Back in November (2013), I signed up for the Chase Sapphire Preferred card with 40,000 bonus points. My goal was to earn enough points for a round-trip ticket to China. At the time, United costed 60,000 miles. A devaluation hit in February 2014, costing 70,000 miles for the trip. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough miles to book my ticket before the devaluation.
Once I had 70,000 points in my Chase Ultimate Rewards account, I transferred them to my United Mileage Plus account. The points were supposed to transfer instantly but I didn’t see them after refreshing my browser multiple times. I had a mini heart attack. I later found out I had to log out and then log back in to my United Mileage Plus account to see my miles updated.
Total cost for my sister’s ticket: 70,000 United miles + $80 taxes and fees.
Then I proceeded to book my ticket using my Barclay Arrival miles.
Since I was paying my ticket with “cash”, I had been watching the airfares for a couple weeks, which were all above $1,000. Then one day, it dropped to $991, thinking it was a good deal, I went ahead and booked it. About a month later, it dropped a couple hundred dollars more – nooo!! But whatever, I’ve since learned to stop watching for airfares after I made my booking.
Barclay Arrival miles can be redeemed within 120 days after the booking. Although I didn’t have enough miles to redeem the whole $991, I waited until almost the end of the 120 days so I could rack up more miles. I was able to redeem $700 against it. So my out of pocket cost was $291.
TL;DR I paid a total of $371 for two tickets from Boston to China that would have costed $2,000.
Mild Turbulence 