My wife and I are going to Europe next summer for a friend’s 40th birthday. This will be our first international trip with our daughter who will be a little over a year old at the time so we are going to fly into Paris before making our way to Austria. The most important thing to consider when booking flights with points and miles is to be flexible with your travel plans. Since we live in Charleston, SC we have to connect to a major international gateway before flying overseas. I started with looking for flights from major airports close to us with nonstop flights to Europe. Washington Dulles (IAD) is only a short hop away and has flights to most airports in Europe. Luckily we aren’t going until next June so I was able to find a flight on Air France from Washington Dulles to Paris Charles De Gaulle in business class for both of us. The cost was 70,000 FlyingBlue miles plus $199.80 per person. I transferred 140,000 Amex points to FlyingBlue which was an instant transfer. If I had paid cash for the tickets it would have cost $3,182 each!

Children under 2 years of age fly for 10% of the adult fare which worked out to $246.70. She also gets a checked bag as well! I would have preferred to pay only 7,000 miles. As there isn’t an option to add my daughter at booking, I had to call Air France to add her to the reservation and pay her fare. It was a quick and painless process that took about 5 minutes. The phone agent also helped us select our seats to make sure we had a bassinet for our daughter to sleep in on the flight.

For the return flight I found one of my favorite ways to come home from Europe, Singapore Airlines on their A380 super jumbo. I booked business class from Frankfurt to New York JFK for 81,000 KrisFlyer miles plus $129.09 in taxes and fees per person. If I would have paid cash for the ticket it would have cost $2,723. I transferred the needed miles from American Express. Usually it can take anywhere from 24-48 hours for the points to transfer but in this case it took less than an hour. Once the points were in my account I was able to book the tickets.

How does Singapore Airlines fly from Germany to the United States? Its called a fifth freedom flight. Fifth freedom flights are where an airline from one country flies between two other countries and have rights to fly passengers between them. There aren’t too many airlines that fly routes like these but it’s always fun when they do.

Now I just have to get us from our home in Charleston (CHS) to Washington Dulles (IAD) and back home from New York JFK. This is the issue for us living in a smaller city with no international flights. We have to connect to a major international gateway when we want to go abroad. But thankfully, there are some great options.

Sometimes, you’ll be able to book one ticket from CHS to where we want to go. Since Air France is a partner of Delta’s we could fly Delta domestically and connect to Air France for the long haul flight. If there is availability you can add your domestic flights for no additional miles. Unfortunately for us, Delta doesn’t fly nonstop from CHS to IAD and we would have had to connect in Atlanta. While I could have done that I wanted to keep the number of flights to a minimum especially since we will be flying with our daughter. So in this case, I just booked us cheap coach tickets on United which does fly nonstop from CHS to IAD.

For the return, the same thing happend. Singapore Airlines is a partner with United through the Star Alliance. Since we are landing at JFK our only nonstop option is on Delta as United flys out of Newark. We could have loaded up into an Uber and gone over to Newark but that is something that would be even worse than connecting in a second airport to get home. So what did I do? I could have transferred 22,000 Citi Thank You points each to Virgin Atlantic. Citi has a promotion running right now until the end of the month where you get 30% more points when you transfer to Virgin. So those 22,000 points turn into 27,500 Virgin points. However, Virgin charges an additional 5,000 for a lap infant which is annoying. To get the 60,000 Virgin points I needed I would have had to transfer 47,000 Citi points to Virgin.

I already had a little over 9,000 Delta SkyMiles from some work trips so I ended up just topping off my account with another 39,000 Amex points to book the trip directly with Delta in First Class. Delta has recently gutted their frequent flyer program (which is another post for another day) so I wanted to use up as many SkyMiles as I could. I only value them at around 1.1 cents per point which is much less than the 1.7 cents per point I value Citi points. Booking this way kept 8,000 points which I value around $136 in my transferrable points balance.

How Much Did This Trip Cost Me?

On the outbound we booked the following:

Charleston to Washington Dulles in coach for $188

Wasington Dulles to Paris in business class for 140,000 and $399.60 in taxes and fees plus $246.70 for our daughter.

On the return we booked the following:

Frankfurt to New York JFK on Singapore Airlines in business class for 162,000 miles plus $258.18 in taxes and fees.

New York JFK to Charleston on Delta in first class for 48,000 miles plus $12 in taxes and fees.

Total Cost:

350,000 miles and $857.78

How Much Would This Have Cost?

If I paid cash for the same tickets it would have cost $12,741!

Taking out the taxes and fees portion of what I paid, those points I used got me a value of 3.4 cents per point. Pretty good if you ask me! That’s way better than if you redeemed them for the 1.5 cents per point you normally get redeeming for travel through your credit card’s travel portal. If I would have done it that way, I would have needed almost 850,000 points. I’d much rather save 500,000 points and pay the $857 for these tickets.

Even if I booked a roundtrip in economy it still would have cost me $3,400!

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Wrapping Up

Hopefully you can see booking this way is a much better option. Even though I’m still paying $857 out of pocket, I’m saving a bunch of money and get to have a seat that turns into a fully flat bed for the long haul portion of our trip.