How to Use Your Rewards Miles

Well....maybe the title to this post is a little deceiving because I really don't know the secret. But I know someone that does. I first heard about Mike of iflywithmiles.com from J.Money of BudgetsareSexy.com. Every now and then J.Money hosts a Side Hustle series and back in January Mike was the guest post.

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I emailed Mike a few times since reading the post asking questions about how many points we would need for our trip to Thailand and Cambodia. After finally accumulating 205K points (been saving since Feb. 2012) we were finally ready to see how far that would get us. It got us an economy seat over and first class back. But since we weren't going to "destination" cites like Bangkok, Tokyo and Seoul it was going to take us three days to get to Siem Reap, Cambodia and then it would take us another three days to get back to Texas. In the end we couldn't justify 6 days of travel for 7 days of true vacation time. We needed a plan B.

Our Plan B came after about a week of discussion on what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go. We finally settled on a Trafalgar tour starting in Amsterdam and ending in Paris! I am so excited! I emailed Mike back and apologized for our indecisiveness. I gave him our dates and he was able to find something pretty quickly. We are flying a combo of United and Lufthansa business class for 100K mileage points each (and some additional money for taxes and surcharges)! I know that if I was to book though United's website for that same flight it would cost either $8,000 or 500K mileage points!!! I think its safe to say Mike is awesome!

And there is a bonus! I guess when booking overseas you get a free domestic layover (staying in a city for a night) and since we didn't take advantage of that we could book an inbound flight to any city - we chose Chicago. So we are going to Chicago next year too! I am so excited for both our trips and I cant wait to go!

Let the planning begin!