Traveling Business Class with Points

In case you missed my previous post about traveling to Europe, the general summary is that I traveled to Switzerland and London via New York City with my mom to celebrate her birthday. I was able to use credit card points to book most of our flights including business class flights, so this blog post is about the process I used to accomplish that. If you prefer to consume this content in video form, check out my Youtube video.

First things first, you have to prep. You'll want to ask yourself if there is a specific place that you want to go or if you are flexible in terms of location. It will be a lot easier to find award availability if you have location flexibility. If you are set on traveling to a specific location, another way to create location flexibility is to book what's called a "self-transfer" where you book the award flight to/from a different location than your desired location then book a separate flight/train/whatever to/from the award flight location. For example, my mom and I booked our award flight from JFK in New York City even though neither of us is located there.

Additionally, you'll want to narrow down the timeline. Again, flexibility makes a difference, but if you are set on specific dates, you'll want to start this process early. A lot of airlines release award availability about a year in advance. It will be in your best interest to book early if you have limited date flexibility.

You will also want to identify any desired airline experience that you want to have. For example, one of the items on my bucket list is to fly first or business class on Emirates. Finally, take inventory of your current credit card and airline points.

Alongside the prep work, you'll also want to do some initial research. If you have a specific airline in mind, you can check their website to see how many points are typically required for award flights. If you're open to a variety of airlines, you will want to use a points searching tool like seats.aero or point.me to view award availability. I'll be talking about seats.aero in this post since that is what I used to book the flights for this trip. I would recommend getting the premium version since the free version is quite limited, but my premium subscription is no longer active, so all screenshots that I'll be showing are from the free version.

You'll also want to do some research into what credit card signup bonuses are currently being offered. If you don't know where to start, looking at sites like https://thepointsguy.com or https://upgradedpoints.com/ can be a good start. While doing this, be mindful of what transfer partners each card has. You'll want to make sure that your desired airline is a transfer partner of your chosen card(s). You can possibly work around this by transferring and booking with one of the other airlines in the same alliance, but you would need to look up those details as well.

seats.aero will actually flag the transfer partners for the major airlines, so that may make your research process a bit easier.

If you only have the free version, you can explore a specific airline and it will show you the next two months of availability for that airline (the premium version goes up to 1 year). You can search from continent a to continent b, but you cannot search from city to city in the free version (the premium version does have that capability). You can somewhat work around this by typing an airport code into the filter bar as shown below.

The premium version will also let you set alerts which is super helpful if you're looking for a specific flight/airline/city/date.

Once you've done the research and prep work, it's time to take action. At this point, you'll want to go ahead and get your credit cards of choice. Make sure that that spend requirements are something that you can easily meet and ensure that you have a plan for the annual fees as well. Paying a high annual fee one time is usually worth it since the sign-up bonuses can be quite large. However, you you have to use your points before closing a card, so ensure that you'll be able to do so before it's time to pay the annual fee again (unless you plan to keep the card long term). 

Now for my specific situation, I already had the Chase Sapphire Preferred and the Bilt card each with a pretty good amount of points. I also had some miles on American Airlines and United Airlines. Based on my research, I determined that I needed two more credit cards to achieve my goal. I decided to apply for the Amex Gold and the Capital One Venture.

I used my United miles to book an economy flight from LAX to EWR. This was 15000 miles + $5.60. I used a combination of Amex points and Chase points to book business class on Swiss Air for myself and my mom from JFK to GVA. This was 60000 miles + 76.60 Canadian Dollars per ticket. Swiss Air was not a transfer partner, but I was able to transfer my points to Air Canada and book that way. I used my American miles and Bilt points to book my mom a business class trip from LHR to IAH. This was about 57000 miles + $693.70 (note the high taxes and fees which is pretty typical when flying to/from London. Other destinations may be similar). I used my Capital One points to book myself a premium economy flight on Virgin Atlantic from LHR to SFO for 27500 miles + 394.67 GBP.

I didn't really find any reasonable business class flights for myself coming home, but I had a good experience in Premium Economy on Virgin Atlantic. I would definitely recommend this to anyone looking to upgrade their experience from regular economy but doesn't want to spend the $/points for business class especially for a daytime flight. However, I would still recommend this overnight as well since it's significantly more comfortable than standard economy based on my recent experience in premium economy on United Airlines.