F is for Free
My readers know of the free tickets that we were given on our flight home from Portland in June, and that we used those tickets to travel to Maui last month. I was so thankful for the opportunity to have a real vacation…traveling to Portland for a long weekend is always lovely, and I was thrilled to see my family there, but it doesn’t really feel like vacation, especially since our main purpose for going up was to scatter my father’s ashes.
As I’m sure you have guessed, ‘free’ doesn’t generally mean ‘free’. The tickets were for the cheapest possible seats, and on Alaska Airlines these days, that means you do not get to pick your seat, so very likely you will not be sitting together. It also means you pay extra if you want to check a bag. And you can pay extra for food, none is provided (except Chex mix and a drink), as well as to have seats with extra leg room. Also, some flights cost more than others, and you have to pay taxes and fees. Still. I upgraded us to seats with extra legroom (but not first class), and we checked a couple of bags, and we all sat together. The total for our tickets was about $3,000, of which, I paid about $1,000. So the free tickets were not exactly free, but they were AWESOME, and saved us $2,000 on the flight. Thank you Alaska Airlines! We had no plans for a vacation this year, mostly due to COVID, so it was really nice to have this to look forward to, to enjoy, and to remember.
I’m late to the points game, it doesn’t make sense if you carry a balance on your credit card to put EVERYTHING on there. But if you can afford to pay for everything on your credit card, and if you are willing to play whatever games you have to pay to do so, you can accrue a decent amount of points. I was able to pay for our condo entirely with points. EXCELLENT. That saved us about $2,300.
When I first booked our car, there was a real shortage in Maui. But gradually they got more rental cars, and I was able to cancel the first rental and rebook, saving about $600 for the week.
So overall, our wonderful trip to Maui was not the financial hit it could have been. It was probably worth the higher prices we could have paid, but I’m pretty sure we would not have spent that much. We’ve been to Hawaii before, and for $6,000 plus everything you spend money on there, especially food, I would have probably chosen Europe. But for the absolute treat this trip was, I am really thankful that we were able to go.
We’re thinking our next trip may be to Alaska. I’m saving my points.
2 Comments
nance
Oh, gosh–if only brownie points were redeemable for actual brownies! LOL.
I often think about the money we’ve spent trekking to Canada year after year, including our wine buying, and realize that we could have done Europe several times over. But we really do enjoy our trips and seeing friends and truly relaxing there, spending hours at wineries we love, buying wines we’ve tasted and from winemakers we know.
A trip to Alaska sounds perfect. I know how much you’d like seeing your childhood home again.
J
One nice thing about trips to Canada vs. trips to Europe is that you don’t have to be on an airplane for hours and hours on end. I’m hoping we can have a vacation to Canada at some point…we have some dear friends in Lewiston, New York, which is right near Niagara Falls, so hopefully we can make that into a vacation of some sort some day.
Sadly, I don’t think any of the houses I lived in in Fairbanks are still standing…the homestead had newspaper for insulation, and it burned down, and the house in town was demolished to make a parking lot for the church next door. But it would be interesting nonetheless to show Ted and Maya, and to see it myself, since it’s been so many years. I’m hoping to make it a family vacation with Richard and Kathy. We’ll see.