Flights by Celebrity, as it is now called, has really good rates for European <-> US flights. Their one-way flight price cannot be beaten, i.e. if you do a one way TA cruise and need to book flight on the other way. If you buy one-way ticket directly from the airline, it is way more expensive than 2-way tickets.
We try to use miles to book as much as we can. We obtain converted miles through credit cards like Chase Sapphire Reserve and SPG Amex (our 2 favorite cards). With SPG Amex, we use SPG points to convert to Marriott to get the 5-night travel packages. When we do not have enough airline miles, we will buy through Celebrity. I do not like Oceania's flight arrangement as they use group/discounted airfare and they won't book it until it is 3 months before the cruise. If the passenger wants to change, they need to pay an air deviation fee. We are taking an air credit of $500 off the Olife fare per person so that we can arrange for our own passage. Oceania's Olife rate includes economy seats, with an additional $149 for each leg to bump to Economy Plus/Premium Economy.
This how we have done it for next year's 2 trips.
April/May 2018 US <-> Rome trip:
- One-way to Rome, about $1,700+ pp on DeltaOne throught Celebrity (Score!). If booked from Delta directly, it is close to $6000. We do not have enough points/miles to use mileage to book this leg.
- Return from Rome, we used Delta skymiles for our DeltaOne flights. We got this with a combination of Delta cc promotion and SPG points conversion. We picked the day with the lowest Delta points requirement to return, which was the day after the cruise ship returns to Rome, at 70K per person (Score!).
Dec 2018 US <-> Singapore and Hong Kong
- Each leg per person on United Polaris is 180K, we are going to use a total of 720K (Groan...) for this trip for 2 of us. The dates are not yet available for booking yet. We will check Flights by Celebrity and United direct booking costs before using United miles. At this point it appears that United miles is what we will do. With United upgrading their Polaris program, their prices have also gone up significantly.
Most airlines release seats about 11 months before the flights. If you are using award miles like me, 11 months is the cheapest, i.e. point requirement as they are capacity controlled. For pricing, it varies with the airline and route as to when you get the best price. From my limited experience, it appears that for international flights, it seems that the further out you book the cheaper it is as well. It is definitely not the case in booking domestic US flights.
Last edited:
. Thanks to Cruise Critic and our sailing's roll call, we signed up for a private taxi tour to the Primeval Forest, where we were met by a naturalist and took a moderate guided walk into this pristine area off the beaten path. It cost $20 pp for the taxi ride to & from the forest, and the driver provided high & low test punch for us. Our forest tour was $7 pp.