Saving $18,000 to Fly Business Class? Yes Please.

Hey there Money Saver! Welcome back to another week of How to Save A Buck, where we explore ways of saving money in personal finance, credit cards, and investing! Check out my archive here!

$9,000 round trip business class seats from the US to Europe this summer - for free?

Yes! ✈

But how?

Leveraging credit card points. That’s right, credit cards are the most useful tools to score free travel - especially in premier classes. When you have no airline status, points will allow you to sit up front!

We are going to break down exactly how we did this, the process, and how much coin we saved.

We saved almost $9,000 - PER PERSON. That’s $18,000 in total.

Mic drop. 🎤

We’ve written before how we utilize certain credit cards for various reasons - some have better point multipliers for groceries, others for travel, etc. Over the years, we’ve accumulated hundreds of thousands of points, and it’s time to burn some.

With some free time this summer, we decided to focus on Europe as our destination. Instead of searching every possible airline site each moment for reward availability, we joined seats.aero and splurged for the $10/month pro version which let us view rewards more than 60 days out across all airlines. It’s an aggregator of reward availability and a breeze to use.

We came across a return option first, on Singapore Air direct from Frankfurt, Germany to JFK in New York. The cash price is $3,195 in business class.

If you’ve followed us long enough, you know better than to redeem your points through your credit card travel portal. It’s not a good value. Instead, you must transfer to airline loyalty programs. And that’s what we did.

Each ticket was 60,000 Air Canada points, so we transferred a total of 120,000 AMEX points to Air Canada (a partner of Singapore Air), which not only showed the reward space but also offered the lowest point redemption.

We paid a total of about $ 400 USD in addition to the points for airport surcharges. The value of the point redemption equates to 5.3 cents per point ((3195×2)/120000 = .053). Much better than redeeming through the AMEX travel portal at about 1 cent per point! This is 5x more value!

With our return flight booked, we needed to get to Europe in the first place.

We found a departure flight direct to Vienna, Austria from Chicago. Here’s what the cash option looked like for business class:

Oof. Not going to pay $5,600 per person for this!

We discovered award availability for this flight at 88,000 points per person, this time via United. Similar to the previous example, we could transfer our points to one airline to book on a partner airline. In this case, transferring points to United to book on Austrian Airlines in business class.

We paid a total of $11 for both of us to fly business class - which is INSANE. Of course, 176,000 points too.

The value of the point redemption here equates to 6.4 cents per point 🔥 ((5653×2)/176000 = .064). Again, we want to squeeze as much value out of these points as possible and were lucky enough to find the availability and these redemptions.

For our itinerary (2pax), flying round-trip in business class to Europe could cost more than $17,000 ((3195+5653)*2= $17,696). But we leveraged our points and only had to pay a total of around $411.

This example shows that you can fly business class without having some super cool airline status. We have none! You simply need to accumulate points overtime, have a bit of flexibility when it comes to planning, and stretch the value of your points to the max. Transferring points to partners is the best way to do this.

And what a way to save over $17,000!

Save On,

Chris

(REMEMBER - pay off your credit cards in full each month - otherwise, these point redemptions are useless!)