Lazy Man and Money

Travel Tip: A Shoulder (Season) to Lean On

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As part of our recent move, my wife and I are trying to declutter our house. In the process, I came across about a bazillion Money magazines from a couple of years ago. When I get to an article of interest I dog-ear the page and move on. I figure that I’ll go back and write about it someday.

Well, a couple of years later, it’s time to cash in one of those pages that caught my eye. The article was about 3 Fall Travel Deals… I know it’s not exactly “first day of Spring” blog material, but bear with me a minute.

The article caught my eye because it mentioned traveling during the “shoulder season” of a destination. We know there are peak seasons to travel to certain locations, but those are going to cost money. Think about flying anywhere around the holidays. It’s simple supply and demand. The shoulder season is an area of time when the experience is still good, but the costs are way down, because most people want to travel during the optimum time. Typically this means the ideal weather for the location.

Before coming across this article, I had never heard of “shoulder season.” However, traveling during it can save you 30% on airfare and hotels. Is it worth it? I think that depends on your budget and your goal of travel. Personally, I imagine that the Louvre is just as good in the spring as it is in the summer. It is probably even better due to less foot traffic in the off-season. (Sorry about “imagining”, but I don’t have real world experience as I tend not to travel a lot. However, my wife has been to France in the winter and says it was a positive experience.)

The trade-off is that the Eiffel Tower might not be as much fun when it is 45F degrees out than when it is 72F (though I’ve seen some amazing snow-covered Eiffel Tower pictures). When I expect to really start traveling in 10 years or so (I want to show Little Man the world, and experience part of that myself), I equate saving 30% on travel with seeing 30% more of the world.

This lead me to do a few more searches to find out if “shoulder season” was really a thing that travel experts talk about an analyze. It turns out that it is a real thing.

Again, since I don’t travel much, I’ll present you with Travel and Leisure’s shoulder season secrets (I dare you to say it 5 times fast). It covers just about any area that you would ever want to travel to. (This obviously excludes New Jersey, but I still love Chris Christie for putting his constituents first). The downside is that they push you to a long slideshow instead of giving you the meat of the message.

For saving a thousand dollars or more, I can living with that. How about you?

Got Airline Miles? Maximize Their Value with these 8 Tips

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[The following is a post from a friend of mine James Williams. Whilst waiting out a bad economy after college graduation, James worked at a major Atlanta-based airline. The brief stint gave him deep insights into the airline industry and he serves as a guide for family and friends wondering through the wilderness of fare rules, frequent flyer programs, and getting the cheapest flights. He is a Mountain View-based software engineer, loves to travel, and blogs about more geeky fare over at James Williams. If you are the techie-type, I got a feeling you’ll be reading more from him in the future. In the meantime, I’m ecstatic he could fill my gap of being clueless with airline miles.]

Traveling as much as I do can get expensive. The technology downturn of 2003 made me recognize the value of a dollar. Lazy Man has already covered some very good tips on how to save money on airfare, but today I’d like to talk about airline miles.

Here are my top tips to make the most of your airline miles: [Note from Lazy Man: Before we get to the tips, I’m going to distract you with a picture of a hot flight attendant. Sorry James…]

Maximize your Airline Miles

  1. Book Early

    Most legacy carriers (US Air, United, Delta, Continental, American) allow you to book up to 330 days in advance. In theory, there is less competition for seats at this time and you may have the best selection of flights. You also will avoid most ticketing fees.
  2. Book Late

    After it’s been decided that they won’t be able to sell the last batch of seats, airlines might free up some more frequent flier tickets for sale. Booking under two weeks opens you up to extra fees and penalties for redemption.
  3. Book a paid ticket to/from a hub city and award ticket from the hub city
    While it is preferable to book an award ticket for the whole trip, if you are flying from a city with limited capacity, you might find seats easier if you split the flight between a paid ticket and award ticket. For example, let’s say I want to fly from BZN (Bozeman, MT) to CDG (Paris) on Delta. Bozeman is likely to only have small puddle-jumpers from BZN to the nearest hub in Salt Lake City. Prop planes mean limited award seats. You could split up the trip into a paid ticket for the harder to get Bozeman-Salt Lake City and an award ticket for Salt Lake City-Paris.
  4. Split up parties of more than two people
    Finding four seats on a flight to a leisure destination can be fairly difficult. For a family of four, try to have Mom fly with one of the kids on one itinerary and Dad with the other kid on another itinerary.
  5. Use co-terminals to your advantage
    Co-terminals are airports that count as the same destination for ticketing purposes. This can be helpful in finding tickets if it is possible to fly out of San Francisco and into San Jose for instance. They can differ from airline to airline but generally the major airports in the Bay Area (SFO, OAK, SJC), New York Metro (JFK,LGA,EWR,HPN), greater Miami area (FLL-PBI-MIA) or the greater Los Angeles area (LAX, ONT, SNA) can be considered the same destination. Sometimes the greater Baltimore-Washington Metro area is included (BWI, DCA)
  6. Use airline alliances
    All of the legacy carriers save Alaskan Airlines take part in some sort of airline alliance whether it is SkyTeam, Star Alliance, or One World. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses but allow you to book award tickets on partner airlines. Extra ticketing fees may apply.
  7. Know the value of your miles
    Most airlines use redemption levels that don’t correlate to the price of the ticket. When you want to redeem an award ticket, first calculate the cents per mile (CPM) for redemption. Divide the price of a paid ticket by the amount of miles it would take to redeem that ticket. If the cost per mile is less than 0.01, you probably should buy the ticket. If the CPM is 1-2 cents, use your discretion and try to find a better valued trip. At 3 CPM or more, book the ticket NOW. If the airline values them at 1 cent per mile, why give them a discount on rewarding you for your loyalty?
  8. Become an elite member of an airline
    Not only will it maximize the amount of miles you’ll accumulate for trips, but several airlines have additional capacity for award tickets that they only offer to their elite members.

How do you maximize your airline miles? Let us know below.

Random Thoughts From the Clouds

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This is what sleep deprived Lazy Man looks like
This is what sleep deprived Lazy Man looks like
There’s not a lot of personal finance content in this post… which makes it somewhat suitable for a Friday afternoon (or evening if you are on the East coast). It’s simply some thoughts I had while flying back from vacation that I felt like sharing. I’ll return with more personal finance articles next week with such mind-numbing topics like “budgeting”. Don’t think I’m joking. I have half a mind to do a whole week on it.

I was fairly sleep deprived so excuse the extreme negative tone of some thoughts.

Advice for various companies:

  • Palm – Your memo application for the Palm Pre should work the same as composing an email. I don’t know how to move my cursor to edit any of these notes that I’m sending myself for this article. I know it’s possible, as a number of screen touches moved it to a random location, I just can’t replicate the moves nor put it where I want to. However your “email memo..” feature was incredibly useful for this when I came out of “airplane mode.”
  • American Airlines 1 – On a 6 hour flight that takes off at 8:47AM, look into selling lunch not just breakfast. We didn’t land until 3PM in the time zone we left. It was closer to 4PM be the time we claimed luggage and left the airport.
  • American Airlines 2 – Since you aren’t selling a proper lunch how about accurately naming your snacks? Your “cheese and crackers snack”, has only .75 oz of cheese and .56 oz. of crackers – but the same snack box has 1 oz. of nuts and 1 oz. of raisins each. Perhaps look into renaming it the “nuts and raisins snack box?”
  • To the lady behind me – Okay, I know she’s not a company, but I might as well get this out of my system, too. Thanks for telling your boy the tray table is not a toy. I wish you did it 3 hours ago. This way I wouldn’t have spent time thinking up 2 things to tell him: 1) I’m Santa’s secret eyes and ears and he’s dangerously close to making naughty list this year or 2) I ate Santa Claus and there will be no Christmas this year or in the future. Did I mention I was sleep deprived?
  • Best Western and Super 8 – Free wifi included with rooms that are priced at $79 and $59 respectively. Somewhere Peter King is spitting up his quad cappa-speso-latte. (See his Enjoyable/Aggravating Chicago Travel Note of the Week II.) Oh yeah, free fridge and microwave as well.
  • Toscano – I really want the Zombie of Montclaire Moors Statue from Toscano that I pictured here at the top of the article. Thank you Toscano and Sky Mall for making me laugh when I was stuck in a bad mood.

By the way, sorry for the weird title. I was going to title this post “Random Thoughts from 3,000 feet”, and then I realized that I didn’t know if a plane typically flies at 3,000 feet or if it’s just something that I’ve heard in the past. So I’ll just go with “from the clouds” to be safe and someone with aviation knowledge can help me out in the comments.