Man, I tell you, blogging is hard work. Coming up with posts daily is not an easy task. Anyway, I have a trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico planned in March and a wedding in Hawaii in October. I have already booked my Mexico trip and waiting for my Virgin America miles to post to book Hawaii. However, I have a buddy who hasn’t booked either flights yet (he’s one of those types.) Not too many people know that Alaska Airlines allows you 1 stopover on one-way award tickets. This has been blogged about before, and so I’m not letting the cat out of the hat here. I’m just reminding and enlightening some of my readers who aren’t aware of such rules. So let’s look at this piece by piece.
If you want to book a one way from Seattle to Honolulu, it takes 20K miles and thus 40K miles round trip. So that’s what most people would book and call it a day. See the award chart below:
And this is the sample itinerary for next October. You can see some flights are at 30K and some are at 20K. These are of course one way prices.
Now let’s say my friend found a cheap one way to Mexico and is looking for a way back to Seattle in March and then on to Hawaii in October. So let’s change our search to a ‘multi city’ search and enter in some sample dates. Here’s the screenshot:
And here are the results:
As you can see, you can go from Mexico to Seattle in April and then on to Hawaii in October all for 17,500 miles. Now that’s odd. Why is it only 17,500 miles instead of 20,000 miles like in the first itinerary. When we look at the US to Mexico award chart, you can see that it only costs 17,500 miles to go from the US to Mexico.
Since our flight is really Mexico to Hawaii, and I don’t see a Mexico-Hawaii award chart since Alaska doesn’t fly direct flights from Mexico to Hawaii, their pricing engine just assumes Hawaii is a part of the US. The reason I say that is because I tested HNL-SEA-PVR, which still came up 17,500 miles; I was expecting that to come up 20K since the first leg is the more expensive HNL-SEA. I know this has very limited use since not that many people would go to Mexico and Hawaii in the same year, but you could easily book HNL-SEA-NYC if you knew you had a trip to NYC coming up. The only way to utilize this “feature” is if you already have 2 trips planned. I don’t know what would happen if you tried to change your 2nd leg after you’ve taken your 1st leg. I’ll have to test that next.
And by the way, yes, my friend would still have to book a one-way from SEA-PVR and then another one way from HNL-SEA. Or if he knew he was going somewhere else after October, he could do the trick again and book a one-way from HNL-SEA-NYC for example. Since one-ways are half the price of a roundtrip (unlike the past), he doesn’t lose money by booking the other segments as one-ways.
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