✈️ Booking premium seats with an underrated program

Estimated read time: 4 minutes and 15 seconds

Good morning and welcome back to Daily Drop. Today I want to share a travel-hacking limerick to kick things off:

Hey, it almost worked. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Anyway, here’s what else is going on:

• 🥂 First-class Friday: Book premium seats with this underrated program

• ✈️ Frontier’s “all you can fly” Summer pass is on sale

• 🖼️ Travel meme

🥂 First-class Friday: Book premium seats with this underrated program

Would you believe me if I told you that you could book a Cathay Pacific first-class seat using your Alaska Airlines miles??

If you’ve got a stash of Alaska miles that you’ve been sitting on for a while and haven’t found the perfect way to use them… allow me to blow your mind. 🤯

We don’t talk much about Alaska Airlines, but honestly, they’ve got one of the best partner award charts out there! So even if you never fly Alaska, their miles are super valuable.

So here’s the sweet spot. You can get pretty dang far in one of Cathay Pacific’s lie-flat seats for relatively few Alaska Airlines miles.

You can see below that a one-way business class flight from the U.S. to Asia is only 50,000 Alaska miles or 70,000 for first class.

If you were paying cold, hard cash, a premium seat on Cathay for this type of route (going from San Francisco to Hong Kong, for example) could cost you upwards of $10,000 one way 👇

So how do we book a deal like this? It involves a little bit of effort to find a coveted sweet spot, but that usually makes it… all the sweeter 🙃

If you’re trying to book an award flight on Cathay, I have found that looking for award space with the Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan, British Airways Executive Club, or the Qantas Frequent Flyer award calendar is best (because Cathay is also a Oneworld member).

Some airlines will divvy up award seats to other partners, so you just never know what you’ll find, or where you’ll find it.

Luckily for me, I found award space directly on Alaska’s site for just 70,000 miles for a first-class seat on Cathay Pacific, as promised.

If you happen to find award space through, say, BA’s website, make a note of the dates, times, and flight numbers of the available seats. Keep those handy and call Alaska to have an agent book your seat using your Alaska Airlines miles. I’ve done this before, and it works 👍

It took me about ten minutes of searching the award calendar and putting in different routes and dates to get to Hong Kong, but if you’re looking to burn some Alaska miles and want an unforgettably luxurious experience, your ten minutes of work is 100% worth that killer deal for a first-class seat!

✈️ Frontier’s “all you can fly” summer pass is on sale

I don’t know if the rest of you have noticed this, but summer travel prices this year are ridiculous. A couple of months ago I was considering taking a break from traveling this Summer to avoid the headache and hefty prices.

That’s why this week I’ve been doing my best to bring you some travel deals to take some of the load off. Today is no different, as Frontier is now offering a discount on their “all you can fly” summer pass.

Basically, this pass will let you fly as many times as you want during the validity window without paying any base fare (which does not mean it’s free).

Now, you may remember when I told you about this pass last year, and how the bottom line is that it was a “less than ideal” offer.

Given the sky-high airfare prices this summer, I’d highly consider looking into this if you live in the U.S.

Here are the deets:

• Flight pass costs $699

• Fly an UNLIMITED number of times between now and September 30th

• Valid for Frontier’s entire route network

• You will pay a base fare of just $0.01 per flight

• You still must pay taxes and fees

To give you a few of the caveats (you can read more on their website):

• There are blackout dates

• You can only confirm flights one day in advance (domestic) or 10 days in advance (international)

• You must pay for add-ons like seats, bags, etc.

• You won’t earn miles from these flights

So, yeah… it’s not the perfect pass, but it could still be WELL worth it if you want to do some serious flying this summer.

And I know that some of you will yell at me and say, “Must be nice to have the flexibility to book your flights one day in advance.”

And my response would be…

“Yup.”

I get it… most people don’t have that level of flexibility. But some of you do. And not every offer appeals to every person.

Don’t worry, this is just one deal. There will be more.

If you were already considering booking travel that would cost you more than $700 during the five-month window, I’d definitely hop on this deal.

If you search for a few random domestic flights during June and July, you’ll see that similarly restrictive flights are so expensive that just one or two round trips could make this flight pass worth it, even taking the taxes and fees into account.

Overall, here’s my advice: Crunch the numbers, read the full terms of this offer, and you might find yourself hacking your way around the summer stampede of travel prices.

🖼️ Travel meme

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That’s all for this week, folks! I’m exhausted… I know there’s some epic travel hacking going on in the world, but it can definitely get overwhelming…

Just because there are so many great deals doesn’t mean you should stress about every single one, so make sure you take things one step at a time, eh?

Anyway, see you soon 😉

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