Questions and Answers

First of all I would like to thank you Ben for all of your inspiration over the last couple of years especially with our last trip to Dubai and Abu Dhabi on Emirates A380 and Etihad.

Our next trip is planned for this winter to the Maldives. Outbound out of ORD-CPH-IST-MLE on SAS/TK business class. It looks like I will just miss the new cabin on SAS by a week or so because it is showing the old A340 business. Anything can happen though, hopefully it gets changed to a plane equipped with the new business class product.

We booked this with no return flight in hopes that a return flight will open up sometime in the next few months. What are your thoughts on this strategy?

Hi Blake, welcome! [USER=4]@Lucky[/USER] and [USER=7]@Tiffany[/USER] often write about this strategy so it’s workable. I think you need to have a diversified point balances of sufficient size that you can take advantage of opportunities that appear or be willing to pay for a Y seat on your way back assuming you have to be back by a certain time.

Thanks for the response! Currently we both have enough points on United and American to get back and it looks like if we are flexible a couple of days we will be able to make this happen. [USER=4]@Lucky[/USER] we read Ben’s post on redeeming awards to maldives and this instantly opened up twice as much award space with the option to fly out of CMB. Especially the possibility to fly CX F which is one we have not marked off our bucket list!

I didn’t quite understand your comment about [USER=4]@Lucky[/USER] and [USER=7]@Tiffany[/USER] often writing about this strategy. If you have any links I would appreciate if you posted them to this thread.

Unfortunately I don’t have time to pull the links right now but Ben and Tiffany have written many times about the value of being flexible and being able to wait till the last minute to take advantage of last minute availability.

So, here’s the thing with waiting to the last minute — I (and Ben) do it for ourselves all the time. Truly, 90% of our award flights are probably booked within a week of departure. So I almost always don’t have return flights, and it’s fine, because I’m flexible as to when I return, how I route, which miles I use, if I have to buy a segment, etc.

If you’re not [I]quite[/I] that flexible, then it probably makes sense to have a backup routing in place. Even a guaranteed economy ticket home can make for a less stressful vacation than trying to scramble to find [I]something, anything[/I], to get home.