Kate's on a Plane

When I took my children to the post office to apply for their first passports, there was a poster in the window that featured a picture of the Eiffel tower. My son, who was six at the time, ran up to the poster and said, “That’s the Eiffel tower! I want to see the Eiffel tower!”

I had just started with points and miles, and a small part of me wondered if it was possible, if I could make it happen. The farthest I had ever traveled with him was to California, a trip which requires maybe six hours of flying time with a stop in between. Could I really take him across the ocean?

Flights

I started doing some research and I learned that although our home airport of RDU has very few transatlantic flights, one of them is a direct flight to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, France. A direct flight, with no positioning or layover required, seemed doable. The eight-hour overnight flight, and potential jet lag the next day, was far less intimidating with the possibility of a lie-flat seat to sleep in on the way there.

Air France’s frequent flyer program, Flying Blue, is known in the points and miles community as a pretty family-friendly program, due to their fairly generous pricing and availability of business class award seats (not to mention their 25% discount on award flights for children under 12). But whenever I looked at the RDU-CDG route, prices were astronomical—up to 250,000 points per person in business one-way. Flying Blue uses dynamic pricing, so although there’s a floor to the points prices, the ceiling is high, and our route seemed to be hovering around the ceiling.

Then I learned about partner award bookings. I searched for our route on Virgin Atlantic, which uses an award chart for partner award fights, making pricing both more reasonable and more predictable. Although there was much less availability for our route through Virgin than through Air France, the same business class seat was priced at only 48,500 points each way.

After several weeks of casual searching, I got lucky: I found two seats available through Virgin Atlantic, on our route, over a school holiday weekend, at the desirable price of 48,500 points per person per way. I got even luckier when I realized that there was a 30% transfer bonus available from Capital One for transfers to Virgin Atlantic. This means that I only had to transfer 150,000 Capitol One miles to Virgin Atlantic to get the 194,000 points needed to book these flights.

As this was very early in my points and miles journey, I had not actually accumulated 150,000 Capital One miles myself. These miles were gifted to me by a family member who had these miles sitting in her account and didn’t even know how many she had or what could be done with them. Capital One allows you to transfer miles to anyone, as long as they have a Capital One miles-earning credit card account themselves. There is no requirement that they be a family member or share your address; you just need to call Capital One with both card numbers, and they make the transfer, no questions asked.

(The standard welcome offer on both the Capital One Venture and the Venture X is, at the time of this writing, 75,000 miles, so this same booking could be replicated by opening two of these cards. In the time since I booked this trip, we have opened these cards—I have the Venture X and P2 has the Venture. So, we actually could have booked this trip on our own steam, just several months later.)

In my excitement, I did not pay close attention to the taxes and fees accompanying these tickets. I knew that international award flights were not totally free, and that I would be paying some amount in the hundreds of dollars in cash for our flights. Still, I admit that I had a bit of sticker shock when I got the final checkout page on the Virgin Atlantic website. I paid a total of $1,383 in taxes and fees for our two tickets.

I felt a whole lot better when I created a dummy booking on the Air France website to determine the cash value of our tickets. The cash price for our flights was an eye-popping $19,535.20. INSANITY.

This number is so comically high, it almost doesn’t feel fair to use this as a basis for comparison. Did I really “save” $18,252.20 by using points? Obviously not, because I would never have paid that much for a flight. It was a struggle for me to pay that much for a car.

I looked up the cost of the same flights in economy, and that was a more realistic but still uncomfortably high $4,436.60.

If we were actually paying cash for this trip, this is surely how we would go, so perhaps it’s more accurate to say that using points saved me $3,053.60 on this flight. On the other hand, the only reason we were going at all was because we could get those lie-flat seats. So which number is the right number to use?

I’ve settled on the thought that points and miles are allowing us to fly across the ocean in comfort for $1,383, and that’s a pretty darn good deal, no matter what the cash price may be.

Hotel

Next: lodging. Though not the most centrally located Hyatt in Paris, the Hyatt Regency Paris Étoile is a fan favorite for its club lounge and spectacular views of the Eiffel Tower. I booked a club room, which gives us free breakfast and an evening happy hour in the club lounge with drinks and appetizers (read: dinner), for 18,000 Hyatt points per night, transferred from my Chase Ultimate Rewards.

I booked four nights for a total of 72,000 points, which was covered by the welcome offer on my Chase Sapphire Preferred.

One Small Change

I had minor misgivings about our dates; our outbound flight was a day later than I really wanted. I went ahead and booked an extra night at the Hyatt at the beginning of our trip just in case availability opened up for a flight on our desired date. It eventually did…but because I had booked our flights as round trips, I couldn’t change just the outbound leg. Rookie mistake! I had to wait until there was award availability for flights on both the new outbound date and our existing return date. I could have kicked myself.

Eventually, the stars aligned, and availability opened up for both the dates we needed. I paid $100 to Virgin Atlantic to change our flight. (International airlines tend to have more punitive change and cancellation policies for award travel than US airlines do.) I made sure to book two one-ways this time, in case any additional changes were needed in the future. This brought our out-of-pocket cost for flights up to $1,483.

The Bottom Line

	Cash Price	Points	Out of Pocket Cost
Roundtrip Flights	$19,535.20	150,000	$1,483
Hotel (4 Nights)	$1,883.50	72,000	$0
Grand Total	$21,418.70	222,000	$1,483

So, we’re taking a $20,000+ trip to Paris for less than $2,000. This tracks with what I’ve heard some say about award travel: overall, you wind up getting about 90% off. I’ll take it!