MRP-trip planning essentials

What are the essentials for planning great package trips using the least amount of MRPs - or is there a reference I can go to here on TUG?

Examples of things I am looking for are booking flights and hotels 50 weeks in advance (I was told this is furthest out I can book) and needing to belong to a particular airline's freq fliers pgm before I can redeem MRP (not sure if this is 100% true), etc.

Note - I am trying to takes trips during the summer months or Christmas/New Years timeframe if possible. Also, I'd like to bring the toddlers along (ages 3 and 4 now) vs leaving them with a delighted relative.

Wow!

What you are seeking would take days and several chapters of a book to write. However, I think we can help a bit and send you in the right direction for some tutorials.

First, your assumptions are approximately correct. I believe NW allows booking tickets 50 weeks in advance. Most other major airlines allow booking 330 or 331 days in advance. With many airlines, you'll need to have the frequent flyer ("FF") miles in your account before you can reserve award tickets.

Marriott reservations can be made about 50 weeks in advance and you don't need to have the award to do so.

When you request a travel package award from Marriott, you'll be asked for your FF account with the airline you choose. Marriott will then buy FF miles from the airline, which will deposit them into your FF account with the airline. Thus, you’ll need to have that account set up before you request the Marriott package award.

Note that if you call (for example) 330 days in advance of your outbound flights to reserve them, you won't yet be able to reserve your return flights. Some airlines allow you to hold your outbound reservations for several days to two weeks before booking your return flights. If you wait to book your entire trip at once, there might be no FF award seats left on the outbound flights, as they might have been taken by (1) those who are taking shorter trips than you are and (2) those who decided it was worth it to finalize the reservation with a dummy return flight and call back later to reserve the real return flights, paying a ticket change fee of up to $100 per ticket, if necessary.

So where should you start? My suggestion is to go to Flyertalk. The top of the forum for each airline contains a sticky thread with info that usually includes the details of booking awards. You can do some testing on your own by going to an airline's website and trying to make one-way reservations for various dates to see how far in advance you can reserve. To determine when 330 (or whatever) days in advance of the date you want to travel is, go to this date calculator.

Some things to consider:

• Go to the websites of several airlines you might use and get familiar with their FF program, particularly how many FF miles are required for an award ticket to the destinations you are considering.
• Do a Google search for various terms likely to uncover tutorials that will help with specific questions you have. For example, if you Google “booking” (without the quotes) and “frequent flyer” (with the quotes), you’ll find a number of helpful articles on developing a successful strategy for getting the FF tickets you want, such as this one
• Traveling at peak times (e.g., school vacations), is the most difficult for getting FF award tickets. That's when everyone else wants to use FF miles for vacation trips, too!
• Snagging summer or Christmas FF award tickets to Hawaii is particularly difficult, as is snagging such tickets to Europe during the summer.
• On the first date you can call, start calling the airline soon after midnight and do so frequently until a rep says that flights have been loaded into the system for that date. (Yes, you might have to pull an all-nighter - or two of them - to get this done.) You can also use a dummy booking request for any flight - for the date you want to travel - on your PC that night to determine when seats have been loaded into the airline’s system.
• You might be able to find two (or three or one) award seats and have to pay for the other two. Why? On the most popular flights, airlines know that they can probably sell all of the seats. So they might make only two seats on the entire plane available for FF awards.
• On most airlines, you can reserve any seat on the plane, no matter how many FF award seats the airline sets aside, if you are willing to pay double the normal number of FF miles for those seats. See the airline’s award chart for details.
• If you can fly midweek, you'll have a better chance of getting FF award tickets, because there is lower demand for those dates. Most vacationers prefer to fly on weekends.
• Note that, as explained in one of the FAQs for this Marriott forum, MR points obtained from trading the use of your timeshare back to Marriott cannot be used for award stays at Marriott timeshares. Hotels, yes; timeshares, no.
• Some hotels will not be available for your award stays. For example, reserving a week-long award stay at the Paris or Rome Marriott in mid-summer is almost impossible to do.

Ultimately, when you are pretty sure what trip you want to take, (1) set up a FF account with the airline and (2) request the package award that fits for the category of Marriott hotel where you want to stay that has the number of FF miles you need for your trip. That might mean requesting two or more awards in order to get the number of airline FF miles you'll need for four tickets. Be sure to do this well in advance of when you need to start making reservations.

I saved the best for last. If juggling all of the complexities, limitations and uncertainties boggles your mind, consider signing up with AwardPlanner ($99.95 for your family for a year). They will make best efforts to get your FF award tickets for you. They get rave reviews and are experts at what they do. If seats are available, they will find them or offer you alternatives that might be available. AwardPlanner is owned by Randy Petersen, the same travel guru who owns FlyerTalk.

Nice summary Dave!

I will add that you may be able to book FF air one way and then do the return separately. It won't cost any more other than booking fees, if any.

Also I have noticed that even with high status the availability of the super-saver FF tickets is significantly reduced. The airlines are having a good year and are able to fill seats. So there is little incentive for them to give out the lower mile FF tickets. That cuts the value of those miles in half almost making it worthwhile to use a combination of FF and paid tickets.

Excellent summary Dave. Just for one added bit of info. If anyone wants to use the "star Alliance" Network which includes United, Lufthansa, SAS and their other partners to attempt to book a flight using miles I had excellent luck this summer by signing up as a memeber on the ANA (All Nippon) website. They are one of the Star Alliance partners but their website is unique in that you can search for flights which have available frequent flyer seats across all the Star Alliance partners using your outbound and return dates and the departure and arrival cities. Using this site I was able to find that while I could not get a direct flight from Dulles to Copenhagen on my outbound date I could get a United Flight to London and a SAS flight to Copenhagen or a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt and then to Copenhagen in business class using miles and I could get my return flight directly from Copenhagen to DUlles in business class using miles.. Once I had found the flights I wanted and was able to see that they had mileage seats available a quick call to United to book was all it took. The United Rep told me she had never had anyone call to book mileage seats that was able to tell her exactly what flights had seats available and get anyone booked so quickly as she was able to do for me since I was so well prepared.

Great info !!! Keep it comin...and Dave, are you secretly compiling all this travel info for a book? LOL, you seem to whip this good stuff up on such short notice, I AM AMAZED! Hey if you r writin a book and publish it, I'll be your first customer : )

Dave M said:

Ultimately, when you are pretty sure what trip you want to take, (1) set up a FF account with the airline and (2) request the package award that fits for the category of Marriott hotel where you want to stay that has the number of FF miles you need for your trip.

Click to expand...

Dave this is great info! Here's where I get stumped. Let's say you ask Marriott for the vacation package, and you get the FF miles in your account with the airline. Would you then call Marriott to make sure that you can use your reward for the week you want at the hotel? And if so, do you immediately call the airline to book that week? But then that week may not be available at the airline. Or would you check the airline first - see if they can put a hold on those tickets and then check with Marriott? How do you confirm that you can get both airline tickets and hotel for the same week? Also, I'm not apt to be up/stay up all night to make plane reservations - but we also like to travel off season (less crowds) - is it still really difficult to get your free tickets for an off season week (i.e. should I still be thinking book 330 days in advance - and then how do you book the return trip?!). Thanks for any help.

Kathy

I'll share my experience using a MR air/hotel package for the first time this past November. I wanted to obtain airline tickets for my son to visit Phuket in June '08. The hotel portion in Phuket was no problem, plenty of availability.

However I was not sure how to book the flights. United had seats, but won't hold them until you have the miles in your account. My brother-in-law is United 1-K with plenty of miles and I considered booking through his account. I finally decided that was more complicated than it was worth so I gambled that United would still have the seats I wanted once I got the miles into my new United account.

I called Marriott, paid the extra fee and the miles were in my United account in less than 24 hours. United was able to book the seats on the flights I wanted!!

The problem is that once you commit to any airline, you're stuck with them. If they no longer have seats for the destination you want then you'll have to come up with a Plan B. Marriott can not change the airline once points have been deposited. That's what can make this tricky, unless you have lots of airline miles and can book the seats before you get your Marriott package miles into your account.

kamumma1 said:

...should I still be thinking book 330 days in advance - and then how do you book the return trip?!). ...Kathy

Click to expand...

I guess you have the same question as I. I have heard of booking just the outbound on day 330 and 7 days later (assuming you want a 7 day stay/trip), calling the airline back and booking the return.

Question is whether the airline will take only 1/2 the total round trip points on the outbound, then take the othe 1/2 of the total rt points when you book the rt flight.

Example - if I am going to Hawaii from SFO, it costs 35000 FF. If I book outbound on day 330 from start date of my trip, they take 17500.... and on day 330 from return date of my trip I book the return ticket and they deduct another 17500 FF, making it a grand total of 35000 FF.

No, the airline won't take half of the points when you book your outbound. In most cases, they will take all of the points for the round-trip award.

Every airline has different policies. AA, for example, allows you to book the outbound portion of the plane trip and "hold" the reservation for 14 days before booking the return. UA, on the other hand, forces you to book the return flights within 72 hours of when you booked the outbound flights or you lose the reservation and have to start all over again.

Thus, on some airlines, you can book the outbound at 330 or 331 days (depending on the airline) and at others, you'll have to wait to book the outbound until shortly before you can book the return flights. The longer your trip will be, the more likely it is that outbound award seats will be gone when you finally make your full reservation.

The good news is that more and more, airlines are making additional seats available well after that 330 day mark. The bad news is that more and more airlines are making few if any award seats available at the 330 day mark.

For those, such as Kathy, who can travel in the off-season, it's much easier to get those off-season award seats.

As to what should the action plan be (ordering the travel package, making hotel reservations and making plane reservations), I would go with the order that Marriott recommends:

1) Make hotel reservations first.
2) Then order the travel package.
3) Then make plane reservations.

Part of the thinking here is that the hotel space becomes available about 50 weeks in advance - a bit more than two weeks before the airline seats might first become available.

However, if your testing (pretending to make reservations for other dates with likely similar demand) indicates that the hotel reservations are more readily available, I would change the order to travel package first, then plane reservations, then hotel reservations. There is no single best answer to this dilemma.

Note: There are numerous situations that don't fit with my explanation. For example, Southwest flights can typically be reserved only 120-180 days in advance. I have tried to give a general explanation, but you need to call your airline (or check FlyerTalk) to find out what the airline's policies are.

Note #2: Even though I recently linked to this thread, it is a very old thread. The AwardPlanner service referred to at the bottom of my above post is no longer available and there is no similar service that I’m aware of.