Making Lemonade When Reasonable Award Flight Redemptions Don’t Exist

Award Flight Redemptions

I consistently focus on redemptions aligned to my goals. I ensure value for my situation without cents per point value unnecessarily entering the equation.  But at the same time, I naturally look to minimize the miles or points I use to accomplish a given endeavor.  Meeting my goal is the primary focus, and doing it an award cost-efficient way is a secondary one.  But recent challenges with award flight redemptions had me wrestling with the latter more so than any other instance in recent memory.  Today, I’m getting into this predicament and how I’m resolving it.

Our Situation

Our longer-term travel goals are generally broad ones.  We have ideas where we want to go and what we want to do, but we usually don’t nail down a selected trip until the travel dates get closer.  Consequently, we don’t make “early” award flight redemptions that often.

Based on how I value my time, I don’t plan for everything.  Otherwise, I’d be doing a tremendous amount of booking and cancelling, pissing away my most valuable time asset in the process.  Instead, I passively gamble on the price and availability of award flight redemptions in the meantime.  I’m more actively booking hotel awards far out, something I can do in a more time-efficient manner.

And so it is with our spring break plans.  About seven months ago, I booked a five-night award stay where I found standard award availability for our 2026 dates.  Back then and as recently as last week, I gave us a 10% chance of actually taking this trip.  Over this past weekend, it became readily apparent this trip is happening.

The good news is that the hotel booking looks much better now.  This program’s award rates have risen in general.  Plus, only exponentially-more-expensive premium awards are left at this property about three months before we travel.  The bad news is award flight redemptions for the return home are abysmal.  I cannot find a reasonable, one-stop itinerary back home for less than 100k miles per person in economy.  (This is a domestic trip, albeit a rather long one).

We have plenty of airline mile currency to cover that itinerary, but on principle, I couldn’t bring myself to make that redemption.  We’re overcoming this conundrum in a variety of ways.

Making Lemonade

Redeeming a Much-Ignored Currency

For part of the trip back home, we’re redeeming miles from an account my wife has never touched.  Part of the reason it’s been long ignored is her total balance is relatively small, not conducive to any of our travel.  But, in this case, we found a flight getting us about halfway home has an attractive-enough award rate.  Just as important, the total miles for two individuals is right around what’s in the wife’s account.  We’ll book the other half of the family with my account, which has a much higher balance.  For a plethora of reasons, my wife and I have never used this loyalty program’s miles.  It’s a win to almost zero out the wife’s account, and just as big a victory to use any of my miles at all.

Two Stops

Initially, I considered two stops as a nonstarter.  I can’t remember the last time I’ve done this myself, and I generally don’t presume that my family would be okay with it.  But as I blathered on about expensive, limited one-stop options, she interjected and asked about two-connection options.  I got back to the keyboard, and things started coming together in a much more cost-effective way.

Perhaps we’ll dread this on the actual day of travel.  But the family is looking at this challenge from a “how can we make this work” perspective, reflecting their emotional investment in this trip.  And like any other travel experience, we’ll pick up stories at the destination and along the way.

Revisiting Another Regional Airport

We took costs even lower by planning to depart from and return to a regional airport farther away, but still close enough to be feasible.  With the right scheduling, it’s been a calm, predictable drive each occasion I’ve used it.  What made this angle a no-brainer for us is the award flight pricing and timing were substantially more attractive.  Those positives vastly outweigh the negative of a bit more driving.

Embracing Buffer Days

We’ve long-followed a travel schedule providing a buffer day on the tail end of each trip.  Generally, we return early to ensure we have one complete day at home with no obligations.  This helps the transition back to “normal” for everyone in the family.  For this trip, though, we’re adding a second day at home of complete nothing.

We’re leveraging those two days off to compensate for a longer, cheaper, more unconventional journey back home.  It’ll be a slog getting back, but we’ll have plenty of time to recover.

Award Flight Redemptions – Conclusion

Have I learned my lesson to make award flight redemptions earlier?  Probably not.  We’re too noncommittal with our travel plans.  And, as I said earlier, planning for all possible destination outcomes would entail an amount of time I’m not interested in wasting.  But that’s relative.  I’ll put minimal time into booking hotel awards, and even less for award flight redemptions.  Others who enjoy the puzzle more may not see this as wasted time.  Indeed, it’s entertainment for many!

I’ve been purposely vague about airlines, hotels, and travel destinations in this article.  That’s because I consider this challenge universal, something that we all can face regardless of any of those factors.  How do you overcome a dearth of reasonable award flight redemptions?