kristenrice
NOT just an ambulance driver
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2006
- Messages
- 7,371
I am helping my sister plan her family trip to WDW next year. They are going to join our family but she is not telling her girls, and my girls won't know that their cousins are coming along with them
.
She is going on a tight budget so I have been trying to help her out. The first thing she did was applied for the SWA Visa with the 50,000 bonus points. Our trip is in October and so I am assuming that the flights will be released sometime in March. Based on the general prices that I've seen, a R/T should be about 17,500 points ($250) or less. In March, she will have enough points to book only 3 of the R/T tickets that they will need.
This was my suggestion...
In an effort to help reduce her OOP cost, I told her to plan on booking 3 tickets with the points as soon as they become available. Then, I suggested she wait another 3-4 months so that she can accumulate more points, hopefully enough to get at least a one-way ticket. She is hesitant to book only 3 tickets when she needs 4. I told her that availability shouldn't be a problem. (For example, I did a "dummy" booking for 8 tickets for our flight in 11 days and there are still WGA fares available, as low as $109!) I realize that the cost can (and probably will) go up, but if she can accumulate enough points over those extra 3-4 months, it should still effectively lower her OOP cost. Plus, if the fares go DOWN, she will have the extra points refunded to her account. A cash credit will do her no good since she won't be flying again until 2016.
Did I give her sound advice? I would love to get the great deal I got for DH and I for our upcoming trip. I booked at 6:30am on the day the fares were released and I scored 2 non-stop round trip tickets for under 19,000 points
. By the afternoon, they were listed as sold out, but then came back at about 12,000 each. I never saw them return to the price I paid so I think we managed to get lucky with a glitch or something.

She is going on a tight budget so I have been trying to help her out. The first thing she did was applied for the SWA Visa with the 50,000 bonus points. Our trip is in October and so I am assuming that the flights will be released sometime in March. Based on the general prices that I've seen, a R/T should be about 17,500 points ($250) or less. In March, she will have enough points to book only 3 of the R/T tickets that they will need.
This was my suggestion...
In an effort to help reduce her OOP cost, I told her to plan on booking 3 tickets with the points as soon as they become available. Then, I suggested she wait another 3-4 months so that she can accumulate more points, hopefully enough to get at least a one-way ticket. She is hesitant to book only 3 tickets when she needs 4. I told her that availability shouldn't be a problem. (For example, I did a "dummy" booking for 8 tickets for our flight in 11 days and there are still WGA fares available, as low as $109!) I realize that the cost can (and probably will) go up, but if she can accumulate enough points over those extra 3-4 months, it should still effectively lower her OOP cost. Plus, if the fares go DOWN, she will have the extra points refunded to her account. A cash credit will do her no good since she won't be flying again until 2016.
Did I give her sound advice? I would love to get the great deal I got for DH and I for our upcoming trip. I booked at 6:30am on the day the fares were released and I scored 2 non-stop round trip tickets for under 19,000 points
