Doing Italy 2017 on Points and Miles with a Baby -- Flights

Main Pool at Borgo Pignano

I used some similar and some new travel tools for our trip to Italy. Italy is a bit of a challenge on points and mile because there are relatively few points hotels for all the many tourists there are wandering around this most beautiful country.

Flights

For flights to Italy, we had a goal to fly in lay flat business class seats for our trans-atlantic flights. Out of Boston, there are a few options as it has become a major gateway to europe over the last few years. We ended up finding flights on Swiss Airlines. You can book swiss airlines using miles from any of their partners including United Airlines.

When we lived in Santa Barbara, we flew United constantly becuase they had the most flights everyday out of SBA. In Boston, I find we don't take United much. But I find their miles one of the most useful becuase they have great partners, a decent number of award flights, and comparatively reasonable number of miles to get where you're going.

To get to europe from the lower 48 states using United miles costs 30,000 miles in economy, 57,500 miles in United business class, and 70,000 miles in partner airline business class each way. So you can see the number of points can add up quickly if you have 2 or 3 tickets to buy. In addition to miles, you still have to pay taxes based on the airports you're landing and taking off from. I like doing this with a card with good travel protections. The tax for each of our roundtrip tickets was $88.16 per person.

LX55         BOS   5:00PM      ZRH     6:15AM     AUG28
LX1660     ZRH   8:55AM     VCE    10:00AM    AUG29
LX1727     FCO   9:40AM     ZRH    11:20AM    SEP 12
LX52         ZRH   5:30PM      BOS     7:55PM      SEP 12

We flew Boston (BOS) to Zurich (ZRH) and then Zurich to Venice (VCE) on the outbound flights. On the return we did Rome (FCO) to Zurich and then Zurich to Boston on the return. One thing of note is that all the flights from Boston and New York that I could find all flew leaving at night. So don't expect to find any flights leaving in the morning . . .

 Our son in the "captain's seat 3A on Swiss A330 BOS to ZRH

One thing to know is that we had our son (who was less than 2 at the time) travelling with us. Sarah has covered all she did to make that possible from packing and planning for his needs. With booking tickets, it's important to remember that rules for travelling with babies are different if you're flying international (lap children aren't free like they are if you're within the U.S.) That goes for foreign airlines as well as US airlines like united, american, and delta.  check out this post for information about infant lap child rules on different airlines. I'd say the most common rule is that a baby costs 10% of the cash price for the itinerary you're doing.  So even though there were many possible ways to go BOS-VCE and FCO-BOS they had cash prices from $2000 to $9000 in business. Part of my search was to find itineraries that had a lower cash price in addition to being available for the fixed miles price. Our  son's business lap child ticket ended up costing about $276 in fare and with taxes came out to $334.

On both of our long flights, we lucked out and there were empty seats in business class. Topher got to sleep on his own empty seat there and back.

Collecting Points

For these flights we basically needed 280,000 United miles. That's a lot. It actually took a good while to save up these points. And I didn't save them specifically for this purpose. I was really saving the points for hotels in Sydney on a potential trip to Australia. But, that didn't seem like it was happening anytime soon...

I basically transferred all 280,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points 1:1 to United since I am a Chase Sapphire Preferred Cardholder. I transferred the last few miles and booked the flights on 3/31/17 for our trip on 8/28/17.

I earned the miles from sign up bonuses and spending across a bunch of chase cards. But Sarah and I signed up for Chase Ink Plus cards (no longer available) when they had 70,000 and 80,000 point signup bonuses. I also signed up for the Chase Ink Cash (20,000 point signup) and Sarah signed up for the Chase Sapphire Preferred with a 60,000 point signup bonus + 5,000 points with an authorized user.  I also worked to maximize my Chase Freedom quarterly 5% (5pts per dollar spent) categories and using Chase Ink cards to get 5 pts per dollar at office supply stores.  I think I accumulated these over the course of about 2-3 years simply by taking advantage of good signup bonus opportunties as they came up, knowing that I'd use them in the future.

Overlooking Vernazza in the Cinque Terre

So what's the takeaway? We didn't have to use up all 280,000 miles on this trip, but decided we wanted to try the international business class seats as part of this hobby.  Signup for cards when they have good bonuses (you can see historical data and the best current bonus by looking on flyertalk.com.  And finally, just use the right card for the right purchases in bonus categories. These added up WAY faster because I was vigilant getting 5 points per dollar on as many purchases as possible. If I had simply gotten 1 or 2 points per dollar like I typically would, we'd still be saving up points.

Next post will be about the places we stayed while in Italy.