How gameable are foreign currency refunds?

A funny thing happened during my August trip to the UK: I had an unusual number of foreign currency refunds. The refunds were unrelated: first I ordered a (surprisingly cheap!) £14 taxi from a train station to our first destination in the Lakes District, which was then canceled and refunded. When I went in to rebook the reservation they had fixed the “pricing error” and the trip would then cost £50. We took the bus instead. In the day it took between being charged for the taxi and being refunded, the exchange rate moved in my favor (the pound had appreciated against the dollar), so while I was charged $17.15, the refund was for $17.21 — a 6 cent currency fluctuation in my favor!

The second two refunds were errors at the Hampton by Hilton Glasgow Central, where they were not able to “find” the payment for two prepaid reservations, one I had made through Hotels.com and one through the US Bank Flexperks travel portal. This was especially odd, since they were able to find the reservations themselves — just not any record of the reservations being paid for. At check-in, I was charged $137.80 and $148.18 for the first and second nights. After finally invoking the Hilton Twitter account, they finally “found” the prepaid payment records and refunded the two charges. But this time, the exchange rate had moved against me, and the refunds only posted as $136.41 and $146.68 — a $2.89 exchange rate penalty!

Naturally, this got me thinking: if charges and refunds are processed on different days at the corresponding exchange rates, how should travel hackers think about refundable foreign currency transactions?

Hedging against a weakening dollar

The most straightforward way to take advantage of refundable prepaid foreign currency transactions is to lock in today’s exchange rate against the possibility of a rapid appreciation of the foreign currency. If a foreign merchant prices their products in their home currency (as hotels and airlines do), then the same product will become more expensive in dollars if the foreign currency appreciates: you’ll need more dollars to buy the same amount of foreign currency, so the foreign product will become more expensive to you.

This strategy can be combined with a refundable award redemption: a reservation may be too cheap to redeem points for at today’s exchange rate, but if you are worried about a weakening dollar, you can make a matching reservation using miles or points. You can then run the calculation again when your trip approaches and decide which reservation to keep. If the dollar has weakened sufficiently, refund the cash reservation and keep the points reservation. If the dollar has instead strengthened, keep the cash reservation and refund the points, since the value of the cash refund has gone down.

In many ways this is no different from what travel hackers and even ordinary civilians do with post-paid reservations all the time, and what sites like Autoslash make easy: by monitoring prices over time, and locking in savings as they pop up, you can reduce the final amount you pay for your trips. The only difference is that instead of monitoring the price of the product, you’re monitoring the price of the product’s currency, and instead of rebooking when the price of the product falls, you cancel when the value of the currency rises.

Just like booking a post-paid reservation, by using refundable prepaid reservations, you’re locking in the maximum amount you’ll pay, while using currency fluctuations to try to identify a new, lower minimum.

Other considerations

That’s brings us to a few final notes, which may seem obvious but are still necessary to keep in mind.

First, setting aside exchange rates, the price of foreign products also changes over time. We usually think of this as prices rising as inventory sells out and firms get a better sense of what price people are willing to pay, but the opposite also happens, as my experience rebooking my Glasgow nights to ultimately save 6,000 Hilton Honors points across two of my nights showed. The ideal situation would be the combination of a weakening dollar (increasing the refund value of your prepaid foreign currency reservations) and falling prices (allowing you to rebook a new, lower price).

Second, due to the risk of a strengthening dollar (which reduces the refund value of prepaid reservations), you should really only explore options for trips you’re actually planning or at least considering taking. Most exchange rate fluctuations, at least between major currencies, are relatively small, but you can find plenty of exceptions, like the recent Truss crash in the value of the pound and its Sunak recovery. More marginal currencies fluctuate more often and by larger amounts: a $100 prepaid reservation made in Turkish Lira a year ago would only refund $54 today, for instance. In the same vein, if you expect the dollar to strengthen consistently, then you should want to postpone payment as long as possible, to pay with the most valuable currency possible. If you expect it to weaken consistently, you should want to pay as soon as possible for the same reason.

Deconstructing a point-to-point hiking tour

[update 8/13/2022: I heard back from the luggage transfer service I mention below and they quoted me a total of £60, substantially less than I guessed from their website]

A popular way to explore the United Kingdom among outdoor enthusiasts and lunatics alike is the hiking tour. The UK is positively saturated with public walking paths and rights-of-way across private property, so the possibilities are almost literally endless. For part of my recent holiday in England and Scotland, we booked a prepackaged 5-day point-to-point hiking tour in the Lake District.

What’s a hiking tour?

There are a number of companies that sell prepackaged tours; the one we happened to book was the “Lake District Short Break” through Macs Adventure. This 5-day tour consisted of 4 nights at 3 different bed-and-breakfasts (the first 2 nights were spent at the same B&B), and 3 days of hiking. The first hike day we made a loop arriving back at our B&B in the evening, and the second two hikes took us to two new towns. On the two days we moved, Macs Adventure arranged to pick up our suitcases in the morning and deliver them at the next town by the time we arrived (this is not particularly impressive, since the towns are only 20 or 30 minutes apart by car, despite being 5 or 6 hours apart by foot). We paid a total of $1290, although it seems the price has gone up since then to $1420 for two adults.

The tour we took is not bookable as a solo traveler (this will become important shortly).

Deconstructing the hiking tour

That’s the trip sold as a single package. But it doesn’t take a genius to see that the package consists of a few discrete parts, which makes it easy to break down the actual value of the package:

• 4 nights lodging

• 4 breakfasts for two

• 2 luggage transfers

• walking directions / GPS-supported map (built into Macs Adventures’ fairly cumbersome app)

Two nights in the cheapest room at the Brantfell House costs £192 ($233), a night at the Old Water View £120 ($145), and a night at The Beeches £90 ($109), although I was unable to verify that final number with a sample booking.

It seems that all three properties include breakfast with all their rates, so let’s assign that a value of $0 for now.

Macs Adventures obviously doesn’t handle luggage transfers themselves; they sell tours all over the world and aren’t going to own a fleet of minivans in every country. In our case, they contracted our luggage transfers out to Brigantes Walking Holidays and Baggage Couriers. They don’t have prices listed for our exact itinerary, but it appears their minimum charge is around £80 per person, or £160 ($194) for two (I put in a quote request for our exact route and will update this post when or if they get back to me).

Finally, while walking directions are free from a variety of websites and apps, it is nice that Macs curates specific routes for each day, and the downloadable maps (for offline use) and GPS integration are worth something too, so let’s assign that a generous $25 in value.

So the total value provided by Macs Adventures, should you book the component parts separately, is about $706, which is actually somewhat more than the per-person cost of the trip ($645). Of course, that brings us back to the point I highlighted above: this trip can’t be booked for solo travelers, so we paid $1290, or $584 more than the trip would have cost à la carte.

Obviously that’s not to say Macs Adventures made $584 in profit; presumably they negotiate bulk rates with their hoteliers and luggage transfer services, so their per-trip profit is somewhat higher than that.

Other alternatives

Above I broke down how to recreate an existing point-to-point package tour to save money, but there are a few obvious alternatives it’s worth briefly mentioning.

First, we needed a baggage transfer service because we were spending a week in the UK before and after our tour, but if you’re a serious hiker and that’s all you plan to do on your holiday, you can simply pack a backpack with everything you need, and indeed many of the people we passed on the trails had the heavy duty backpacks you’d expect to see on the John Muir or Appalachian trails. In Ambleside I even found a laundromat to wash my first week of clothes, so packing light doesn’t have to mean wearing soiled clothes or washing them in the sink every night.

Alternatively, instead of a point-to-point hiking tour where you check out of one room and into another every day, you can avoid the need for luggage transfers by setting up a base of operations in a town with a variety of nearby trails. And remember, you don’t need to walk all day: on our first walking day we took a ferry to our starting point and then walked back to our B&B. Likewise, there’s no shame in walking out from your B&B and taking a bus or taxi back.

Conclusion

This was our first hiking tour, and it was plugged into the middle of an already-complicated itinerary, so I was grateful that we were able to pay someone to arrange everything for us, and it turned out to be a wonderful time, albeit with a few hiccups we would have encountered either way.

Having said that, we’ll almost certainly never book a packaged tour like this again, since all the tour company did in this case was stitch together pieces that could easily be booked on their own. There are exceptions, like tourist attractions that can only be visited as part of a package tour, but in most cases the savings are significant enough that it’s worth recreating almost any tour simply by breaking it down into its component parts.

Beginner's guide to UK passenger rail

[Note to the reader: in this post I’m using specific examples of specific cities in the UK, but I am not bothering to give any information about them because it’s irrelevant to the post. If you want to know where Saxmundham is, Google is just a keystroke away.]

For the last 3 weeks I’ve been on vacation in the UK, and will be sharing some interesting, valuable, and/or fun lessons I learned along the way. In today’s edition, I want to dump everything I learned about booking and saving money on passenger rail in England and Scotland.

What is Network Rail?

To give a mostly-accurate potted history, the UK nationalized their rail industry after World War II. In the 90’s under New Labour, they privatized the operation of freight and passenger rail, but kept ownership and management of the tracks and stations in a public entity. That public entity is now called Network Rail (it had some other names in the past).

What is National Rail?

National Rail is the public-facing brand of the privatized passenger rail companies. Why National Rail matters is that it operates “underneath” the private operating companies and creates a kind of interoperability between them. This has the potential to be convenient, a bit like the baggage interline agreements that allow airlines to check bags through on connections operated by other carriers, although there are some important pitfalls to watch out for, which I cover below.

What are Railcards?

The second, much more important reason that National Rail matters is that they sell Railcards. There are several different Railcards, but they all operate roughly the same: when you purchase a National Rail ticket, select which Railcard you have, and you’ll receive a discount, usually 1/3 of the price, if the fare is eligible. Virtually all trips after 10 am and on weekends and public holidays are eligible for the discount, as are some trips beginning before 10 am. There are basically 3 buckets Railcards fall into:

1. Group-based. “Family & Friends” and “Two Together” Railcards provide discounts when traveling in specific group formations.

2. Age-based. There are Railcards for 16-17 year olds, 16-25 year olds, 26-30 year olds, and seniors.

3. Status-based. People with certain verified disabilities and veterans of the UK Armed Forces are eligible for status-based Railcards.

These are listed very roughly in order of money-saving potential, and as you can see, most people are eligible for one of these “good” Railcards, with the exception of adults between the ages of 31 and 59 who always travel alone. They are still eligible for the generic Network Railcard, which offers discounts only in “London and the South East.”

Finally, it’s essential to note that you can have more than one Railcard, and use a different Railcard for different trips depending on what generates the most savings.

How do Railcards work?

This is the easy part. Whenever you’re booking a train in England, Scotland, and Wales, you’ll see a dropdown box allowing you to select your Railcard. Here’s an example from Greater Anglia:

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The price shown on the booking page will then reflect your Railcard discount. Here’s the exact same trip for 2 adults between London Liverpool Street and Saxmundham before and after applying a “Two Together” Railcard:

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As you can see, the Two Together Railcard saves £7.50 on a single short trip. For longer trips, Railcards can pay for themselves in a single reservation. Advance tickets for two adults from London to Glasgow on an Avanti West Coast service, for example, cost £65.60 without a Railcard, and just £43.20 with one. On close-in reservations the savings can be much higher: the same two tickets booked for tomorrow cost £285.20 without a railcard and £188.20 with one!

Most Railcards are good for an entire year, but my Two Together Railcard paid for itself several times over in less than 3 weeks.

The Family & Friends Railcard is the most gimmicky of the Railcards, but offers the most potential savings. Each £30 Railcard can have two named adults; one of those adults must be traveling on any ticket purchased with the Railcard (the Two Together Railcard requires both named people to be traveling on the ticket). Up to 3 additional adults can travel on the ticket. In addition, at least one child aged 15 or younger must be traveling on the ticket. The adults receive the standard 1/3 discount, and the children a 60% discount. A roundtrip ticket on the same Avanti West Coast service as above for 4 adults and 4 children ages 5-15 would cost £314.40 without a Railcard and just £222.40 with one.

Note that children’s tickets in general are pretty cheap; most of the savings being realized here are on the more expensive adult tickets. However, you do need one ticketed child in order to unlock those larger savings on the adult tickets.

Do you really need a Railcard?

Everything I said above is based on the rules laid out in black and white on the Railcard website. In fact, it is not clear to me that you need a Railcard at all in order to realize these discounts. That’s because ticketing is available online, tickets can be picked up at unattended kiosks, and most importantly, British ticket inspectors do not appear to me to care at all about the rules.

Of the 8 trains we took in the UK, our tickets were only inspected 3 times, and not one conductor asked to see my digital Railcard. Like a dumb American I volunteered to show my Two Together Railcard on the first train, but didn’t even bother doing that on the rest. If you lived in the UK and traveled frequently with adult friends and minor children, or with your adult partner, then you may as well buy a Family & Friends or Two Together Railcard since they’re so cheap and the savings are so significant, but if you’re just visiting and taking a train or two, you’re probably safe bluffing it.

Should you book “direct?”

Remember up top when I mentioned that train operators are private companies in the UK? Thanks to National Rail, all or most of the passenger rail companies in Great Britain can sell tickets on each other’s services, and there are no price differences on any of the routes I checked. This is roughly the equivalent of United allowing Delta to sell tickets on United for the same price as United charges when booking directly.

But this does not make the booking channels interchangeable. There are three big differences between the various booking channels.

First, seat reservations. The only trains we took with reserved seats were on the Avanti West Coast line between London and Glasgow, and because I booked our tickets through Greater Anglia (because they operated the first leg of our trip), I was not able to select our seats. If I had booked the ticket directly through Avanti West coast, I would have been able to pick them before even booking the ticket to make sure our seats were together, facing the right direction, etc.

Second, routing. While pricing is uniform across booking channels, unsurprisingly each operator’s routing algorithm works better on routes it actually serves. This came up on our trip when Greater Anglia booked us on an Avanti West Coast train from London to Preston in order to change to a Northern Railway train to Windermere. Plugging the origin and destination into Avanti West Coast directly gives the much preferable change at Oxenholme Lake District. Fortunately, the conductor on our Avanti train told us to just wait until Oxenholme to change, but if the conductor hadn’t asked what our final destination was and taken the trouble to sort us out, we would have tried to change to the slower Northern Railway train earlier than we needed to and risked our connection.

Finally, to circle back to Railcards, while pricing and discounts are uniform, the validation algorithm varies widely in quality, which may work to your benefit. For example, Avanti will (incorrectly) price out a Friends & Family Railcard discount for a reservation with 4 adults and no children, while Greater Anglia’s otherwise much less glossy booking engine will not, instead (correctly) returning pricing for four full-fare adult tickets.

Ground transit add-ons

Depending on your origin and destination, you may be offered the option to prepay for a bus or subway connection at the beginning or end of your trip.

For example, if your train originates in London, you’ll be offered the chance to buy a Travelcard that works on the London Underground and buses on the day of your departure. Unfortunately, the Travelcard costs £14.40 or £20.30, the maximum that can be charged for Zones 1-4 and 1-6, respectively, when using London’s Oyster payment cards. If you travel any amount less than the maximum, you’re overpaying.

On the flip side, arriving in Glasgow on a Railcard ticket lets you pay £2.70 for a PlusBus card that lets you take buses all around Great Glasgow on the day of your arrival, which offers at least a modest discount over an all-day bus pass.

In other words, savings are possible at specific destinations, when you’re purchasing tickets using a Railcard, but don’t assume booking your rail and transit tickets together will automatically save you money.

A final note on routing

I mentioned routing above in the context of the different passenger rail companies’ ticketing engines, but there’s a slightly separate issue that’s worth mentioning: it can be hard to figure out what your origin and destination are even supposed to be, especially when you plan to make connections by bus or taxi instead of rail.

I don’t have an easy solution except brute force: use Google or Apple Maps to search your origin and destination, then narrow in on the pieces operated by National Rail, then plug those routes into a few different operators’ websites, keeping in mind you might need to book legs separately or through different operators in order to get the best available routing and discounts.

Heathrow Express versus Elizabeth Line

I’ve had a very interesting time over the last few months wrapping up planning my first international trip since 2020. One of the first things that surprised me when I started looking at getting to and from Heathrow was how cheap it was.

Now, there are lots of airports that offer cheap connections to downtown on public transit (the Silver Line connection from Boston’s Logan airport to South Station and travel onward on MBTA is completely free), but what surprised me was that ever since they opened Heathrow Express, the nonstop train between Heathrow and London’s Paddington Station, I’ve only heard complaints about how expensive it is. So here I was, staring at my computer screen, trying to figure out what I had done wrong. Why were they just charging me £5.50 for a 15-minute, nonstop train that drops me off at the front door of my hotel? What were people complaining about?

A few weeks went by as I finalized our return plans, then I hopped back onto the Heathrow Express site to book tickets back to Heathrow, and the price had jumped. It wasn’t extortionate, but now tickets from Paddington to Heathrow were £16.50. A price I was happy to pay, but I had to get to the bottom of it.

Fortunately this didn’t take very long: it turns out Heathrow Express runs a kind of primitive dynamic pricing system, with tickets starting at £5.50 “around” 90 days out, and increasing to £25 in roughly the two weeks leading up to your travel date. I say primitive because there appear to be a finite number of price points: £5.50, £10, £12.50, £16.50, £18, and £25, and they increase at roughly 2-3 week intervals, although sometimes prices dip and sometimes they pop, presumably around dates that are manually entered as “high” or “low” demand days.

What this means is that even if you are unsure of your travel dates, you are better off booking a couple of dates at the lowest rate far in advance than waiting until your plans are firmly settled, let alone booking a ticket on your day of arrival; if I had booked before finalizing my plans, I could have booked tickets on 3 different days for the same £16.50 I ultimately paid. Either way the tickets would be non-refundable and good only on the day of travel, but I could have preserved the optionality of a 3-day travel window, a worthy consideration given the current mess facing busy, understaffed airports in the UK and Europe.

Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Elizabeth Line

All of London is in a tizzy over the long-awaited opening of the Elizabeth Line, formerly known as Crossrail, which runs from Reading in the West to Shenfield in the East, with a spur running from Paddington to Heathrow, which reproduces the functionality of the Heathrow Express, although adding 10-20 minutes to the trip by making several intermediate stops.

My initial assumption was that the Elizabeth Line, as it is integrated into the London Underground, would be a low-cost alternative to the Heathrow Express, but oddly, this doesn’t seem to be the case, because the Underground charges fares on a point-to-point basis, and the Elizabeth Line fare is £10.80 (off-peak) or £11.50 (peak). Obviously that would be a sensible option if the alternative was paying £25, but if you’re able to plan even a month in advance, the Heathrow Express seems obviously superior in both cost and convenience.

The one wrinkle here appears to be that Transport for London caps the total amount you can be charged each day within their “zones 1-6,” which includes Heathrow and central London, at £14.10, and the £11.50 charged for the Elizabeth Line counts against that “cap.” That means if you do end up outside the cheapest Heathrow Express booking window and find yourself taking the Elizabeth Line instead, you should also use the same cap period (beginning at 4:30 am and ending at 4:29 am the next day) to explore as much of London by transit as possible, since you won’t pay more than £14.10 no matter how much you use the system within zones 1-6.

Conclusion

Given the current labor and COVID crisis in the UK I’m totally agnostic about which pieces of this trip will fly by seamlessly and which will require last-minute adjustments and accommodations, so I’m just trying to be as forearmed as I am forewarned. What else do I need to know about transit in London and the UK?

Double booking into the same Delta award space

So-called “fare buckets” are a curious feature of the airline ecosystem. For the overwhelming majority of flyers, even frequent travelers, the wide-ranging alphabet of letters, usually shown in parentheses after the class of carriage, is simply irrelevant: most people book on some combination of convenience and price, or have little or no choice if they’re required to fly on tickets booked by their corporate travel office.

So fare buckets don’t matter at all — until they’re the only thing that matters. For example, American Express Delta Platinum companion tickets can only be used to book into the L, U, T, X, and V fare classes. If those fare classes aren’t available for the flight you want, you simply cannot use the companion ticket on that flight.

The other important use of fare buckets is for finding award space on foreign carriers, especially ones that won’t show you availability unless you have sufficient miles in your account. Expert Flyer has a paid service that allows you to see the inventory available in each fare bucket for hundreds of airlines.

It’s important to note that there’s nothing magical about fare buckets. There’s not a “fixed” inventory in each fare bucket that never changes. While I assume most if not all airlines assign inventory to fare buckets algorithmically, the algorithms were still written by humans. An algorithm might say, “if there are 6 or more seats available in First Class, make one available for awards.” If that award seat is then booked, the algorithm might run again and make another single award seat available. One of the Japanese airlines is famous for doing exactly this.

Double booking the last available seat on Delta

As I wrote last month, although I’d finally booked my outbound tickets to England with SkyMiles, the price in Mileage Plus miles had ticked back down to 30,000, and I hoped to cancel the Delta award ticket and rebook using worthless-to-me United miles.

Having successfully completed that switcheroo, and with my Delta award ticket instantly refunded, I turned to booking flights to Wisconsin for a June wedding. There’s a single nonstop flight per day, and I found a ticket available for 26,000 SkyMiles. Almost like the good old days! But when I confirmed the dates with my partner and started booking seats for two, the price had jumped to 28,000 SkyMiles each! A 4,000-mile penalty just for waiting a day to book?

You probably see where this is going: the lower-priced ticket was still available, but there was just one seat available in that fare bucket. When I searched for two tickets on a single search, I was shown the lowest fare bucket with two seats in it.

What to do? Well, as Derek Trotter would say, “he who dares, wins!” So I had my partner fire up her laptop and log into her own Delta account. With both of us searching for a single seat, we both saw the 26,000-mile award available.

We each selected a seat, plugged in our payment information, and gave it a dramatic countdown: 3, 2, 1, click!

And we both got the last 26,000-mile seat.

This is obviously, in one sense, an almost trivial anecdote. We both had 28,000 SkyMiles in our accounts so if either of our purchases had errored out with “this fare is no longer available” whoever lost would have restarted the search and forked over the extra 2,000 SkyMiles.

But upon a moment’s reflection, the opportunities begin to come into view.

First, there are lots of tickets that cost more than 26,000 SkyMiles! For example, a one-way flight to Maui from Los Angeles in First Class costs 66,000 SkyMiles on December 3, 9, and 10. But on December 9, only one seat is available for 66,000 SkyMiles — try to book two, and the price jumps to 85,000 SkyMiles each. More realistically for a travel hacker, that means 66,000 SkyMiles for the first and 85,000 SkyMiles for the second, still a difference of 19,000 SkyMiles.

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Second, lots of people travel in groups of more than two passengers. If scalable, for groups of 3 or more the savings start to look astronomical. A family of four might save 57,000 SkyMiles flying in First Class to Hawaii; almost the cost of the first ticket!

I think this is a pretty neat trick, but to bring down the temperature let me state the obvious caveats.

First, to simultaneously book awards you need multiple accounts with sufficient miles in each. For a lot of people in “two-player” mode that’s not a big deal, but if you’re trying to book your kids or parents who don’t play the game, you will quickly struggle to find enough miles in enough separate accounts. If you have friends or colleagues in the travel hacking community that’s a good option, although it will likely involve at least some Zooming and screen-sharing to make sure all the booking details are right for each passenger, plus getting the timing exactly right.

Second, I don’t know how scalable this is: maybe it works for two passengers but not three, maybe for three but not four. Presumably at some point when the cabin is actually full Delta will reject issuing the ticket, so it’s essential to select your seats (different seats!) during the checkout process to make sure there’s room in the cabin for everyone.

Finally, I have no idea if this works on partner or international awards. I was booking nonstop, Delta-operated domestic flights. Would connections break it? Would partner award availability break it? I simply don’t know.

Conclusion

Like everything in the travel hacking game, your mileage will vary. If anything comes from this post, let it be the recommendation to search for individual seats before you search for seats for your whole family, since whether or not this trick works for you, securing one or two low-level seats before paying more for more expensive seats is an easy way of saving miles anyone can enjoy.

While this trick almost won’t certainly work for everyone, on every flight, in every class of service, I wanted to pass it along because it worked for me.

Disappointed by Alaska Airlines IT, satisfied by their customer service

I wrote a few weeks back about the maze of rules relating to the elimination of change fees by most US carriers. My basic conclusion was that eliminating fees is better than keeping them, but that if you’re trying to claim a credit for a fall in price you should anticipate having to put some work in.

That turned out to be prophetic in my own case, rebooking a 3-week trip out West in July. But while I didn’t run into any problems with Alaska’s change fees, I am now 3 weeks into an IT saga.

My reservation was complicated, but uneventful

For my summer trip, I booked a fairly straightforward multi-city itinerary, with stops in California, Oregon, and Montana. I was able to book the itinerary entirely online, and I didn’t violate any of Alaska’s rudimentary routing rules. However, I did pay for it in a modestly complicated way:

• I made the reservation logged into another person’s account, using their companion fare;

• I paid for part of the fare using their Wallet funds;

• and I paid for the rest using their Alaska Airlines credit card.

Obviously there are a lot of moving pieces here, but the reservation itself was made online with no hiccups.

Changing the reservation was straightforward

In my original post, I wrote that Alaska “offers two methods of changing an existing itinerary.” It turns out that’s not right. You can also “Deposit a ticket” through the “Wallet” tab in your account, which offers three additional options:

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In hindsight, I wish I’d chosen one of those options! Instead, I called in, had my ticket re-priced, and was told I’d receive a certificate by e-mail I could deposit to my Wallet.

But, the certificate never came.

A “known issue,” but nobody knows what it is

When I called back last week to follow up, the rep made me walk through the entire story from scratch, researched the history of the ticket, put me on hold while she called accounting, and then confirmed that I was due the $720 certificate, which I would receive by e-mail.

Yet again, the certificate never came.

When I called in again today, I decided to be a bit more straightforward: they had screwed up, I was sick of being given the runaround, and I needed to know what they were doing to fix it. This elicited a slightly more effective reaction, and the phone rep contacted the most knowledgable person in accounting she knew (“I’ve been working here for 29 years and Carrie’s been here even longer than me”).

This time, I got what seems like a sensible answer: “there’s a known IT issue, accounting is making great strides to fix it, and it will hopefully be resolved soon.” She even threw in that “Carrie” had recognized my name and knew I was one of the “handful” of people affected by the issue.

She also offered me a $100 discount code, bringing the total gross value of the rebooking to $783. I don’t believe I’ll be able to use the discount code since (unlike Wallet funds) I don’t think discount codes can be combined with companion tickets. Still, someone will surely use it.

Conclusion

I don’t know exactly which piece of my booking broke Alaska’s IT, so there’s nothing I can recommend to avoid running into the same problem until it’s finally resolved. I suspect it has something to do with how their change fee waiver populated across various systems, since I was using a companion fare, Wallet funds, and a non-traveler’s credit card.

But despite the incomplete and inadequate information they’ve given me since the beginning, I came away impressed with their overall customer service. Even as an entry-level MVP elite, I never had to wait more than a few minutes on hold. Every rep I spoke to confirmed that I was owed the fare difference, so there was no need to recite terms and conditions to them at any point. And when the problem continued far too long I was even offered a fare discount as a goodwill gesture.

It’s not like people have much of a choice in carrier these days, but I’m frankly thrilled Alaska's doing their best to keep up their customer service standards.

Some good discounts on flexible rates at Delaware North properties

For those unfamiliar, Delaware North is a concessionaire that operates hotels, restaurants, and campsites at many parks and forests in the United States. They don’t offer their own loyalty program or co-branded credit card, and their locations show up in some, but not all travel booking portals: for one property I checked, a limited room selection was available through Chase’s Ultimate Rewards travel portal and Hotels.com, but not through US Bank’s travel portal or Priceline.com.

That means for access to the complete inventory of rooms, you’ll probably need to pay cash through Delaware North’s own booking engine (and then ideally redeem credit card points like Barclay Arrival+ Miles or Capital One Venture Miles against the purchase), and it also means it’s one of the rare occasions when discount codes can actually reduce your out-of-pocket expenses.

Use code “MYESCAPE” for a 20% discount on flexible rates at Delaware North properties

I found out about this offer because we got on a mailing list after staying at the Big Meadows Lodge at Shenandoah National Park last fall (subscribers can listen to my partner and I reflecting on the trip on episode 10 of The Manifesto podcast on the Milenomics Podcast Network).

Like any hospitality company, Delaware North is constantly running offers like discounted rates for AAA members (10%), senior rates (10%), military rates (20%), and advance purchase rates (25%).

Even more importantly, those rates are available throughout the season, including on weekends, so you may have no choice but to use one of those rates if you want to stay on Friday or Saturday between June and August.

Having said that, the “MYESCAPE” offer is pretty good, if you’re able to use it. A 20% discount off the best available rate is as good as the military discount, but with a more generous, no-fee change and cancellation policy up to 48 hours before arrival. The other discounted rates charge a $15 cancellation fee up to 72 hours before arrival, and the cheapest advance purchase rates cannot be changed or cancelled at all.

In other words, if you’re planning an eligible trip at an eligible property, the “MYESCAPE” code offers a pretty good discount and a lot of flexibility should your plans change.

Different properties have different blackout dates (and rooms are going fast)

There are two things to be aware of here. First, the booking engine varies slightly between different properties: some use three different fields for “Group Code,” “Promo/Corporate Code” and “Travel Industry ID,” and some use a drop-down menu. Not realizing this, at first I thought the “MYESCAPE” code didn’t work at “drop-down” properties.

But it does! You just have to be sure to select “Promo” as the code type when beginning your search.

Second, while the “MYESCAPE” e-mail I received specified only Fridays and Saturdays between July and August were blackout dates (and indeed I could find availability throughout the season between Sunday and Thursday), the promo code doesn’t work the same at all Delaware North properties.

• In Yellowstone it works throughout June (including weekends), then availability completely disappears. It also doesn’t work at the Holiday Inn or Choice Hotel properties there.

• The Tenaya Lodge at Yosemite has wide open availability in June, July and August, except over the July 4 weekend.

• At the Peaks of Otter Lodge it works in May and June, but there’s no weekend availability at all.

• At The Gideon Putnam there’s some weekend availability in June, before weekends are blacked out for July and August.

• The Honey Creek Resort has a minimum stay requirement over the weekend of July 4.

• The Lodge at Geneva has no Saturday availability at all, while Friday nights are available throughout the season.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the code to work at any of Delaware North’s properties outside the United States, in Australia and New Zealand.

Conclusion

While room availability under this promotion is limited at many properties after May or June, if you squint just right there’s a certain logic to it, since they are advertising it as an opportunity to “use your saved up vacation time.” Many white collar workers really do have weeks and weeks of vacation time saved up from all the trips they weren’t able to take in the last 12 months, which means weekend and holiday blackout dates aren’t quite as annoying to plan around as they used to be, and will be again soon.

The added flexibility of a 48-hour, fee-free cancellation policy is likewise a nice nod to the fact that almost no one has any idea when they’ll be comfortable traveling again.

So if you live within driving distance of a Delaware North property in the United States, and prefer a room with running water over roughing it, it’s worth clicking around a little bit to see if you can find dates, locations, and prices that work for you. Shenandoah National Park is by far the closest Delaware North property to us, and has relatively few opportunities for indoor crowding, but I also might speculatively book a late June stay at the hotel-style Peaks of Otter Lodge, in the hopes that the vaccine rollout will have reached us by then.

COVID, cancellations, schedule changes, and refunds

This was originally going to be a quick hit on my experience cancelling an Alaska Airlines reservation for a trip I had been planning to take this summer, but then I noticed lots of people having related issues on a whole range of carriers, so I thought it would be worth taking a more comprehensive look at how different airlines are currently handling schedule changes and cancellations.

Most flights have been cancelled for the next few months, and more will be

The ongoing disruption to air travel has been catastrophic. Alaska says they’ve reduced their flight schedule by 80% in April and May. Airlines have eliminated some routes completely, while others have dramatically reduced frequency: we normally have our pick of 6 non-stop flights a day to Indianapolis on American, a route that has been completely cancelled until June 7, when it is scheduled to resume once per day.

A cancelled flight is the simplest situation to be in (although not always the simplest situation to resolve): the Department of Transportation recently clarified that for all “flights to, within, or from the United States,”

“Carriers have a longstanding obligation to provide a prompt refund to a ticketed passenger when the carrier cancels the passenger’s flight or makes a significant change in the flight schedule and the passenger chooses not to accept the alternative offered by the carrier.”

As the plague continues to exact its terrible toll, more flights will be cancelled and more schedule changes will be implemented, so if you have a flight booked you know you won’t take, but is still scheduled to depart on time, your best bet is to sit tight for now and see if you become eligible for a cash refund later.

It is faster and easier to take advantage of airline policies than to assert your rights

Now you know you have a right to a refund in the case of a cancellation or significant schedule change. But if your airline pushes back, asserting that right might mean filing a DoT complaint that takes weeks to resolve, as Stephan Segraves described here.

Instead of pursuing your rights, you might want to check out your carrier’s fee waivers instead. Every major airline has voluntarily waived change and cancellation fees, on somewhat different terms.

• Delta: no change or cancellation fees on flights booked through May 31, 2020, existing eCredits extended until September 30, 2022.

• United: no change or cancellation fees until May 31, 2020, existing and new travel certificates valid for 24 months from issuance.

• American: no change fees for all flights booked between March 1 and May 31, 2020 and for flights booked before March 1 for travel through September 30, 2020.

• Alaska: no change or cancellation fees on flights booked through May 31, 2020 (with inscrutably different rules for flights booked before and after February 26, 2020).

• Southwest: new and existing travel funds (from cancelled, non-refundable reservations) have their expiration extended until September 7, 2022. Refundable reservations continue to be refundable (obviously).

• Jetblue: no change or cancellation fees for flights booked through May 31, 2020, for travel through January 4, 2021, and 24 month validity for Travel Bank Credit.

As you can see, there are two slightly different moving pieces here: protections for people who already booked travel they won’t be able to take, and protections for people thinking about booking travel for the future they’re unsure they’ll be able to take.

Obviously travel credits aren’t as good as cash, but for folks who periodically book paid travel on the same one or two carriers, they’re not bad, and by taking advantage of these policies you may be able to avoid a drawn out battle for a cash refund.

My Alaska Airlines refund experience

As I mentioned up top, I called Alaska to ask for a refund for a July trip that won’t be happening. I knew there had been some schedule changes, and I knew Alaska had loosened their cancellation policy, so I didn’t have any doubt I’d be able to cancel the flights, but because I hadn’t read this blog post, I wasn’t prepared for the pushback the phone agent gave me.

To be fair to her, she did instantly agree to cancel the reservation, but then explained the value would be deposited to my travel bank. I told her I needed the refund to go to my original form of payment.

The problem was that despite Alaska’s massive cancellations, none of my four flights had actually been cancelled! All four were operating on the days I’d booked, with the same flight numbers and everything — two were even operating on the exact same schedule, and a third had an adjustment of just 35 minutes.

Fortunately, the fourth had moved its departure from 7:40 am to 9:05 am, just over the hour schedule change Alaska requires to offer a cash refund.

The agent then repeated a version of the most annoying cliche I hear from customer service representatives: “if there hadn’t been that schedule change, you wouldn’t have been eligible for the refund.” Whenever I hear this condescending aphorism I always want to shout into the phone, “but there was, so I was, so why are we still talking about it?”

Of course, what I actually did was politely thank her and hang up. The refund is supposed to take up to 7 days, and I’ll be interested to see how they handle the redeposit of the companion fare I used to book the ticket.

What the New York Times got wrong about long-haul Amtrak travel

Last week’s New York Times Magazine featured a long article about long-haul Amtrak travel that somehow managed to get almost everything wrong about the advantages and disadvantages of train travel. As a life-long enthusiast of train travel, I thought it might be helpful to correct some of the more common and absurd myths perpetuated in the article.

Myth #1: Amtrak travel is expensive

Behold the feigned horror the Times Magazine author imputes to her hypothetical friends:

“Depending how you slice it — time or money — there are either 61 or 960 immediate reasons not to travel by Amtrak trains from New York City to Los Angeles. Those are the extra hours and dollars, respectively, that you might reasonably expect to forfeit if you forgo a six-hour $129 nonstop flight and opt instead for an Amtrak sleeper car. Covering the interjacent 2,448.8 miles can easily consume some 67 hours for a mind-boggling $1,089.”

Unfortunately for the Times Magazine, these numbers are easily checked. For non-stop flights between New York City and Los Angeles 6 months from now, I actually found slightly cheaper economy flights than the ones that Weaver reports, starting at just $127:

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But the identical Amtrak route she took between New York City’s Penn Station and Los Angeles’s Union Station doesn’t cost $1,089. It costs just $232:

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Why the difference? Because Weaver is comparing Amtrak’s sleeper car accommodation to American Airlines’s economy cabin (I actually found sleeper car accommodation on the same date in October not at $1,089 but at $914 — Weaver should start booking further in advance!):

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The deliberate confusion of economy-class airline fares with sleeper car Amtrak fares is journalistic malpractice, but that doesn’t stop us from untangling it a little bit more.

First, let’s take note that an economy-class airfare between New York City and Los Angeles International Airport requires you to travel to one of New York City’s regional airports from your residence, and from LAX to your final destination in Southern California. I don’t live in New York City or in Los Angeles, so I’m not going to pretend to venture a guess at that final cost, besides spitballing that it’s in the high 2 figures, depending on your origin and final destination. Remember you’re only working with $105 in “profit“ to begin with by flying instead of taking Amtrak.

Second, what do you get for your fare in each case? In the case of the airfare, you get the convenience of same-day arrival. In the case of Amtrak travel, you also get 3 nights of accommodation on board the train. If we insist on only comparing airfares and Amtrak fares, that leaves you paying $35 per night for a place to sleep (assuming in each case that your flight and your train arrive on time — no sure thing). Amtrak also includes free checked bags and much more in-cabin storage space than the typical US airline, a potential additional source of savings.

Of course, I don’t recommend traveling on long-haul Amtrak routes in coach. The sleeper cars are far preferable! That brings us to the third piece of the cost puzzle: sleeper car accommodations include the same 3 nights of sleep, but on what an airline blogger would insist on calling “lay-flat seats,” plus 9 cooked-to-order meals in the Amtrak dining car (dinner on day of departure, 6 meals en route, breakfast and lunch on day of arrival).

For a single traveler between New York City and Los Angeles, we can finally make a clear comparison: $127 is the underlying cost of transportation, with the option to pay $262 per night for three hot meals per day and private sleeping quarters.

Is that a good deal or a bad deal? Well, that depends on how much you planned to pay for room and board in New York City and Los Angeles, which I’m in no place to judge. But the math changes a final time when you book a sleeper car with multiple people, as intended.

That’s because when you travel on Amtrak, you pay a fixed price for each sleeper car room, up to the maximum number of passengers that room type accommodates. The cheapest roomettes on this route accommodate two passengers, which means two people can buy 3 nights of room and board for a total of $892, or $446 each, $149 per day (remember we’ve assigned an underlying value to the transportation itself of $127 per person):

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Suddenly it become clear that when used as intended, Amtrak long-haul travel isn’t outrageously expensive. Booked far enough in advance, it starts to look like a steal.

Myth #2: Amtrak travel is inconvenient

Weaver gave herself a bit of an unfair advantage by selecting a particularly illogical route to go by train: between two cities served by multiple airports and multiple airlines, but only an awkward train connection. Personally, I would not book an Amtrak trip with just a 5-hour connection window, as hers does in Chicago. In the waning days of the old Amtrak Guest Rewards program I booked an itinerary from Chicago to Los Angeles on the Southwest Chief, connecting to the Coast Starlight. Over the next 3 days the train was predictably delayed, we missed our Coast Starlight connection, and had to be rerouted by bus and regional rail upstate to where the Coast Starlight ultimately caught up to us.

But there are lots of routes where Amtrak is not only convenient, but indispensable. Someone living in Seattle or Portland who wants to take a New Year’s ski vacation at Whitefish Mountain Resort, near Whitefish, MT, can sit down on New Year’s Day on the Empire Builder at 4:40 pm and arrive in Whitefish the next morning at 7:21 am for $77; they could be on the slopes by 9 am. The next best alternative I found is a $139 Alaska flight, not to Whitefish but to Kalispell, arriving at midnight (requiring another night of lodging), and a 15 mile car or shuttle to Whitefish. Which do you think is more convenient?

Now head the other direction: 6 months out, you can book a 7 hour, 47 minute flight from Chicago to Wolf Point, MT, for $381 per person, with (pretty tight) connections in both Denver and Billings. Or you can sit down on the Empire Builder at 2:15 pm and arrive in Wolf Point around noon the next day for $110. Which do you think is more convenient?

Let’s do one more fun one. If you want to get from Mattoon, IL, to McComb, MS, you can drive 2 hours to Indianapolis International Airport, pay $94 to fly to New Orleans, connecting in Atlanta, then drive another 2 hours or so to McComb. Or you can sit down on the City of New Orleans in Mattoon and step off in downtown McComb 13-and-a-half hours later for $111. Which do you think is more convenient?

You can see from these examples the obvious convenience of Amtrak, and train travel in general: it makes the intermediate stops that other forms of long-haul transportation don’t. To put it another way, Amtrak is only inconvenient if you aren’t using it as intended. For folks without impaired mobility, It’s incredibly inconvenient to ride a municipal bus two blocks. You have to find the right stop, figure out whether a bus is a local or express, wait for it to come, then it might drop you off on the wrong end of your destination block. How inconvenient! But that’s because you’re using it wrong, not because municipal buses are an outdated or unnecessary form of transportation.

Myth #3: There is No Reason to Cross the U.S. by Train

Near the beginning of her article, Weaver notes in passing:

“The most unifying characteristic of my fellow passengers was not age (although, as a rule, the sleeping cars skewed retired), race (very mixed), income (while sleepers are astronomically priced, coach seats can be downright economical for shorter segments) or even fear of flying (no one I spoke to had it).”

This is best understood as a passive-aggressive swipe at a 2013 Times article about Amtrak travel, which explains perfectly clearly why people take Amtrak: if you have a fear of flying, you have a fear of flying no matter how much longer train travel takes. If you’re unable to fly for medical reasons, you’re unable to fly no matter how much cheaper it would be. If you’re undocumented, you’re unable to fly (and often unable to drive) no matter how much more convenient it would be. Train travel doesn’t serve those populations as a “backup” option; it serves those populations as the only option.

Conclusion: if you don’t like train travel, don’t travel by train. But don’t tell me there’s something wrong with trains

I’m perfectly aware of confirmation bias, and the fact that I love train travel obviously makes me seek out the most convincing arguments in favor of train travel. If you think train travel is a poor substitute for flying or driving, then you won’t find these arguments convincing.

Writing this post, I was reminded of my notorious screed about Galveston, TX, where I wrote extensively about how hard it is to get there, and reader stvr commented, “Do you not have a driver's license?” To stvr, renting a car for a weekend is a totally normal and good way to get around, whereas to me it’s an almost unfathomably annoying prospect.

Whether it’s flying, car rental, or train travel, issues where people have strong feelings are opportunities for disagreement, but also a chance to exercise some epistemic humility. I hate renting cars, but I’m not crusading for the destruction of the car rental industry; I know that many people believe it serves a useful function, and I’m not willing to say with certainty that those people are wrong. Likewise, even if you hate traveling by train, before destroying America’s passenger rail network once and for all, do me a favor and take the opportunity to step back and ask how certain you really are that all of us who love it are wrong.

Even more Hilton Honors IT nonsense

Back in September, 2018, Robert Dwyer wrote at Milenomics about all the real and potential problems you might encounter redeeming Hilton Honors free weekend night certificates. Having re-read that post, I thought I was locked, loaded, and ready to redeem my own Hilton Honors Ascend free weekend night certificate for an upcoming trip to New York City.

It didn’t work out that way.

Good news: free weekend night awards may have gotten easier to book

Going into this call, my assumption was that I’d run into one of the same obstacles Robert did: I didn’t have enough points in my account to book a night entirely with points, even though I didn’t intend to use any points at all.

That did not end up being my problem. After I identified myself, the phone rep was able to find and apply my free weekend night certificate and complete the reservation without any problem, even though I had less than 6,000 Hilton Honors points in my account, so they seem to have fixed Robert’s ninth obstacle.

Interestingly, the phone rep was willing to let me use my free weekend night award to book any standard room award. Now that Hilton has started charging different prices for different “standard” rooms on the same night this is potentially a big advantage, for a couple of reasons.

First, for reservations booked entirely with free weekend night certificates, it may increase the value of the certificate by letting you book a larger room or one with more beds for a single “price.”

But second, depending on the property, it may also increase the value of your points when combining a points reservations with a free weekend night award reservation. That’s for the simple reason that under many circumstances a hotel may prefer to let you stay in a “better” room for multiple nights rather than force you to move every day and their housekeeping staff to turn over multiple rooms multiple times.

Your experience will vary, but using a free weekend night award for the first night of a stay may be one strategy for working your way into a larger or better room for the entire length of your stay.

Bad news: points are not available instantly after awards are cancelled

This is not exactly a new problem, so much as one Hilton has never really figured out how they want to handle. When I wrote about the issue in 2017, I advised cancelling, instead of changing, award redemptions since changing reservations did not redeposit the price difference in your account.

But now the problem has gotten worse, with award cancellations not immediately redepositing points either. I ran into this exact problem yesterday trying to rebook a 3-night award stay as a 2-night award stay (with the first night replaced with my weekend night award). I waited patiently for the points to be redeposited so I could rebook the last two nights, but they never were (and still haven’t been).

My pet theory having only looked into it over the course of a frustrating evening is that these developments are connected. When I opened my free weekend night award reservation, I saw that instead of simply saying a certificate or award had been used, instead my reservation stated that 67,000 points had been redeemed. If free weekend awards are being converted into points before being applied to reservations, that would mean you could theoretically book any standard night at any of the most expensive Hilton properties, cancel the reservation, and receive 95,000 points redeposited in your account.

If they really implemented free weekend night awards in such a crude way, adding a level of scrutiny to those free weekend night reservations necessarily means applying the same scrutiny to all cancelled award reservations. That is an issue that’s trivial to work around, but only if you know it exists.

And now you know.