travel

Spending Money for Travel – Part Deux

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on how I could trade my Delta SkyMiles for Air Canada Aeroplan miles, but that it would cost me over US$200 to do so. I waffled on whether to do it, but in the end I decided to post the trade request. Since the trade would expire a month after I posted it, I figured I had nothing to lose, so I posted the trade. 20,000 Delta SkyMiles for 20,000 Aeroplan miles.

Wouldn’t you know it, this week the trade went through! Good thing it was this week to, as the Canadian dollar is almost at par with the US one, so the US$220 fee ended up costing me CDN$227 and change. Yeah!

I’m excited about this trade because it means that I’m more than halfway to a ticket to Europe, which is cool since I’m hoping to go there next year. OR, I’ve got a ticket to the West Coast, which is another option, although since I was just there in February I’ll probably hold on to them to use for Europe. Woo!

And as far as finding the $227 to pay for the trade, I’ve got $100 saved up in my Toonie fund, and I’ll take $100 from my income tax refund to finance the other portion. The rest will come from my next paycheque (this Friday), so it’s all covered.

Sure, I won’t use the Aeroplan points for a while, so some of you might be thinking why didn’t I wait, but in the end with something like a trade, I couldn’t be sure if anyone would accept the trade when I needed them. If it was a matter of relying on the airline to let me trade them, then sure, I would have waited. But since I had to find someone to trade with me, I thought it was better to do it as soon as I could, that way I’d have the points when I needed them.

Spending Money for Travel

One, two, three…ten thousand, fifteen thousand, sixty thousand.

What am I counting? I’m counting up my airline miles. I was admiring all of my airline miles in a few different affinity accounts while logged in to my Points.com account and discovered something interesting and annoying.

(Points.com, for those of you who don’t know, is a site where you can exchange points in various affinity programs that normally wouldn’t let you exchange points. For example, I can exchange points from a gas station program into an airline’s program and vice versa. Not every program is a member of Points.com, but there’s a pretty good list of ones that are.)

I’ve got over 20,000 points in Delta’s SkyMiles that I earned when it was Northwest Airlines, and living in Canada it would be quite hard for me to use the points as I don’t fly to the States all that often. While SkyMiles is a member of Points.com, annoyingly they don’t allow swaps out of the program, so I can’t actually use the points other than to fly on Delta. *sigh*

BUT, Points.com has a new program where you can trade points rather than swap (trade usually costs money, while swapping doesn’t). This would allow me to swap out my SkyMiles into something that I would use, like Air Canada’s Aeroplan points. My basic question to you is this: do I spend the money to trade out the SkyMiles?

Here’s the more detailed question:

• Trading out 15,000 SkyMiles would net me 5,000 Aeroplan points and cost me US$140.
• Buying 7,000 SkyMiles to top up to 30,000 would cost me about US $200, THEN I could trade 30,000 SkyMiles for 15,000 Aeroplan points for US$220.

Option 1 would cost me US$140, while Option 2 would cost me almost US$500. Considering the Canadian dollar is almost at par right now with the US dollar, it’s not as bad a cost as it would have been last year. But do I do it? I’m quite tempted to do so because I will never use those SkyMiles to fly Delta, but transferring them over to Aeroplan would mean I could use them, either to fly or to exchange into a gift card or something.

What do you think? Should I go for it? If yes, which option should I choose?

Back from the Olympic Adventure

Hi everyone! I’m back from my wonderful Olympic adventure at the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. What a spectacular experience! The city was alive with proud & loud Canadians, who were wooing and cheering their way to all the events. My friends and I had a great time, and I’m proud to say that I didn’t go crazy with my spending. In total I spent approximately $350 on meals, food-related items like snacks & drinks, and $15 on a cowbell and kazoo noisemaker. I had already purchased my Team Canada gear throughout the year when I had the money, so I didn’t end up going crazy with any souvenirs during the games. I did buy a $30 souvenir t-shirt, but that’s about it.

We will find out in April how much we made in total with all of the tickets we sold on the Fan-to-Fan Marketplace of the Vancouver 2010 website (scalping tickets is legal in British Columbia). We did pretty well on those sales, selling most of the tickets for well over face-value (some of them we made twice and three times the money, which is great!)

All in all I’m pleased with both the trip and my fiscal restraint. Woo hoo!