I had a great opportunity last weekend that was only made possible with airline miles. My daughter and I are huge soccer fans and a bucket list item for us was to see a Bayern Munich (our favorite team) play live in Germany. We didn’t get to do that, but this was a very awesome alternative!
Currently, the US is hosting the FIFA Club World Cup which is a similar format as the World Cup, which will be hosted in North America next summer. This tournament however pits the top club teams from around the world against each other compared to the countries’ national teams in the regular World Cup and still features the top stars of the world like Lionel Messi, Erling Haaland, Kylian Mbappe and Harry Kane.
Unfortunately, none of the games were scheduled to take place in St Louis. We considered going to Cincinnati on Father’s Day to see Bayern in a group stage match, but it didn’t work out. Once we learned that Bayern would be playing their first game of the knockout round last Sunday in Miami, we only had a few days to figure things out if we wanted to see them live.
How to get there?
Getting game tickets for the 4:00 afternoon start time was easy and surprisingly not very expensive, but we needed a way to get there and back in the same day. Southwest flies nonstop to Miami (as does American) and Fort Lauderdale from St Louis, but with just a few days’ notice, the cash prices (and therefore the Southwest points prices) were outrageous at $800-1000 per ticket round trip. Even with Companion Pass, that was a no-go since we had 3 people total that needed to travel.
After looking at Southwest my next stop was American. There was award space that wasn’t horrible at 36.5k round trip in economy, or 48.5k to fly there in economy and back in first class, but since they are not currently a transfer partner of any bank points, I don’t have an easy way to replenish American miles and this was a bit higher points price than I would want to pay.
I was starting to think this trip just wasn’t meant to be, but I decided to check Alaska just in case American was still considering these options saver space that was open to partner airlines. Needless to say, I was thrilled to see the much better pricing for the same flights with Alaska and importantly, space for 3 people!
The only difference was that Alaska was not showing availability for the return flight at 7.5k miles for that leg, but since it was late at night (and ended up being delayed over an hour), we were very happy to take the first class seats for 15k to try to sleep on the way home. For a total of 67.5k miles we were able to get the 3 of us down and back in the same day for about the price of 1 award ticket on Southwest and for 78k less miles than American would charge for the same flights (48.5k times 3 – the 67.5k total we paid).
Since we are well stocked with Alaska miles (transferred from Hawaiian) due to recent Hawaiian card sign-up bonuses (I wrote about here and here) and from transferring a good chunk of Amex points to Hawaiian before that pathway ended a few days ago, this was a no-brainer redemption and at great value. Compared to the cash price of a nonrefundable ticket for the same flights, we redeemed for ~4.5 cents per point value and had the benefit of the tickets being refundable should something have changed with our plans. For domestic travel, 4.5cpp is outstanding value!
TL;DR: Knowledge of partner award options, in this case using Alaska miles to book an expensive, last-minute flight on American, helped us check off a bucket-list item of seeing our favorite soccer team play in the Club World Cup. Alaska miles saved us about 54% vs using American miles in this case.
