Sure, most of you have heard about the “mileage run” where you find a cheap flight and fly it just to gain the miles and elite status. Then you have the “mattress run” where you find a cheap room rate and check in but don’t really spend the night there just because the bonus points you are earning is worth more than the paid stay. I’ve even read about “manufactured spend” runs, but usually it’s piggybacked on a personal or business trip. Well this Saturday my friends, I will be going on a “gift card” run. That’s right. Equipped with my plethora of AMEX cards, I booked a day trip to Los Angeles, the home of 40 Smart & Final stores (hopefully I won’t need to visit every one of them). I thought about going to San Fran, but there’s only 4 stores around the area, which meant my probability of success would be greatly diminished. Plus, I’m sure Travel with Grant would have already raided all the stores.
Airfare
I never even considered paying cash for the 1 day roundtrip flight. I knew I wanted to fly on Alaska Airlines since they seem to have the most flights from Seattle to Los Angeles. I had wanted to do this 2 weekends ago, but for some reason, there wasn’t any availability from LAX to SEA on Saturday night on 4/18 or 4/25. The first Saturday that was available was on 5/2; it might be because no one wants to fly during the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight (by the way, I did consider NOT going this day because I didn’t want the pilot to announce the results during my return flight). Anyway, I was looking at the week of 5/2 for the past 2 weeks, and I finally decided to pull the trigger on Friday 4/24. I was kinda shocked that both my outbound and inbound flights still had low level saver availability that close to departure. Anyway, I could have booked it on Alaska for 25,000 miles roundtrip, but because British Airways has a distance based award chart and partners with Alaska, it only cost me 15,000 miles roundtrip. I have these BA points from my AMEX Plat signup in December, which I layered on the 40% bonus. For reference, the cash cost for this flight is around ~$300 ($.02c of value), but since it was within 7 days, the price was actually $720 when I booked it (which is why you collect miles – for exorbitant last minute flight costs). The cool thing was when I booked it through BA, I was ready to have to argue to not be charged the $25 phone ticketing fee, but the British lady told me I only owed $11.20. I then repeated to her, “You are not charging me the phone fee because I can’t book this online, right?” She goes, “No sir, just the airport fees.” The last time I didn’t ask this question, the Indian rep told me $11, but actually charged me $36 and I was not a happy camper since I couldn’t call back to get it refunded.
Car Rental
Next step was to look for a 1 day car rental. I immediately went onto Autoslash.com and looked for prices. The lowest I saw was $31.14 [all in] through Payless Car Rental (who?!?). I then pulled up an Expedia search and all of the big boys wanted something like $45. I then decided to just book it through Autoslash for $31. The cool thing about Autoslash is that whether you book a rental through them or not, you should enter in your car reservation info, and they will email you if they find a lower rate. Sure enough, the very next morning, they emailed me saying, “Hey we found a cheaper rate through Hertz for $26.78. All I had to do was reply to the email with the words “YES.” It took them almost half a day to re-book me, and I was actually afraid the rate would go away, but they were eventually able to change my booking to Hertz for $26.78. The funny thing is that even I couldn’t find that rate on the Hertz site. Then 2 days later, they emailed me again saying I was rebooked on Hertz at an even lower rate of $25.32. SWEET!
The only other expense so far is the 1 day of parking that I’ll need to book, which I have an expired Groupon that I need to use up. Here’s a tip – don’t speculatively buy airport parking Groupons. They will re-run the Groupon and you don’t want yours to expire like mine did. So just wait until you’ve locked down your trip and only buy it a week or 2 in advance. My estimate is that parking will cost me ~$20.
Conclusion
So the total cost so far is the $11 in airfare, $25 car rental, and ~$20 airport parking for a total cost of about $56. As for the financial benefit, let’s just say it’ll be well worth it. The way I see it, it’s more of an “adventure” than anything else. Plus, I planned lunch with an old friend at a restaurant where they make their own udon, Marugame Monzo. I’ll write up a trip report for you guys after I return.
By the way, this reminded me of when I was working at a Fortune 500 company. They had this rule where if you extended your business trip into a business-personal by staying over on a Saturday (this was back when Saturday night stays were cheaper for airfare), then that would be fine. And so I had a Monday to Friday business trip in Los Angeles, and so my business airfare came out to something like $850. I then did some research and found out that if I flew to Anchorage the week before, it was actually cheaper (down to something like $700.) The funny thing is that I would actually land in Anchorage at 9pm and fly back out at 11pm. I basically deplaned, took a step outside to smell the fresh Alaskan air and walked right back in. I even had the same flight crew on the flight. Most people would have stopped there, but while I was on the phone with the agent booking this thing, I asked her to check the price if I flew to Hawaii after my business trip (on Saturday) and then returned home on Sunday. Sure enough, it came out to something like $825. BINGO! And this was when Delta had a double miles promo going. All in, I netted something like 30,000 Skymiles and got to Gold Medallion pretty quickly after that. Ahhh good times.