things wrong that are that are proven wrong in January. So, you know, I'm glad to keep that streak alive. Well, luckily, you did much better. I never would have thought that it was going to happen quite that fast. But no, I did better in the sense that, yes, I predicted that indeed we would be able to transfer points this year. And it came true already, Greg. Congratulations, Nick. So you got it 100 percent correct. Is that right? 100 percent, because the other half of things,

I predicted that they would transfer to one-to-one ratio. I knew that a lot of people talked about two-to-one, but I thought they'd want to just keep it simple rather than have to deal with complaints from customers who are like, why are my points worth half? I figured just the hours of customer service of explaining to one person after another that it's two-to-one,

it would be worth whatever additional cost. But clearly, choice did not agree with me. So I predicted the wrong ratio of one to one. All right. Well, luckily, Stephen did not predict one to one. So did he get it all right? He specifically predicted not one to one. And he went on to say, nor did he think it'd be two to one. He thought it would be one and a half to one, but then he thought maybe that's a little bit too confusing. So possibly it'll be one to one. And so Stephen really hedged on everything, but he specifically said, nor do I think they will be two to one.

So yeah. All right. So, all right. So we're, we're, we're over three so far. How about,

how about Tim? Well, Tim saved us because he didn't get any part of this prediction wrong. All right. So he got it 100% correct? Well, no, he got it 100% no answer. So he took the politician route and just didn't answer this one. And he was safe. So Tim said nothing about the choice thing at all. Nothing at all. And so he was the only one that got it right. Good job. Good job, Tim.

His first year doing predictions for frequent miler. And he gets it already. Not at all wrong. Good job. Take the bait. He didn't take the bait for the easy per day. He's like, no,

I'm not taking the bait on that one. I know that one's going to be hard. I'll go with something else. Good job. Yeah. Smart. Good job. All right.

So next up, we're skipping over crazy thing this week. And we're going to talk a little bit about, I guess we'll do the news. So there up, we're skipping over crazy thing this week and we're going to talk a little bit about, I guess we'll do the news. So there's, there's some news this week. Tell me about the news because you are a Delta flyer. I have flown Delta like a couple of times in the last two years. And before that it had been like 1986 or the last three years, maybe it was like 1986 was the last time I flew Delta before that. So Delta is like this distant thing that I know a little bit about. Greg is the expert on Delta.

What's going on? Yeah. So Delta has come out with a new benefit for their cardholders. As long as you have a, really any Delta card, gold, platinum, or reserve, which is most of them,

there are some, there's like Delta blue or whatever that doesn't have this feature. But as long as you have any of those cards and personal or business you now get a 15 award discount just for having the card so uh when you log into your account and do award searches uh with your you know to use your delta miles to book flights you actually see in the search results an indicator that like here's what the price would be if you didn't have the card but because you're a card holder here it is like about 15 off um i

just buying a million miles you only pay 150 000 miles sounds like a great deal um yeah uh and and um you you pay 150 000 less you mean 150 you mean. $150,000 less. That's a great way to put it. It's not 15% of the ticket. It's 15% off. So what was I going to say? Oh, yeah. So I just by chance last night was doing award searches.

So I knew how much a certain flight costs. And this morning when the feature went live, it was really about 15% cheaper than it was before. I didn't do the math actually to check if it was exactly 15, but the point is that this is a real discount prices for years now, so all leading up to this, and this is a minor dent in that, which I would agree with you. But you know what? I've been for a long time thinking of Delta SkyMiles as mostly being sort of like cash. They were worth about 1.2 cents each for most flights. It varied a little bit, but around there. And now this makes it closer to 1.4, and that's considerable. So as long as you're not expecting to get incredible value for your SkyMiles, this is a very nice little bump in the value. So that's cool. Yeah, and I think this is actually a really smart play from Delta, too, because this really, I think, makes a cardholder feel like there's a benefit of having the card, a benefit that they're likely to see when they're ready to book a

vacation. And I think that's smart from their standpoint in terms of keeping cardholders engaged and interested in having the card. And I think it is valuable if they aren't just pumping up the prices in order to discount it by 15%. But like you said, they've pumped up prices so much over the years that they don't really need to do that. They probably could afford to offer the 15% discount here. So yeah, I think this is a good play and it provides a good reason to have a Delta card because we've talked a lot on this show and on the blog about the Delta cards and having them in order to spend towards elite status. And so, you know, spending towards elite status requires considerable spend,

even at the lower level, so to speak. The MQD waiver requires twenty five thousand dollars spend on cards. So, you know, you're presumably going to be spending a lot if you want to be able to get that MQD waiver and then also get extra MQDs towards status, et cetera. So if you're doing that kind of stuff, you're earning a lot of Delta miles. And so this instantly makes those Delta miles more valuable. And to me, that's a really big benefit. You only need a couple of redemptions per year for this to work out to be probably worth the annual fee of having the card, right? I mean, I guess it depends on which card it is and how many miles you redeem. But if you are spending that much on your Delta cards,

presumably you're redeeming a fair amount of Delta miles. I think it's a pretty solid deal. It really is. And one nice thing, remember Delta is almost alone in giving elite credit when you fly on award tickets. Um, and so, you know, those that are hunting elite status no longer have to avoid booking flights with miles as they used to do. Um, and, and so this makes, this makes that even more valuable for them now they're getting a discount on those. So, uh, yeah, cool. I, I, I, you know, I, I'm just making this up, but that Amex, who has that exclusive and very, very expensive deal with Delta to offer their cards, may have been behind the scenes saying to Delta, hey, you keep raising the award prices. That's not fair because we're buying your miles at this expensive rate.

We expect them to be worth, you know, as much as they were when we started the contract. So this could have been a, a, a bone thrown to Amex, right. To make Amex card holders happier. And it's sort of a win-win pretty much all around, I think. So that that's great. I agree. I agree. All right. Very good. So awards we booked this week. Here's where I have something to insert before Greg gets into what we plan to talk about here, mostly because it's on my mind because the call came in moments

ago. If you heard my phone ring, it's usually on silent. And I guess I just forgot today. But that call was, I think, worth talking about very quickly because that means that I have successfully, at least almost successfully completed. I'll have to call back now. A manual booking with Avianca Life Miles. So I got the email now and I looked at the deadline to make sure I had enough time to call back and I didn't have to drop things right away. But if you're not familiar with what I'm talking about when I say an Avianca Life Miles booking, there will be a manual booking rather. There'll be a post coming. So this is a sneak preview. I wrote a post a couple of years ago about making an Avianca LifeMiles site, but you can price the segments individually as available and it follows the usual rules of like a layover of no more than 24 hours, etc., then you can put together a manual booking. And I think what I've learned from One Mile at a Time

is that Avianca won't show itineraries with a layover of more than eight hours. So if you want an itinerary that has a longer layover, then you would have to do a manual booking if you want to do it through LifeMiles. It's a difficult process. It takes forever. And invariably, you're going to not hear anything and not hear anything and panic that the award space is going to go away. But I can at least verify that yet again, for the second time now, it did work. I was able to get that call and email and now I have to call back in to pay and ticket it. I was a little nervous because the last time I did this, they gave me 72 minutes from the time the email came in until the ticketing deadline. And so I was like-

We better finish the show early today. I looked at it this time. My ticketing deadline is tomorrow. So I'm okay. I'll be fine this time. But anyway, I'm excited that it was possible. I'll be excited to write about the process and my experience and what you need to know and how to avoid the stupid mistake that I made in the process, because I definitely made a silly one that I thought was going to cost me this award. So I'll be excited and we'll talk about it more. Hopefully, you know, you'll read about it more next week. That's awesome. So, so I think Nick and I are different in this way. And I love that Nick is this way that when he finds like an opportunity, you know, no matter how complicated it is to book this thing, he will track it down and get it working. I often will be like, oh, man, I can't do it online or whatever the, you know, whatever the complication is and say, I'll find some other way to book what I want.

So hats off to you, Nick. Well, you know, it's more fun. It's more fun, I guess. Well, and really to be realistic here, would I have done this if I weren't going to write about it? I don't know. I mean, I think that because it worked, it's very easy for me to say, yeah, this worked out well. But if I wasn't also going to write

about it, if it failed, then I maybe I wouldn't have been I would have been less inclined. But anyway, we'll talk. Yeah, talk more about you'll see more about it next week. But but I'm happy. I'm excited because it was successful. So you'll get to read the success story. And like I said, the mistake that almost cost me the award. So that out of the way, that's not the only thing that's been booked this week. So no, no, no. Talk about other stuff that got booked. Right. So last week's show, we talked all excited about how we booked for five people, ANA the suite. So, you know, first class ANA from Tokyo to San Francisco. And so we booked that for our entire team of five and decided, well, that's going to be sort of the basis of this year's team challenge. And we haven't defined what

the challenge is yet, by the way, but we knew somehow we're going to have to get to Asia before flying home from Japan. So luckily, Japan Airlines business class awards opened up like crazy. And there were lots of routes with like four seats available. And we amazingly found a route with five seats available that works with our timeframe to get us there in time to fly back and plus some extra time. And so booked it. So we have a flight now, outbound business class, five people all on the same flight and return first class. So these are two like, you know, if you'd asked ahead of time,

could you book something like that if you have limited set of dates, which we did for five people, we would have laughed, right? Right, right. No, I never in a million years would have thought, especially with this case, with Japan Airlines, I don't think I ever would have thought that we'd find five seats in business class on Japan Airlines, I don't think I ever would have thought that we'd find five seats in business class on Japan Airlines. But it just goes to show that if you keep your eye out and your ear to the ground and, you know, and you're searching, you know, as much as we were, then you're going to, you know, stumble on these sorts of things. So, so I, it was definitely a lucky find. There's no doubt about that. Like a very fortunate to have found this, have found this that lined up perfectly. But it goes to show that you can do that. And I think it's particularly relevant here because we booked that one way first class flight from Japan to the U S they'd be like, Oh, how are you getting there? And I'd say, well, I don't know.

We'll figure that out later. And they'd be like, what do you mean? Like, how are you going to figure that out later? You got to know how you're getting there and when and everything else. And, and, and I would say,

as we said last week, and I'll say again, that you have to jump on these things when they become available, something else will hopefully become available. You'll figure it out. But if you don't jump, you know, and strike when the iron is hot,

then you'll miss it. And here we are with a pretty hot trip. I'm super excited to fly Japan Airlines long haul business class and a long haul first class. I've never done either. I've flown regional business class on Japan Airlines, and the service was memorably amazing on a short flight. So I very much look forward to this. I look forward to it also because everybody makes a big deal out of the Apex Suites seats that Japan Airlines uses that are kind of popular in business class these days. And so I was very excited about flying that someday. And then I flew Apex Suites with Gulf Air this past fall during our Three Cards, Three Continents challenge and also Oman Air. And I found that I didn't love the seat. I was actually less enthusiastic about it than most people are. I liked the Oman Air. And I found that I didn't love the seat. I was actually less enthusiastic

about it than most people are. I liked the Oman Air one better. But interestingly, I saw One Mile at a Time recently reviewed Golf Air and similarly didn't enjoy the experience as much as I did, but yet has been very enthusiastic about Japan Airlines in the past. So I'm thinking that the service and the catering and everything else makes more of a difference than we sometimes give it credit for. So I'm very excited to see how it works out and how everybody does with it. So, yeah, I can't wait. I'm excited about that. And when you heard, by the way, Greg say that we don't know what the challenge is yet, that's

not to say that we haven't been working on it. We've been feverishly talking back and forth. It's probably been almost the only thing on any of our minds for the last week here. And we've discussed it at length and we'll continue to. So I'm excited. I think it's going to shape up to be a good one. And I think it'll be a lot of fun, both for us and hopefully for readers, too. Absolutely.

Absolutely. All right. Cool. So that time for the main event. Welcome to the main event. Here we are. Hidden city ticketing. Yep.

Hidden city ticketing. We're going to talk about techniques for doing it, challenges with doing it, and the ethics. Is it right? Is it wrong? All right. First, what the heck is it? Do you want to give a brief overview? What is it? What are we talking about? Well, the idea is that airline pricing is kind of funny. And so sometimes you can buy a ticket. Let's say you really want to travel from, well, an example I gave in a recent post was from Sydney to Los Angeles. And if you buy a ticket from Sydney to beyond Los Angeles and you fly Sydney to Los Angeles to, let's say, San Antonio, sometimes that ticket is actually cheaper than only buying the Sydney to Los Angeles ticket. So the idea with hidden city ticketing is that you buy the ticket to San Antonio knowing that you're going to get off the plane in Los Angeles and not continue on. So that's the general concept that sometimes you can find these hidden cities where there's a connecting point that would be more expensive to fly to on its own

than it is to connect onward. And so you buy more flight time than you anticipate actually using. That's the idea, right? And this is true with both cash tickets and award tickets. And there's a special case with award tickets where, you know, there's this concept of saver award availability, which is when that exists, that's when you could get great deals with your miles. And the interesting thing is that

there's often this thing called married segment logic where the availability of the saver award is based on your start and end, not the individual segment. So for example, if you look for, are there saver awards available between Sydney and LA, you're going to find, oh no, there isn't. But Sydney to LA to San Antonio, maybe there are if you book it that way, even though the individual segments show otherwise. So that's important because sometimes the savings can be dramatic. is how you could get great value from Delta SkyMiles for booking business class flights from a place that is not the US or Canada to a place that is not the US or Canada. And so one example was you could fly from Sydney to Mexico City in business class for 95,000 miles. And if you look at the actual award flight, it's flying Delta One Suites from Sydney to, I think it was LA, and then onward from LA to eventually get to Mexico City. And so the idea, oh, and that's 95,000 miles. If you just look in Delta for a Delta award from Sydney to LA, it was over 400,000 miles for the exact same flight.

So you get the same flight, right? And something more for like a quarter of the cost. Exactly. Exactly. It's insane what savings are available. Um, so that, so hidden city ticketing, like an example of it would be booking that flight to Mexico city, getting off in the airport in LA, and maybe you have a positioning flight home from there or whatever, but that's, that's the idea that we're talking about. Right.

Right. So, and like Greg said, that applies both in, uh, in terms of cash tickets and award tickets. And we'll talk about, you talk about benefits and drawbacks, et cetera, of both here. So that's the general concept and why you might want to do it because the savings could potentially be dramatic. I mean, you look at that example, the Sydney, Australia to Mexico City, where you have to get off the plane in Los Angeles, or where you're going to get off the plane in Los Angeles. If you pay 95,000 per passenger and you're flying two passengers,

then you've saved 610,000 miles over the cost of just flying to Los Angeles. And if you take Greg's 1.2 cents per point valuation of Delta miles that he mentioned a few minutes ago, that's what, like more than $7,200 worth of mile savings by booking it through this hidden city thing. So we got to talk about some things to not do or drawbacks or things to watch out for anyway, some things you have to think about before you even engage in this. So I think the first thing on the list today was you can never skip anything but the last segment. So let's look at Greg's example in reverse. If let's say the same pricing were available from Mexico City to Los Angeles to Sydney,

if you book that, you can't skip the Mexico City to Los Angeles segment and say, oh, I just want to fly Los Angeles to Sydney. That won't work. You can only skip the final segment. So this works on that Sydney to Los Angeles to Mexico example, because you're not going to take the flight from Los Angeles to Mexico. It would not work in the other direction unless you only wanted to go from Mexico City to Los Angeles, in which case I can almost guarantee you probably don't want to book a ticket to

Australia then. And buy a visa so that you can board the flight. It wouldn't make any sense. So only the last segment. Now, probably some advanced user out there is saying, well, there's a law in Italy that you can skip the first segment and keep through segment. Now, probably some advanced user out there is saying, well, there's a law in Italy that you can skip the first segment and keep through it. Yeah, there's something obscure out there in one or two places where maybe you could skip the first segment. Super advanced play. And if you know that, then probably, you know, almost everything else that we're going to

talk about here. And that's not something I recommend getting involved in because you would need a backup plan for when that goes sideways. Good point. So almost 100% of the time. Let me add to this that you also can't skip any middle segments. I know we said only last, so that should be implied. But if you book a round trip, for example, maybe from the US to something like Prague and you want to get off in Paris, don't book it as a round trip because

if you get off in Paris and don't fly that leg from Paris to Prague, you're not going to be able to do the return part of your award. So instead, or cash ticket, either one. So instead book to one ways, one way to Prague, and then maybe it's from Prague to the US, whatever. But you'd have to then actually get yourself to Prague to fly that return. That's a great point. So the key there that we didn't actually say, so I want to say it directly, is everything

after you skip a segment will get canceled. Once you skip a segment, the rest of the itinerary gets canceled. So if there are any other segments, you're not going to be able to fly those. So that's why we say only the last segment of the itinerary, because anything after your skipped leg is going to get canceled. So only the last segment, or if there's two segments at the end and you don't want to fly either of those, I guess you could skip both of those that, uh, you know, just keep in mind that anything after the skip

segment will get canceled and you won't get refunded for it. So don't, uh, you know, don't do that if you're not prepared for that. Okay. So that's piece number one to watch out for piece. Number two to watch out for is beware of checking bags. So if you were to try to do this, let's say, let's keep it simpler and domestic. If you were looking to fly from Albany, New York to Detroit to, I don't know, Chicago, and you really just want to go to Detroit, you don't want to check bags in that situation because your check bags are going to get checked through to Chicago, not to Detroit. So you're going to get to Detroit and not have any bags. So you probably don't. Well, first of all, you definitely don't want to check bags if you're doing this domestically. And you probably in general want

to avoid checking bags altogether, because if something goes wrong at some piece of the puzzle here, your bags are going to end up in a city that you don't plan to end up in. And that's going to be a pain. So probably avoid checking them all together. Now, I say that, and there's an exception that I think is probably worth talking about, and that is when you're flying into a place like the United States where you have to pick up your bags when you land. So, for instance, if you were flying, excuse me, let's say Paris to New York to Mexico City. Well, in New York, when you arrive from an international flight, you're going to have to pick up your bags and recheck them yourself. So you can be reasonably sure that you're going to get your bags in New

York. And so if you're going to do that hidden city ticket, you're fairly safe. Now I say fairly safe because what happens if your bags don't get loaded on that flight and they have to get rerouted? Well, they're going to end up in Mexico City. So there's still some risk if your bags miss getting loaded on the flight for some reason or get misloaded on the wrong flight, they're going to end up in the wrong place. And so you may be able to get them back, but good luck. You're going to be in for a bit of a headache and that's not really what you want. You don't really want to draw attention to the fact that she got off the plane so uh so you probably should generally avoid checking bags though there are situations where it may not be

the end of the world yeah and in some cases it can also be a problem with gate checking bags so if you're boarding a flight um and they say there's not enough room in the overheads you have to check bags over a certain size. Just be careful because in some cases, they actually put them into as if they're like checked bags. In most cases, you just get your bag when you come off the plane and it's fine. But there's a few cases where they'll actually sort of actually check it and it might go through to the final location. So I think you need to talk to the desk agent there and say, well, where is this going to go to? Because I'm going to need my bag in airport X in order to get out my medication or whatever is your reason for why you need your bag with you. Come up with a better reason than the medication

because they're going to tell you you should take the medication out anyway. But yes, like that's that's Greg's point, though, is that you're going to need a reason why you need to get that bag back, though, you know, I think in a lot of cases, like Greg said, they will just gate check it to the next place. But I would definitely recommend asking

because sometimes they'll ask me, do you want us to check it through, you know, gate check it to the final destination? So I would therefore want to make it painfully clear to them that that's not what I want to do before they even ask, you know, lest they do it the way you didn't intend. So so make sure you're going to get it at the next stop if you're going to have to gate check anything. So you want to be kind of careful about that. If you're going to have to fly like a small regional plane at the beginning of the itinerary, then bringing a roll aboard might be a risk. You know, you may, if you don't have elite status or something like that, you may reconsider how you pack for the trip

or what type of trip you choose to do this on. Now, speaking of those things, we, you know, kind of talked about what if your bag gets misloaded, et cetera. But also similarly of key importance is what about a regular operations? There's a snowstorm, airport gets closed, flight gets canceled or delayed or whatever. What's going to happen then? Yeah, this is a real problem. So when that kind of thing happens, they're very, very likely to try to just book you some other way to your destination. And, you know, from this discussion, your destination is not where you want to be. So, you know, I think in most cases, there's not going to be a lot you can do if it's like a bad weather type of situation where there just aren't flights to where you want it to

go. I don't know. Do you have any suggestions for this? I mean, I've definitely heard of people pleading a case and saying, I really need to get to connecting itinerary or connecting airport, you know, whatever it is, because I have to meet somebody there at the airport. You know, I was planning on meeting them in between. And, you know, like you can come up probably with some sort of a story as to why you need to get to that connecting point. Now, whether or not that's going to make any difference and they're going to be

able to get you to the connecting point is a whole other thing. So yeah, I think that this is the part that is trickiest. And so if you're somebody who's got a lot of miles and points and the ability to kind of do things on the fly and say, okay, well, I'm going to have to switch plans. Maybe I have to stay an extra night here and find an award flight that's available tomorrow to a secondary city and buy a cash ticket to get back to where I need to go. Like if you're the type of person that can drop back 10 yards and punt, then this may not be a deal breaker for you. But you do have to consider that. Now, along with that, though, you can also consider, well, what are my worst case scenarios? So we brought up before that Sydney to Los Angeles

to San Antonio example. And in that example, I don't know that American has many other options to get you to San Antonio other than flying you to Los Angeles first. So maybe you get delayed a day or something like that. But in that type of scenario where Americans only got a couple of flights out of Sydney, and so I think they might only fly to Los Angeles. So maybe they might have some way to get you to Dallas, though, or something like that. That's true. That's right. And they might be able to put you on Qantas. So there are some other considerations there. But I think there are probably situations anyway where you could narrow down the number of possibilities for getting rerouted and be less

concerned about this, but still not completely unconcerned about it. So, yeah. So if things go really bad, you might have to actually be prepared to get yourself from that ultimate destination to where you really want to be, you know, just in case. Now, it's not like it's likely to happen, but it may be likely if you're traveling in the middle of winter, for example, and your connection is in a tough city like Chicago that often has cancellations and delays. So you got to just be aware of those things. One last thing we didn't have on our list to talk about, but if the ultimate location of your ticket is like another country that has different rules, like visa rules or COVID rules, whatever it is, you have to, you actually have

to qualify for those rules in order to board your, your original flight. So you want to avoid that situation unless you already have a V happen already have a visa and everything that could qualify you. That's a great example. So for instance, if you wanted to fly from the US to Japan to Vietnam, and you intended to get off the plane in Japan, well, you better have a visa for Vietnam before you get to the airport, because they're not going to let you board the flight if you don't have the Vietnam visa, because that's the destiny. Perfect example. Yeah, yeah. All right, good. And And obviously you need to make sure you meet the Japan entry requirements as well. If there are, you know, whatever requirements are,

you obviously need to figure that out too. But more importantly, the destination on your ticket, you're going to have to meet. So. All right. So if you're still listening after all of that. All the warnings. After all the warnings. If you're still interested in this at all, let's talk about some tools you could use to find these opportunities. Remember, 610,000 Delta SkyMiles, it could save you. So although I guess you probably wouldn't pay 400,000 Delta SkyMiles for that flight anyway, at least not you, Greg, but maybe somebody listening would. I imagine people do. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody, otherwise they wouldn't charge that price. Right. So, all right, let's talk about the tools. So the first one up is skip lagged. And actually, I haven't used skip lag very much, but you wrote back when. San Francisco or maybe it was LA to Detroit.

You put in the flight you want like that into skip lag, and it will show you if there are hidden city ticket opportunities. So, for example, I found I could save a tremendous amount by flying, let's say, LA to Detroit to Kansas City. And so I booked that route and you know, skip lag just showed me, oh, you'll save $150 or whatever it was. So I booked that and got off in Detroit. One little funny irony there was that the nonstop, there was a nonstop flight to Kansas City on the next gate over when I was boarding the one to Detroit. So it's just kind of funny that and lucky that Delta didn't like realize that they were

putting me on a longer flight than I sort of technically needed. And, you know, if they'd known what they were doing, they would have been like, don't you want to fly on the on the nonstop instead? You know, right, right, right. But they don't do that. But that actually I'm glad you brought that up. Excuse my cough there, because that actually speaks to a warning that we I don't know how we didn't talk about in the warnings.

So let me back up for a quick second to the final warning that we should have had there. And that is that airlines don't like that you do this. And we'll talk more about that probably during the ethics section. But it's worth mentioning here. That's probably the most important warning. Probably the most important one, yeah, in hindsight. So airlines don't want you to do this. They want to charge you the price from Los Angeles to Detroit if that's what you want to fly.

They don't want to charge you the Kansas City price. They want to charge you the LA to Detroit price. So they don't want you doing this. And so it's not illegal necessarily, although I shouldn't even say that because I'm not a lawyer. I haven't heard of people going to jail for this, but they don't want you to do it. And so airlines have different ways of discouraging people from doing this. And we've heard reports of people who have either been threatened with the shutdown of their account or maybe a few people have been shut down entirely for doing this to enough volume. We've even seen an airline, Lufthansa, that sued a passenger for the difference in cost between the ticket that they flew and the ticket that they purchased. So they took it all the way to court. They eventually they lost the first

round and appealed and eventually they dropped it. I think they realized they weren't going to win. Airlines will tell you that this is part of the contract to carriage. You're buying a ticket to Kansas City. So you need to go to Kansas City. And we'll talk more about the ethics of not doing what they want you to do later on. But it's worth mentioning because if you include your frequent flyer number, if Greg bought that as a cash ticket and he included his Delta Sky Miles number on the ticket, well, there's a risk that Delta might take some action against him. Absolutely. And that's why I've only done this maybe three times in all the years that I've been travel hacking. And so it's something to do, you know, keep in your arsenal.

But if you do it a lot, you have to be very, very careful to avoid getting some kind of retribution from the airline that you do this most often on. And I think that the stories, at least the stories I've heard, are from that do this regularly. Right. Like all the time again and again. And that's totally not what I'm talking about doing. I mean, I, you know, when we're, we're talking about travels like, you know, Sydney to Los Angeles, to Mexico city, I assume most people are going to do that. You know, if they do it once a year, they're probably not even doing it every year. So, you know, that kind of thing where it's like once in a great while, I think there's less risk, but right now, but there, there we have that. So, okay. We got that warning out of the way and we'll come back to it a little bit more in the ethics section, but it's just worth knowing that airlines don't want you to do that. So when

you get to the check-in counter, don't say, oh yeah, well, I'm really only going to Detroit. I'm not going to Kansas. You don't want to lead with that because that will likely get you into more trouble or potentially maybe they'll cancel your ticket if you make it really clear that that's your intention. So, so I'd keep your intentions to yourself in that case. So, and we'll talk more about whether that's right or wrong in a few minutes, but all right, skip lag is one of the tools you can use for this. What other tools do we have? ITA matrix, right? Well, let me talk about Google flights first, becauselights first, because that one's a lot easier to use. So Google Flights has the ability to do, for example, let's say you want to go from Detroit to Paris and you want to book a cheap cash ticket. With Google Flights, I would

put in, well, first I would search for Detroit to Paris and I see how expensive it is, right? So then I would do something like Detroit to Europe in the Google Flights and it would let me then, all the flight options. And then I could do things like I'm not interested in like 20 segments. I'm going to reduce it to, you know, two or fewer, that kind of thing. But importantly, it's also possible to pick a single airport that's a connecting airport. So for example, I could go in and filter to connecting airport is Paris. Now show me the prices for all the opportunities that now I see, oh, if I go to Budapest, it cuts the price in half. And so that's what I'm going to book. That's really smart. And Google Flights is a really powerful tool. So it's worth like if you've only ever just searched point A to point B on Google Flights, there's a lot of tricks to look at there. You can search, for instance, from the United States to

all of Europe. And so there are other things to do that I think are worth looking into also. But I think that this trick of picking a connecting airport is incredibly valuable for this particular exercise that can really help you save some potentially some money anyway on your paid flights. Right, right. Great. unbelievable number of like filters and rules and things. And you could, you could list like 20 airports that are potential destinations so that all at once you could find out, are any of those going to be cheaper than where I want to go while also specifying that you have to stop along the way in Paris, for example. I'm not going to get into how to use IT matrix. It's way above.

But it's not particularly user-friendly. Like you, you know, you really have to dive into it to understand. Right. They do have a new like web-based like more friendly face to it. So it's, it's easier than it used to be. So I, I wouldn't shy away from trying it out, but, but, you know, start with Google flights. That's a lot easier to get, to get your, your feet wet and that kind of thing. Um, but, but seriously, uh, ITA matrix, especially if you're like, uh, trying to earn elite status, you could do things like

say only show me, you know, star Alliance flights or whatever the thing is that would, that would help. Yep. So a lot of good stuff there. Very useful. Very useful tool. I use it. I mean, I used it just yesterday for something. So I use it quite a bit. When I say it's not particularly user-friendly, I mean, it's not necessarily obvious initially.

Although, like you said, they do have a new web interface and all the rest of that. So it's a tool worth learning how to use. I will say that it's worth putting some time into. If you book a lot of paid flights, particularly then ITA Matrix is worth learning how to use. Yeah.

But that would take a whole show to talk about, and it would probably glass over the eyes of most people. So if you want to dive into that, go ahead and dive into that separately. Right, right. cash opportunities for booking hidden city ticketing is that they could be a good step also to finding mileage opportunities. So in that example I gave before, or maybe flying to Budapest is the cheapest way to get to Paris. That tells you, oh, when I'm searching for awards, let me put in Budapest as a potential endpoint as well. And maybe that'll be cheaper. There's no guarantee at all. It's not even close.

But if you're like, I have no idea where to search to, that could give you some ideas of what to put into award searches to try to find these similar deals. And the reason that that's a particularly good indication is particularly relevant when we talk about programs with dynamic pricing. And like Greg said, there's not always a correlation between cash price and award price, but these programs that have dynamic pricing, in at least some cases, the cheaper awards do cost fewer miles. And so the rise, so to speak, of dynamic award pricing, I think has probably led to even more of these hidden city ticket opportunities than before.

I wrote about in a recent post opportunities with American Airlines to find this kind of thing with Air France. Air France would be super common to find a cheaper award that's going beyond Paris or Amsterdam. If you're using Flying Blue Miles, it will almost always be cheaper to continue on somewhere else. And some places. It's so interesting that way. But that's absolutely true. Yeah. So, you know, that's a program that I think is a good example, but then you're going to be like, well, but okay, where's the cheapest place to continue on to? Because we sometimes see places that are way cheaper than others in terms of the number of miles required for Flying Blue Awards. So that used to be more of a Flying Blue thing than other programs. But now we see that, I think, more with Delta and United and American as things become more

dynamic. So that's one thing to look for, these dynamically priced programs, which really are not the majority of airline award programs. It might kind of feel that way because the US-based ones are going in that direction. But the majority of programs around the world are still using an award chart. So this wouldn't necessarily apply for all of those, but it does tend to apply to these more dynamically priced awards. Now, so one opportunity for looking for these is to look at programs that dynamically price awards. And I talked about American. I gave that example of Sydney to Los Angeles to San Antonio,

where the savings weren't quite as dramatic as Greg, as the example he gave with Delta. But yet they were still very significant. For a family of four, it would have been a savings of, I don't know, 160,000 miles a person, I think, to continue on to San Antonio, something like that, rather than only flying to Los Angeles. And so, yeah, it really can add up with multiple passengers. So it's worth checking those things when you're looking at using your Delta miles or your American miles or United miles, you want to check those opportunities, but those aren't the only situations where you can find great hidden city award tickets. Do you have any other ideas in mind

for award tickets? As far as tools to use? Yeah. What places to look for these? Well, yeah, sure. So often, for example, if you want to fly back to the U.S., I would look at flying to Mexico, whether it's Cancun or Mexico City, sometimes Canada, but that's less often that can be cheaper as well uh but often it's cheaper to fly to near the u.s and um most of the flights though to mexico and even canada not all but most of them actually go through the u.s and so you can get off in the u.s and and uh book it that way um what else uh for finding well i think that an opportunity, a place to look for these is where regions connect. And so there may be times where you're able to book an award that is sort of going to a region that's going to be cheaper than the region where you get off in between.

And so, for instance, I gave an example in the post I wrote recently of flying. And this was a ridiculous example, but a good one nonetheless, flying from, I think to Indonesia costs fewer miles than flying from Vietnam to Istanbul because the price from Asia to Europe is higher than the price from Asia to Asia. Now, that is an extreme example. And you're not going to find many programs that will let you book a ticket within a single region, Asia in this case, that connects in a third region, but there are some. And so you want to look for those opportunities because in that case, I showed that it would have been 30,000 miles in business class for that entire itinerary. And if you only booked from Vietnam to Istanbul, it would have been far more miles. I think it was

100,000 miles because there wasn't any saver award availability. And like we said a few minutes ago, sometimes when you look at these connecting itineraries, suddenly there's saver availability that wasn't there otherwise. So in that specific example, those flights weren't available to book through other partners. They were only available to book through Turkish Miles and Smiles because they suddenly became a saver award when your ticket was to continue onwards. So you might be able to save miles when you're going from one region to another by connecting in that region, the region that you're looking for, onward to a cheaper region. And so that was kind of an extreme example. But other examples like that to look for were,

let's say you really wanted to end up in Europe, and you found a Turkish example like that that connected onward to Africa. And I don't know off the top of my head whether Asia to Africa is cheaper than Asia to Europe. But there are situations where that will be. And you know, you have to connect in Europe in order to get there. So you might be able to book that ticket in order to save on getting to the region you really want to be in. And there's a good reason to do that. Sometimes, for instance, if you may want to end up in Europe because flights within Europe, A, are pretty cheap with money, but also, B, with miles. American Airlines charges 12,500 miles in economy class, Europe to Europe.

So you may want to get off in Istanbul because you know you can get all the way across Europe for not very many American Airlines miles. So there are reasons where you may use that when you're connecting regions on more complicated tickets. That may not be a day-to-day use, but it's a good tool to keep in your pocket for that time when you're like oh man i've really got to get from here to there and awards are outrageously priced what can i do well you can look for that ticket onward that may may go to a region that's cheaper yeah yeah uh great points um there's also some more advanced like sort of ninja tricks you might want to be aware of if you're if you're more on the advanced end. Like, for example, there are a few programs that are that price the awards based on how far you're flying. But they do it based on your starting airport and your ending airport, not how far you flew in segments. And so,

for example, one of those is Virgin Atlantic for flying Air France or KLM within Europe, or it's not even only within Europe, but near Europe. And so if you want to fly to Amsterdam or Paris, you could book a flight with Virgin Atlantic miles, let's say from Istanbul to some airport that's nearby that's also served by KLM or Air France. And Virgin Atlantic will route you through Paris or Amsterdam, depending on which of those airlines it found award space on. And the awards are like dirt cheap. So you could get off in Amsterdam or Paris. So that's one example. Another is where some airlines, they charge less for mixed cabin itineraries. So what do I mean by that? Let's say you want to fly first class from the U S to Frankfurt on Lufthansa. Um, if you use your life miles to book that, I think it's something like 85,000 one way, somewhere in that range. Um, but if you continue

on in, let's say economy to, I'm going to just use Istanbul cause that was on my mind, uh, to Istanbul, um, that adds a economy leg and they're going to average in the, the prices of economy and, and, uh, first class based on the distance flown. And it'll actually reduce the overall cost of that flight because you tacked on an economy leg. And it would work actually much better the other direction if you're going from like Frankfurt to, let's say, Boston and then fly onward from Boston to, let's say, L.A. So that so you have a really long economy leg that would make it even cheaper. It would. And sometimes it can be a significant savings. I can't remember the exact route, but just the other day I was looking at one of these with Avianca Life miles between Europe

and the United States. And I remember that the leg from Brussels to New York was in business class, but whatever economy class leg I had connected with that was decently long. So the business class price, which normally would have been 63,000 miles one way because of the economy class connecting flight with that itinerary dropped the price of the award to 49,000 miles and change. So, you know, you can save a significant amount on that ticket with an economy class connector. And Greg mentioned that that'd be more useful coming back to the United States, because like we said before, you have to collect your bags when you get back to the United States anyway. So if you had checked bags, it would be safer to do in that instance. And also easier to find a long connecting flight

within the United States than in some other regions of the world that may not have as many really long flights. But that could work on the way to Europe if you're not checking bags. Also, it could work the other way. You just want to find those long connecting itineraries, you know, maybe a New York to Lisbon to Istanbul, where that Lisbon to Istanbul leg is really long. So it takes up a significant part of the total distance from New York, your starting point to Istanbul, your ending point, and you could save a lot of miles that way. So Avianca, and I didn't mention this in the Hidden City Ticketing Post and really should have. I thought about it while we were talking about this and I said, wow, how did I leave that out? Because this is really one of the best opportunities out there for it in some

senses anyway. Avianca Life Miles is a great program for this. Asia Miles, Cathay Pacific Asia Miles is another really good program for this because they do the same thing with mixed cabin award pricing. So those are the two that come to mind. Are there any others that do this? Those are the two that I know. I'd imagine there's probably more. Yeah. But there's the downside, of course, in that. And when you're booking and really in booking award tickets, period, because we just spent all this time talking about award tickets. But do you remember what that last warning was before we got talking about the award tickets? It was that airline programs don't really like when you do this, this whole hidden city ticketing thing. And so if you're booking a cash ticket, typically, I think most people would tell you it's wisest if you're going to engage in this

practice not to include your frequent flyer number so that you don't risk the airline shutting down your frequent flyer account, zeroing out your miles, which is something they could do at any point in time. And now I don't think it's going to happen if you do this once or twice. I really don't. I think it's much more likely to happen if you do this 38 times. But if you're going to do it once or twice, I think that's probably an extremely limited risk. However, there is some risk if you include your frequent flyer number on the ticket because they know who you are then. And of course, you can't really avoid that with an award ticket. You're going to have a loyalty program number on there. I don't think you could zero it out. And even if you could, the ticketing airline

knows who you are because you bought the ticket from them. So you run some risk when you're doing this with award tickets and that there's no way around the fact that you could get in trouble with that loyalty program. Again, I think it's super unlikely if you do this once in a great while, but it's possible. Yeah. Yeah, no, exactly. All right. So as far as finding these award opportunities as opposed to cash opportunities, one tool that I find is fantastic, it's called seats.aero. And it only lets you look out a couple months, like two or three months into the future. But even if your flight is further than that, you could potentially use seats.aero to find opportunities that you should be looking for.

So for example, it lets you do things like find all the best flight deals, award deals from the US to Europe or from North America to Europe. And so just by like scanning down them, maybe limiting to airlines you're interested in flying, you are likely to find, you know, oh, wow, it's really cheap to fly from, you know, I'll just take my example earlier, Mexico city to, um, you know, Paris, whatever it is. Um, and, and then, then you could start honing in on, Oh, all right, that's an opportunity that I should be looking at. And so then plug in, you know, do award searches with the dates that you're really interested in to see if, if that helps make the, uh, the prices cheaper. Excellent. Excellent.

That's a great tool then for this type of thing. All right. So we've got, you know, when it comes to award flights, looking at your dynamically priced programs, considering those secondary cities, looking at flying into the United States as an option and or looking at flights to Mexico specifically, perhaps maybe Canada,

because they are very likely to connect in the United States if you're connecting from some other continent. And seats.aero as our key ways of sort of finding these. And then you're, I'm sorry, rather your mixed cabin programs, your mixed cabin pricing programs. And if you're interested in more information about that, if you type in mixed cabin awards in the search box at Frequent Miler, you'll probably find the posts we've written about Avianca Life Miles, which I think has the words

first class for less in the title and so does the Cathay Pacific both. They both have the words first class for less in the title. So you can look for those. And of course, there'll be links in the description of this show wherever you're listening to it, to all of those resources. So those are some good ways to find them. Does that kind wrap up finding them and and the various I think I think we're good there um so let's talk about is it right to do I mean the airline is is saying you know you're buying a ticket from LA to Kansas City um it's we didn't sell you a ticket to Detroit. So why was it okay? Or was it okay for me to get off in Detroit and, uh, you know, basically cheat the airline? Was, was I doing something unethical? I, that's a good question. And there's not really a simple answer. And so I look forward

to discussing this a little bit here, but there's a few different things to consider. So first of all, there is that airline perspective that says, you know, we price our tickets based on the demand, and we look at the demand for different regions. And so you paid for this product, the, you know, LA to Kansas City product, you should not be entitled to the LA to Detroit product without paying the LA to Detroit price. And so the airline certainly doesn't want you to do that. Now, is it wrong? Are you misleading them? Well, first of all, there's the fact that many airlines will point to their contract of carriage and say that they had a contract to transport you to Kansas City and

you didn't hold up your part of the bargain because you didn't go to Kansas City. So from at least one standpoint there, certainly from the airline standpoint, what you're doing is wrong because they say that's not the agreement that you came to when you bought a ticket from them. What do you think about that argument, Greg? Yeah. I mean, so there's the, that's true. You've sort of agreed, you've accepted the terms and conditions when you bought the ticket. So when you go against that, you are deliberately sort of breaking that um agreement i i guess um so so that's that's unfortunate you know a flip side to it is um we're we're buying yes i bought uh la to detroit to kansas city but i bought that ticket I should be able to do whatever I want with it.

And if that means I don't want to fly that last leg, I think that should be okay. Uh, you know, it's, uh, people have, have, uh, given examples of, of similar things. Like what if you, what if you save money by buying a, uh, a combo meal at McDonald's instead of buying the, you know, you just wanted the Big Mac, but you bought a combo meal just because it was cheaper. You know, are they going to are they going to be mad at you for not eating the giant fries that came with it? I mean, you know, I mean, yes, it's a waste of food, but. Right. And we can talk about the ethics of wasting the food. But but can you imagine McDonald's telling you you have to eat those French fries or pay us more money? It just seems kind of silly. It seems ridiculous. You go to a restaurant, you order something, it's yours to do what you want with it. So I don't know. I tend to look at it that way. I tend to feel like if I buy a product, it's up to me how much of it I want to use and not use. And sure, there are ethical questions behind wasting, behind buying more than what it is you're going to need. But somebody came up with a good example in the comments that I felt like kind of captured

my thoughts on this. Imagine if the grocery store put the gallon of milk on sale for less than the half gallon. Is it unethical to buy the gallon then? I mean, wouldn't everybody do that? Even if you only needed a half gallon, you'd probably pay the less for the full gallon and say, well, I'll use what I use. And, you know, if I don't use it all, then I don't use it all, but I'm going to spend less. So, you know, of course you would do that, right? Right, right, of course. And there's absolutely no ethical dilemma there at all. But, you know, the thing is, when you're buying a gallon of milk, you are not clicking a box, accepting the terms and conditions of that, saying that you have to drink the whole thing.

That's true. That's true. It does kind of blow my mind that they get the ability to set that term and condition because we wouldn't accept that anywhere else in the world. Right now, there's no other kind of product you buy with any other example where that would be a term and condition of buying it. So it seems kind of crazy. And while we've seen airlines send threatening letters and we've seen that instance where Lufthansa sued somebody, I'm not aware. And that doesn't mean it hasn't happened. It just means I'm not aware of it. But I'm not aware of that holding that argument holding up in court. I'm sure that the airlines will argue that it will, but I'm not aware of cases where it has. Now, again, maybe it has. So do your own research on that before you take a risk at getting sued by the airline. Again, I would not do this 38 or 40 or 50 times a year or whatever it is that some people have done and gotten in trouble for.

I don't think it's worth the headache of trying to argue that and the cost of going to court and everything else. But I think it's kind of a crazy sort of a thing. But a reader brought up another ethical question that I want your perspective on. And that was this.

So let's say you bought that ticket from Los Angeles to Detroit to Kansas City. Now, the reader said award tickets are like a limited commodity. There's only so many of them. And so by buying that, knowing you're not going to fly the Detroit to Kansas City flight, you potentially denied the chance for somebody to buy an award ticket from Detroit

to Kansas City. Is that unethical? The fact that you took a seat away that somebody else could have booked with their miles but can't now because that seat's gone and you don't plan to sit in it. Is that unethical? Oh, wow. I mean, first of all, airlines, they do so much, they oversell their flights and everything. So they expect a lot of the seats not to actually be filled when they fly and they're surprised when they actually do fill up more than capacity. But so, you know, there's a certain amount of that planning going into it anyway, that any one person booking something, they're not necessarily going to be in that seat. I also don't think there's necessarily a one-to-one between, if I book that flight from LA to Kansas City, going through

Detroit, I don't think there's a one-to-one between that and the award availability between Detroit and Kansas City in any way. But let's say there was is is that an ethical um uh problem i mean it i i'm not an ethicist uh but it doesn't bother me i mean anytime i think it's just smart to book things uh the cheapest way you can and um sometimes I book things that I'm probably not going to fly because they're backup opportunities. So for example, if I am planning to fly on American Airlines to get to DC, but I think there might be a delay um so you know so maybe i book a uh united or delta flight um for a bit later in the day and if uh you know if the american flight goes goes smoothly then i cancel the backup one and so that would that's not saying one way or another whether it's ethical it's just sort of

saying i do this all the time and uh'm okay with it. I don't know. What do you think? Is there any ethical problem with this? You know, initially I had none at all because like you said, I'm somebody who looks for savings all over the place. And so I think it's just smart consumerism to look for the opportunities to save money. I don't see those, that type of activity as unethical. I see it as, I don't know, like wasteful to not look for those opportunities. If you're just wasting your miles without thinking about, okay, what's the best use? I think that that's, to me, that's something I wouldn't want to do. Now, it's not unethical to waste the miles, of course, but I just wouldn't want to do that. I think it makes more sense to be a smart consumer and shop around. So initially, I saw no ethical

dilemma. I thought about it some more, and I can see where somebody would say, now, maybe the LA, Kansas City, Detroit example isn't as clear. Let's say you're doing a Paris to New York to Cleveland. And so you're potentially denying Paris to New York to Cleveland. And, you know, so you're potentially denying somebody that New York to Cleveland is the same thing. But domestically, I feel like on Delta, perhaps there's less of a chance that you're maybe this might be example is still a bad one. I meant to come up with a better example where there's a situation where that award will probably be available if you don't book, you know, the award that's connecting with the seat that you're

it could happen. Sure. It could happen. And so I could see the argument that people say, well, if people like you that have tons of miles that you can afford to book your backup flights and your things that you don't really need, is that not denying somebody who's got a limited set of miles and just wants that, you know, New York to Cleveland or Detroit to Kansas City. You know, are you not kind of being the rich fat cat here with your miles and points that doesn't care about the people that, you know, the little guy trying to book that little flight, so to speak? I don't know. I mean, I can see the argument and the anger from somebody who has that standpoint, particularly about the backup flights, because, you know, those cases were booking flights that we really have very little intention to keep that obviously were available for anybody else to have

booked. So I can see the argument there, but I do it all the time. Like Greg said, also, I booked those backup flights, too. And so, you know, as I thought about it, I don't know, to me, I looked at it and I said, like anything else in life, award flights are for sale first come first serve. And so if you want to book that New York to Cleveland or the Detroit to Kansas City, you got to book it before I do. And so that and that's always going to be the case that, you know, you're going to have to be the first person or the person who's there while it's still available. So I felt less ethically conflicted when I looked at it that way and said, well, you know, everybody else had the same opportunity to book that before I did, and they didn't. So it's not available anymore in the same way that it wouldn't be available if the store had a limited supply of something and I bought the last one and nobody else can buy another one afterwards. Well, you

had to get to the store before I did if you wanted it. And if you didn't, then you're going to have to look for another plan. And I don't mean to sound smug in that. It's just like that's just the way life works when it comes to buying limited commodities. So I don't feel ethically conflicted there are a lot of things in this game exactly it's questionable and i don't have the right answer or and you're neither does greg none of us do you just have to create the answer that makes you feel comfortable if you don't feel comfortable doing any of the things that we've talked about today then by goodness sake don't do them like you know don't do something you think is wrong yeah no that's that's exactly right and i feel feel exactly as Nick described that it doesn't personally bother me, but I completely understand why some might feel that it's wrong to take up those seats. So, yeah, do you. I don't know.

And if you're upset with what we're doing, I'm sorry. There are going to be several things that we do that will upset you. And, you know, we can't live our lives based on what others worry about. But if you convince us that it's really doing harm, of course, we would change our ways. Well, you know, and I think that there needs to be the discussion of the flip side of this, too, that like, is it ethical that the Delta is charging 400000 miles for people who want to fly Sydney to Los Angeles, but only 95000 if they continue on to Mexico City? I mean, I I'm a capitalist at heart, I guess, you know, I'm into this whole credit card game. So I understand that they're going to charge what they can get for the

product. But the fact of the matter is that they're really soaking people on that Sydney to Los Angeles route. So should I feel bad that I was a smart consumer and didn't overpay for the product, you know, the inflated price that they're asking because they know they'll get some people to pay it? I don't know. Delta is as unethical as I am in that example, I feel like, in the sense that they're soaking people for so many more miles than they're willing to accept for that flight, clearly. So I think you could look at it from that way and say that either side has some guilt, so to speak. But like you said, I sleep fine at night. I'm not particularly concerned about this. I don't do it all the time, but I just like using a coupon code.

If there is a coupon code, I'm going to use it because I want to save some money. So I- What if it's a limited use coupon code and you're taking away the opportunity for someone else to save that money and you don't really need it? You've got a good job. I mean, that's true. And that's where I see the perspective from the people who are like, you know, hey, it's unfair that you booked that backup flight because you got the extra miles to do it. I don't. I can only book one and now I can't even book that because you booked it as a backup flight. So I can see that argument and I don't have a great answer for it. I it's probably not going to change my behavior. But is that wrong to me? I don't know. I'm not sure.

No. Yeah. One other thing. If we don't book, those things, there's no guarantee that people who actually want the, the regular flight from Detroit to Kansas city are actually going to be booking that. It might be other travel hackers that found this opportunity, um, to not to not save all that money or all those miles because of the possibility that someone wouldn't be able to book the flight they actually want. Yeah. I mean, you're preparing for a possibility. Yeah. Like it may not even exist. Right. You don't even know if somebody is going to want it on that day at that time and book it to begin with. And I also, you know, when I thought about it, I was like, well, I mean, do I need to concern myself then with is it ethical for me to book the totally, you know, unnecessary vacation flight from San Francisco or from, you know, Sydney to Los Angeles? Because somebody might actually need that flight for like, you know, a more important reason. And like you could drive yourself crazy with preparing for all of the potential scenarios that might happen. And I so I'm just not going to do that.

I'm not going to think out that many hypotheticals. So I'm not too concerned about that either. So from those standpoints, I'm not particularly concerned with this, but some people certainly are, and it's worth recognizing that. So final word on it. Years ago, a New York Times ethicist took on this question and determined it is ethical to do this. And so I'm going to defer to someone who calls himself an ethicist instead of us. I'm glad that you qualified it that way. Someone who calls himself an ethicist. How do you become an ethicist? I have no idea if they have any qualifications that make them. Yeah. That's all you need. You just need to call yourself an ethicist. That's all you need. There you go. We defer to the ethicist on this. We do not call ourselves that. So there you go. There you go. All right. That brings us,

my friends, I think, to the question of the week. This week's question of the week came in at the giant mailbag address. That's mailbag at frequent miler dot com mailbag at frequent miler dot com. Got questions that you'd like to have considered for future segments. So this week's question came in from Benjamin, who said, I love listening to your podcast. Been in the game for about 10 years. I consider myself somewhat knowledgeable and continues going on about sweet spots that he's been able to book. But he says in here that he noticed, I'm looking for the exact line I was trying to skip ahead. My question for you guys is this, how often do you guys book close in? Seven days or less before flights or stays? So much availability appears in that timeframe that I'm wondering if this is a viable travel

booking strategy. Make it up as you go along. Or am I setting myself up for a world of pain? Would love your perspectives. All my best, Benjamin. So Benjamin points out the fact that oftentimes there is much greater award availability within a week or two of pain. Would love your perspectives. All my best, Benjamin. So Benjamin points out the fact that oftentimes there is much greater award availability within a week or two of departure. That's pretty standard across the board. If you look at next week and the week after whenever you're listening to this, I can almost guarantee that award availability almost anywhere is going to be easier to snag unless you're looking during a holiday week, right? So that part is true. So is that a viable strategy or is he setting himself up for a world of pain by deciding to just book close-in

awards? Yeah, no, I think it's totally viable. I haven't done a lot of it, but it's ironic that this came up now because I've started to plan around that kind of thing. Let me give one example. Well, this isn't my plans, but an example of what motivated me to is I have been using Seatspy to watch some routes that are of interest to me. And so some are, for example, from Australia to the US or from New Zealand to the US or vice versa. And I've been finding daily that flights that are within a few days coming from Australia to the US, there's at least four business class seats on United, for example, that just pop up. Sometimes it's just a few days before, sometimes it's a week or two before. And so I think it would be totally reasonable to book a trip, for example, to Australia, where you use miles to book one way awards in both directions.

And you but but use miles that are that are freely or cheaply cancelable. And, and, and maybe you book economy, or maybe you pay more miles than you're willing to pay. And then as it gets closer and closer to the time you want to leave, you find the much better flight and you book that instead and cancel the one that you had. So I have a trip to Europe where I'm kind of counting on that now. It's a little different. What I'm looking for is in that case is I'm going to book business class and I'm hoping to get on first class flight. So I have like, you know, award alerts set up with expert flyer. And I think it's very likely that we're going to fly first class on that trip. Yeah. You know, and I think that Greg really hammers home how to avoid the world of pain, because I think that that's really the key piece of this. When Benjamin says, you know, is this viable or am I setting myself up for a world of pain? Now, if you go in and say, well, I'm not going to book anything until a couple of days before I'm scheduled to come home without any backup plan, then maybe you are setting yourself up for a world of pain because you don't know for sure that those seats are going to open up. But the antidote to that is exactly what Greg said, booking a backup flight with miles that are freely cancelable. And, you know,

the ethicist says that that's OK. So so I think that that's the strategy to use. Now, I didn't know about this Australia finding, but I do have an itinerary booked back from Australia and could cancel that. So this is a great tip for me because if I could find four seats a few days before departure that are cheaper with some other miles, and maybe I would switch to that and cancel what I currently have booked. So I think that if you're doing it that way, I think this can certainly be a viable option. And I do think that award availability opens up very frequently. So the other qualifications I would say is this is easier to do if you're traveling with one or two people than it is if you're traveling with four or five or whatever it may be with a larger group, smaller, the group,

much better chance. One, one seat is going to be probably pretty easy to come by close in two seats, probably still fairly easy. More than that. It's going to really depend on a lot of different factors. So that's one piece of it too, is is you got to be pretty flexible. And if you got a kind of job where you got to be at work on Monday, one way or another, well, that could end up maybe being a problem unless you're willing to fly, for instance, economy class. And there's lots of economy awards available all the time. And then maybe that could be an issue for this. So but if you're the type of person that works from home, you know, you work remotely, and you're like, well, if I got to extend my trip by a day or two, whatever, that's not the end of the world, then I think this can be a totally viable strategy. And probably the easiest way to fly in the most luxury most of the time. I mean, I think that it would make the whole process a lot simpler. I've seen people do it for years and years. I haven't done much of it either, like Greg, but I've seen people on my Facebook feed do it for years and years to great success. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't seem to work with Delta, by the way, but a lot of other airlines,

it works well. Good to know. Good to know. All right. Keep that in mind. My friends, that brings us to the end of today's episode. If you've enjoyed this conversation, you'd like to get more in your email inbox. You want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. You can follow us on all the various social medias, follow us on Instagram for lots of good tips and stories and things there. You can watch this show on YouTube. If you're listening to it, by contrast, if you're watching it on YouTube, you could listen to it on all the popular podcast platforms, wherever you are listening to it or watching it, please like it, give us a thumbs up. Leave us some feedback in the comments. We always appreciate all of those things. And don't forget to subscribe

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