In the wee hours of Aug 28 it was notice by someone booking an award flight that American Airlines would impose a fuel surcharges on award tickets, a few calls later and American was confirming the news with prepared statements. Fuel surcharges are two words travel points hobbyists want to avoid. If your going to pay a fuel surcharge on an award ticket you might as well book a revenue ticket because fuel surcharges suck the life out of an award. The travel bloggers were in a tizzy for several stressful hours as the news that came out of American Airlines was all but detrimental to those who travel on points.
Fast forward to present time and we come to find that American made a mistake (actually I believe this was intended and they now are backtracking) all isn't as it was but it ain't what it was for several panicked hours. As I have written several times over (here), do not acquire these points to watch your balances grow. Have a destination in mind and work to achieve what you need to reach your travel goal. Having just returned from blowing a massive amount of points on 15 days in Asia, I am right back in it acquiring what I need to take my family to South Africa next summer. What did I think when the American news hit...that US Air would somehow be next which almost caused me to panic book a fare just so my points wouldn't be devalued. I someohow managed to compose myself and decided I would do what best I could to protect the points I have for my upcoming trip. As I stated and was evident by the American scare the airlines do NOT have to provide their frequent flyers with advance notice of such changes to their programs. The scare from yesterday came with no advance warning and provided no window to book a quick trip to avoid the devaluation.
At this point, for South Africa I care about airline ticketing and the hotel bookings only. The trip will not occurr until August 2014 and because the Star Alliance carriers will only let me book 329 days out I am forced to wait until October to actually get ticketed seats. Yes, that 2 months time frame makes me vulnerable (especially with a pending US Air/American merger), but I have no choice but to wait it out for air ticketing. Hotels are a little different, we've seen several devaluations so far this year and some came with no announcement or warning. I suspect there to be more in the future. In order to protect myself I booked my rooms today even though I didn't have all the points needed to pay for the stays. Some rooms like Hyatt I booked as revenue stays. Hopefully, I can change to points when I meet the required thresholds, some like Radisson Blu were booked with all points since I get a night free when booking two or more nights and some I booked on cash and points, again most likely to be changed when the proper amount of points are acquired. I had to guess on the dates and plan an impromptu itinerary but again this far out it's all easily changed. Why did I do it? I noticed that many times if you had reservations on file with a property when a devaluation was announced the devaluation did not affect existing reservations, so in essence abiet a bit weak, I reserved my rooms as a bit of an insurance policy asgainst a delvaluation. Only time will tell if my advance planning is fruitful or not. I will scour the travel blogs and read the news bites until my US Airways stash of points is safely turned into ticketed seats, its all I can do. Many reading this are thinking "is it really worth all this?" I can only answer with the following fact: After I take the South African trip I will be writing a blog post on how in three years time I have experienced $100,000 worth of travel and most likely paying no more than 3% of that total cost. I'm sorry but to someone who doesn't have access to a $100,000 travel budget in a lifetime let alone three years, yeah it's very well worth it.
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