Recap Week Ending 10/11/26

Today I’m off to Marriott HQ to celebrate Marriott Bonvoy Member Day! If you’re also attending, come say hi!

More tools have come out in the last few months where you are notified if your cash fare price goes down and you can rebook. Some tools also do this for hotels. For flight price drops, the savings are generally given back to you in the form of a future flight credit with the airline you booked for. Some of these tools are free, some are included in existing subscriptions, and others charge a percentage fee of the savings (to your credit card). To be honest, I haven’t used any of these yet, but I certainly will be giving them a try!

This is something that probably couldn’t exist pre-COVID because the major US airlines now allow free changes/cancellations on your tickets as long as you didn’t book basic economy.

Thrifty Traveler (free for anyone): Track up to 5 flights for free (10 for subscribers). No commission, not cut, no inbox access needed. Just put in your flight info and price you paid and get notified if price drops by $20 or more with rebooking instructions.

Going (included in subscription): Subscribers can track up to 5 flights. No commission, no inbox access. Get email notification if price drops 10%+ and how to rebook.

Capital One Travel Portal: Automatic price drop protection for 10 days after booking airfare through the Capital One Travel Portal, no rebooking needed. After 10 days, you can still get travel credit for a major price drop, but only up to $50.

Autopilot (free and paid): Tracks flights and hotel price drops of $20+. Autopilot will reach out on your behalf to claim fare credit/hotel savings. Free to use but 25% commission of savings charged to your credit card. Paid subscription has more features like award travel tracking and upgrade offer tracking.

Gondola (free): Tracks your hotel and flight emails because you provide email access to Gondola, or you can manually forward them to a Gondola email. No commission or fees. Apparently they make money if you use their travel portal to book hotels and they count as direct bookings so you still earn points + elite night credits.

Expedia (free for select loyalty members): OneKey Gold and Platinum get flight price drop protection on certain flights, and only if booked through the app. Others can pay a small fee for the protection and get the price drop credit after the trip ends.

If you’re spending your hard-earned points, you’ll want to make sure you get the best deal from it. That includes making sure you are sitting in a good seat, and not all seats are created equal, far from it. Some business class seats still require you to climb over others, some even have middle seats (Emirates and Turkish have them still!).

With British Airways making headlines this week around upgrading the A380 cabin, I wanted to highlight some tools and the process I use to figure out what type of seat is on the flight I may be booking so you may never be cursed with climbing over others even if booked in business class.

1) Use Google Flights to figure out what type of plane is on the route. It even potentially tells you if your seat has doors on it (marked as individual suite). Plane/seat type may determine if I reposition to New York or Chicago to fly a certain plane. In this example, the Chicago to Narita flight on ANA has a lie-flat seat on Google but the flight to Haneda says it’s an individual suite. That means the HND flight appears to be The Room business class instead of the older business class.

2) Look up the plane type seat map on Aerolopa. An example is if I am flying Turkish from IAD-IST, there are 2 flights a day. One is on a 777 and another is a 787. Using Aerolopa’s seatmaps for Turkish, I can see the 777 has business class in a 2-3-2 layout while the 787 has a 1-2-1 layout. Which one would you book… Some routes also get A350s, which are also in a 1-2-1 layout.

3) When ready to book your award flight, check the same flight on Google Flights and you can even do a dummy booking (fake booking with fake info just get to the seat selection part and don’t pay). Compare with Aerolopa.

4) Search reviews on Google for that airline and route. Example would be “Turkish Airlines business class review IAD”. The more recent the review, the better as airlines have been changing and upgrading their flight experiences in the last few years.

Note: Even planning ahead like this and positioning to another city for a specific plane type is not fool-proof. Aircraft swaps can always happen last-minute for operational reasons.

I’ve been sharing this deal since early September where you could book Air France business class starting at 42k points and only $6 in taxes/fees between East Coast and Paris. Some work was required including being able to have JAL miles (Bilt, Citi, Capital One, and Rove transfer to JAL), finding availability, and having to call JAL to book.

Well, it appears that those awards can no longer be booked by JAL as of October 1 (Reddit thread I created for data points). Likely due to Air France limiting awards as it is a deal almost too good to be true given the recent Air France/KLM devaluations.

Despite this, there are still a lot of sweet spots with the JAL program due to their award chart based on distance, but I fear this might not last long given the flood of miles into the JAL program recently.

American Airlines: Starting at 42k points one way and minimal taxes/fees between US/Europe.

British Airways: East Coast-London for 42k points and $215-500 in taxes/fees. Can connect through LHR to other destinations BA serves and fees could drop.

Iberia: US-Madrid starting at 42k points and $100-200 in taxes/fees.

LATAM: US to South America for as low as 42k points one way to 85k points round-trip, even on longer routes like JFK-SCL. Fees are minimal.

Japan Airlines: Fly JAL business class between US and Japan for 55-110k points (or more) but ~$350-400 in taxes/fees due to high fuel surcharges currently.

At the end of the day, the distance chart is what determines the fare (+ sometimes carrier imposed surcharges). You can build some cool self-built around the world flights with this. Get creative with JAL’s partners ;)

There is a lot of award space on LATAM business class between North American cities to popular South American destinations including Lima, Peru; Sao Paolo, Brazil; and Santiago, Chile.