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Make Travel Blackout Dates a Thing of the Past

March 16, 2014 by Brad 14 Comments  Richmond Savers has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Richmond Savers and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers.

Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities. Disclosures.

When we talk to people about frequent flyer miles or hotel points the biggest concern is always, “what’s the point of collecting all these points when you can never use them because of all the blackout dates?”

For years we didn’t want to be bothered collecting points for precisely this reason – it just seemed way too difficult and time-consuming to actually get any real use out of them.

After jumping into the travel rewards concept a few years ago, we can confidently report that many of the major programs are incredibly easy to use and you do not at all have to be concerned that your miles will go unused if you plan properly.

Everything we post on this site, whether personal finance or travel rewards related, is written with simplicity in mind.  We know how busy and stressed everyone is with their regular lives, so we try to cut through the noise and make things easy.  If we can help save you thousands of dollars on travel and prove to you that this is fun and easy then we have done our jobs quite well!

Sign up for our completely free (no gimmicks) travel rewards coaching service and we’ll work with you one-on-one to plan your own rewards travel.

Here are our favorite programs for ease of use and ability to earn significant point balances:

Starwood Hotels

If any Starwood hotel you want to book has availability for a standard room then you can always use your points to book.  This means there is no such thing as a blackout date!

Starwood hotels include Westin, W, aloft, Sheraton, Four Points, St. Regis, Le Meridien and Element, so there are options all across the globe.

A nice thing about Starwood points is that you can combine points across accounts, so if you and your spouse each have points you can combine them for one award booking.  This is particularly useful since you’ll want to book one continuous stay and also to take advantage of the 5th Night Free promotion Starwood offers on award booking (Category 3 or higher).

Starwood Redemptions

We’re staying at the Westin owned Walt Disney World Swan this year, and we’ve recommended The Nines in Portland as well as many of the Starwood hotels in Hawaii.  You can see the entire list of Starwood hotels here as well as the point requirements.

When you search for any Starwood hotel availability, just click the “SPG Free Nights” option under “Rate Preferences” and in the list of room options one will be listed with the number of points needed.

Hyatt Hotels

Hyatt also has a no blackout date policy, so when you’re searching for availability just click, “Show Hyatt Gold Passport Points” and it will automatically give you the points requirement for that particular hotel.  You can see the entire list of Hyatt hotels here (just click on the category numbers) as well as the points requirements per night.

Hyatt Free Nights Example

Hotel options include: Park Hyatt, Grand Hyatt, Andaz, Hyatt, Hyatt House, Hyatt Place, Hyatt Regency

The simplest way to earn Hyatt points is to open a credit card from Chase that offers transferable Ultimate Rewards points.

Once you earn these points in your Chase account you can transfer them to your Hyatt Gold Passport account via an instant transfer and then book your Hyatt room.

Southwest Airlines

Similar to the hotel programs, there are absolutely no blackout dates on Southwest Airlines.  If a flight is available for cash it is available for purchase with your Southwest Rapid Rewards points, so it could not be easier.

The price in points is just a simple function of how much the cash flight costs:  Take the cost in dollars and multiply it by 60 to get the number of points it will cost (this will rise to 70 after the Southwest devaluation at the end of March 2014).  Put another way, it costs 60 points per $1 of Southwest flights.

Let’s say your flight costs $100 each way for a $200 total round-trip cost:  Just multiply $200 by 60 to come up with 12,000 points and that’s your cost.  Their website does this very easily for you on every single search; you can just click the button next to ‘Fares in’ that says “Points” and your cost in points will show automatically.

Southwest Points Example

Southwest points can be earned through any of the various Southwest credit cards or through transfers from Chase Ultimate Rewards, so it is quite easy to amass a significant point balance.

United Airlines

In our opinion United Airlines is the absolute best of the traditional airlines for a number of reasons:

  • United is a transfer partner of Chase Ultimate Rewards
  • United has a wonderful search function right on their homepage to see what reward availability is available.  Their calendar shows you two months at a time so you can see at a glance what Saver level awards are available.
  • United has a significant number of alliance partners, so you can travel quite easily to popular destinations such as Europe and Asia.
  • United allows a free stopover on international flights, which effectively gives you a completely free flight so you can see multiple cities on one trip for zero additional miles

We tell our travel coaching members that as long as you’re flexible and plan far enough in advance (award availability opens up 330 days prior to a flight) you really can see the world for free.  United is a big part of our strategy for regular people who want to easily earn a significant number of miles and actually redeem them for trips they want to take.

As long as you plan far enough in advance, you’ll also find the other major airlines are fairly easy to navigate with points.  We’ve talked at length about how you can get incredible value out of British Airways Avios points to fly on American Airlines, and even notoriously difficult programs like Delta have some decent availability when booking 7-10 months in advance.

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Richmond Savers has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Richmond Savers and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers.

Filed Under: Travel Rewards

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Comments

  1. Andrew@LivingRichCheaply says

    March 17, 2014 at 2:45 pm

    Always good to know. My wife and I racked up a lot of AA miles mainly from traveling and it was hard to use because the black out dates seemed to coincide with dates we weren’t able to travel. At the time my wife was teaching so of course it was hard to schedule vacations. I like when programs have less restrictions.

    Reply
    • Brad says

      March 17, 2014 at 9:22 pm

      Glad you got some value out of the article Andrew! Frequent flyer miles can be great, but only if you can actually use them. It becomes exceedingly difficult if you only have limited and set weeks when you can travel. I try to tell people that flexibility, planning and patience are keys to succeed with this concept, but it is hard for a lot of people who want to travel where and when they want…

      Reply
  2. Brad says

    March 17, 2014 at 9:20 pm

    Glad you enjoyed it Alexi! I really constantly stress making this accessible for the regular family out there, as most people just don’t want to be bothered with some of the stuff that you and I might otherwise consider doing since we love this topic so much 🙂

    That is a great point with having not only multiple currencies, but flexible ones as well; that’s another reason why I talk up the Chase Ultimate Rewards points so much. I know you had great success recently having multiple currencies — it spurred me on to diversify my own rewards a bit more. I hadn’t otherwise considered AA miles themselves, but I’m going to change that shortly…

    I’m still going slow and steady, but looking to pick it up the next application in a month or so. I’ll keep you updated

    Reply
  3. Brad says

    March 17, 2014 at 9:28 pm

    Great, as always, keep me in the loop and I’ll be glad to help as much as you need! Looking forward to chatting again 🙂

    When you say the really cheap flights, do you mean the “saver” level ones?

    I find that if you book far enough in advance you can get amazing options, but I know that’s hard for people. Just for fun I mocked up a flight from Denver to Paris in January 2015 using United miles. Every single day in the month still had saver level economy availability. But August 2014 only had 6 days with saver economy flights available.

    If you can book far enough out (up to the max 330 days) then you can travel anywhere you want; I know it is hard to lock down plans that far in advance though…

    Reply
  4. Kim says

    March 18, 2014 at 12:11 am

    I’m going to book our Europe tickets at 330 days or as close as possible to when our dates become available. We are planning on using United, but should have lots of AA miles by then just in case!

    Reply
    • Brad says

      March 27, 2014 at 8:34 pm

      Nice, that sounds great Kim! The earlier the better 🙂

      And it is always smart to diversify your point balances; I usually rely on Ultimate Rewards since they are diversified by nature (United, BA and Southwest transfers) but lately I’ve decided to start collecting American points as well.

      Reply
  5. Mark Murray says

    March 20, 2014 at 9:00 am

    Good thing that I almost always use my travel rewards.

    Reply
    • Brad says

      March 27, 2014 at 8:41 pm

      It is good! Travel rewards, when used properly, can save you a ton of money!!

      Reply
  6. Raquel@Practical Cents says

    March 24, 2014 at 9:43 pm

    It’s interesting that you say United is the best of the traditional airlines. My local airport is Newark and as you know United has a hub there so we use them alot. I always found them to be very good when it came to redeeming miles. My husband has the united mileage card and I’ve been considering getting it myself. Do you recommend I get the United Mileage Plus explorer card with a 30,000 sign up bonus or the chase sapphire which offers a 40,000 sign up bonus? Thanks for your help.

    Reply
    • Brad says

      April 5, 2014 at 6:37 am

      Hi Raquel,
      Thanks for the comment! Yes, I absolutely love United because they have so many options and the system is quite user-friendly. In general I’d suggest starting with the Chase Sapphire Preferred card, and I would hold out for an increased bonus on the United MileagePlus Explorer card. That often increases above the current 30,000, especially if you fly them often you might receive a targeted offer when you login to your account.

      Reply
  7. Syed says

    April 13, 2014 at 6:45 pm

    Thanks for this post. I have been using Southwest a lot recently and have been able to find some good flights along the east coast. It seems most of the big guys like American and United need a good amount of time to book ahead in order to find a good seat. Southwest just makes things easier.

    Reply
    • Brad says

      April 14, 2014 at 8:06 pm

      For sure Syed — Southwest is the absolute easiest program to use. Even though you might not get the best “value”, there’s a lot of real-world value for regular people in the Southwest program. It is just nice to be able to go to the site, find a flight and book it with points.

      Reply
  8. Mom @ Three is Plenty says

    April 18, 2014 at 11:15 am

    I think the key is the flexibility (not just on dates, but also on timing and routes). We booked our flights to Germany as soon as the timeframe we wanted to travel in was available for booking on United. If we flew in/out of FRA, no business class availability on the way home – if we flew into GVA and out of VIE (we’re sticking to the alps) – saver award availability in business both ways (with a 2 hr layover in CPH on the way home on SAS). Only concern is that the flight to GVA is a 777 on United metal, so I’m hoping that they’ve upgraded them all to the lay-flat beds by October!

    Reply
    • Brad says

      April 21, 2014 at 10:10 pm

      Great comment — I couldn’t agree more that flexibility is essential! I try to tell everyone who will listen that this entire concept is about flexibility, planning and patience. If you can just change up how you think about travel, even ever so slightly to be more flexible with dates and destinations, then you can reap incredible benefits from this concept.

      Reply

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