The Power of Credit Card Reward Points
Hey friends,
Hope everyone is doing well this week as always!
I did something pretty exciting last weekend as I booked my flights to Europe next year in business class with Qatar! This will actually be my first time ever flying business class and what a way to experience it then by flying with Qatar’s famous Q-Suite business class. And the best part? I’ll be flying on it for both legs of my journey from Melbourne to Madrid.
Now funnily enough whilst I’ve been accumulating reward points for years now, this is the first time I’ll be flying business class. I’ve never felt like I was missing out on anything as I was always just interested in getting to my destination for the lowest price possible, so economy reward seats was always my go-to-choice.
But this Europe trip is going to be our honeymoon for my partner and I, so why not splurge out!
So what did these reward seats cost me? Well, the cash price for these tickets would’ve totaled $13,285 for the both of us.
However, because I booked reward seats this cost me 180,000 Avios points (equivalent to 360,000 AMEX reward points) + $705 in taxes, fees and fuel surcharges.
I did transfer my reward points over to Qatar when they had a 20% transfer bonus because I knew for a while that this trip was coming for a while, meaning I spent around 50,000 less AMEX reward points than I otherwise would’ve needed to.
Which means that I got roughly 4c per point in value for my AMEX reward points, which is pretty standard for a business class reward redemptions. There’s definitely times where you’d get more or less) value, but nevertheless this is still significantly more value than I otherwise would’ve received if I had just redeemed my points for gift cards or cash (which is fixed at 0.5c per point)
I haven’t booked my return leg flights yet because we’re planning to book Singapore Airlines business class for return trip, but the dates that I’m looking to fly haven’t been released yet. I’m planning to transfer points to Kris flyer via Velocity in order to redeem these flights. Because you can transfer points to Kris flyer from Velocity at a rate of 1.55:1, this worked out to be the most effective method.
I’ll give everyone an update when I book those reward flights and give a similar breakdown of costs + points required.
But hopefully this shows you the power of credit card reward points in redeeming reward flights and why you should also look into accumulating points across multiple programs if you haven’t done so already! This has allowed me greater flexibility in finding reward flights based on different routes and airlines, allowing me to optimise my reward point redemption as well.
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