Help me redeem my World Points for flights.
March 14, 2008 1:24 PM Subscribe
What's the best way to get a flight for the minimum number of points using my BofA (formerly MBNA) World Points? We want to go somewhere besides the US, the Caribbean or Mexico.
I have almost 85K World Points I'd like to "cash in" for a free flight (or two). For those not familiar, this is Bank of America's answer to frequent flier miles or whatever... you can use them for a multitude of things, but we want to travel, so plane tickets it is. We have traveled a couple of times with my husband's miles through US Airways, and their site to redeem your points makes life so easy--they suggest times and places where you can get flights for the minimum points advertised. BofA, not so much. The redemption site is geared towards someone who has specific dates and places in time, and I really don't care when or where--just as long as I get the most bang for my points.
I did call the World Points Hotline and learned that the minimum point value is based on flight cost (ie, 35000 points to Caribbean = maximum $600 flight, 85000 points to Asia = maximum $1150 flight). This seemed helpful--I can easily plug random dates into Orbitz or Expedia and use the flexible date feature to find places I can go for these amounts and the ideal dates. The problem is, it doesn't always work. For example, flights to Bangkok through all of the major travel sites for early June were right around $1000 from our local airport, but when I went back to BofA's redemption site, the points required to "buy" a ticket for that time period equaled twice the minimum.
I had some luck with places like Mexico, the Caribbean and even Costa Rica (which we are considering), but we really wanted to go somewhere like Thailand or Australia or... somewhere "bigger!" (We live in Virginia, ready to start a family so this could be our last big vacation before entering Babyland.)
Does anyone have any suggestions for working the system? Or for that matter, suggestions of places in Asia, Africa, Australia or anywhere in the Pacific that are notoriously cheap to fly to during the summer?
I have almost 85K World Points I'd like to "cash in" for a free flight (or two). For those not familiar, this is Bank of America's answer to frequent flier miles or whatever... you can use them for a multitude of things, but we want to travel, so plane tickets it is. We have traveled a couple of times with my husband's miles through US Airways, and their site to redeem your points makes life so easy--they suggest times and places where you can get flights for the minimum points advertised. BofA, not so much. The redemption site is geared towards someone who has specific dates and places in time, and I really don't care when or where--just as long as I get the most bang for my points.
I did call the World Points Hotline and learned that the minimum point value is based on flight cost (ie, 35000 points to Caribbean = maximum $600 flight, 85000 points to Asia = maximum $1150 flight). This seemed helpful--I can easily plug random dates into Orbitz or Expedia and use the flexible date feature to find places I can go for these amounts and the ideal dates. The problem is, it doesn't always work. For example, flights to Bangkok through all of the major travel sites for early June were right around $1000 from our local airport, but when I went back to BofA's redemption site, the points required to "buy" a ticket for that time period equaled twice the minimum.
I had some luck with places like Mexico, the Caribbean and even Costa Rica (which we are considering), but we really wanted to go somewhere like Thailand or Australia or... somewhere "bigger!" (We live in Virginia, ready to start a family so this could be our last big vacation before entering Babyland.)
Does anyone have any suggestions for working the system? Or for that matter, suggestions of places in Asia, Africa, Australia or anywhere in the Pacific that are notoriously cheap to fly to during the summer?
I, too, had an old MBNA Worldpoints card, and the inability to redeem an award without paying extra $ led me to shift my spending to an airline card.
Remember, your 85k Worldpoints can be redeemed for $830 in cold hard cash. Are you likely to find a "cheap" fare bookable through Worldpoints that gets you more value than $830 cash? My own personal assessment was that cash was the best and highest use of my own Worldpoints.
I suspect that part of the problem is that fares in the lowest class buckets (purchaseable through Orbitz) are not bookable at all with Worldpoints. The cheapest international fares are going to be available through consolidators / "bucket shops" and you can't use Worldpoints directly there. You might get lucky, but I suspect you'd incur a lot of time and frustration looking for something.
posted by QuantumMeruit at 2:50 PM on March 14, 2008
Remember, your 85k Worldpoints can be redeemed for $830 in cold hard cash. Are you likely to find a "cheap" fare bookable through Worldpoints that gets you more value than $830 cash? My own personal assessment was that cash was the best and highest use of my own Worldpoints.
I suspect that part of the problem is that fares in the lowest class buckets (purchaseable through Orbitz) are not bookable at all with Worldpoints. The cheapest international fares are going to be available through consolidators / "bucket shops" and you can't use Worldpoints directly there. You might get lucky, but I suspect you'd incur a lot of time and frustration looking for something.
posted by QuantumMeruit at 2:50 PM on March 14, 2008
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Good luck!
posted by allen8219 at 2:41 PM on March 14, 2008