My highest domestic economy redemption yet!!
Here's another real-world example for you: a good friend in Detroit wanted to come visit us in NYC for a long weekend. Fares between Detroit and NYC are notoriously high for last-minute travel so the only way it was going to work is if I could find a reward seat. As I mentioned before, flying on points is usually best when you either book very far in advance or very last minute, and since he was proposing flying here tonight or tomorrow, I was somewhat hopeful. As I've discussed in my tips, I priced out the flight and the cheapest non-stop I could find was a whopping $844 – even when I tried different days and times. Going with a 1-stop option got the price down to $550, but that's still really expensive and it tripled the length of travel time for him. I logged in to Delta.com and found out that a non-stop itinerary was going to be 65,000 miles (32.5k each way... United was a little better, but he would have missed all of Friday coming on the Sav