How I flew around the world for almost nothing!

[markis10]

USDM goes mainstream:

Alissa Haupt flew around the world in business class for $1340 | News.com.au

In June, I opened my US Airways Master Card, which gave me 30,000 miles after my first purchase. In August, US Airways had a sale of frequent flyer miles: buy up to 50,000 miles and get the same amount for free.

As it costs 90,000 miles to travel between North America and North Asia in business class, I purchased 30,000 US Airways miles for $1,200 and got the final 30,000 miles for "free."

 

[samh004]

It really makes me want to spend some cash on them, but I can't chase both QF LTG and free flights

 

[casanovawa]

She's lucky to be able to get the credit card deals in the US, but with these 100% share deals i reckon we here get to do it for not much more than about $1,700-1,800... With the 100k miles coming in at about US$1,165, another 10k miles if bought at full price about US$350 (if not left over from another bonus which would make it even cheaper) and then about US$250 in taxes and booking fee...

That life time QF gold could add up to an awful lot of USDM RTW J class trips with lounges and extra luggage and everything included...

 

[anat0l]

She's lucky to be able to get the credit card deals in the US, but with these 100% share deals i reckon we here get to do it for not much more than about $1,700-1,800... With the 100k miles coming in at about US$1,165, another 10k miles if bought at full price about US$350 (if not left over from another bonus which would make it even cheaper) and then about US$250 in taxes and booking fee...

That life time QF gold could add up to an awful lot of USDM RTW J class trips with lounges and extra luggage and everything included...

It's still great though for what she got it for. Share promos are rare and you need points to start with. Telling people not in the know that you can fly around the world in Business for $1,300 is not quite realistic. First, like some people have commented on, it's not a "true" round the world, and that's not about the semantics of not crossing the Pacific Ocean - she only was allowed a destination and one stopover - everything else was a transit. Have as many as you want, but that's not a true round the world.

Second, the Share Promo on US makes it very cheap indeed, but for someone with no miles to start with, unless they know someone else it is certainly unrealistic. Yes you can do Share bouncing after buying the seed miles, but for those not knowing of the game you just have to be careful what you tell them. It's OK to tell people it's around $1,300 if you tell them how that's possible, but it's nuts to tell them that if they have nothing to start with (and you're not going to help them in seeding the miles).

As for all the people saying, "that's not great value, I can do it better," I think part of the thing is, who cares? As long as it costs around $7k to buy a ticket emulating a similar itinerary, who wants to get into a good vs. bad argument when the two comparatives are within $1000 of each other and still substantially cheaper than a standard ticket?

 

[serfty]

To start I had 2K from survey points converted to UDM pending the merger with AA sitting around.

I did purchase another 3k and off I went.

 

[bismarck]

Whichever way you cut it I think it's good value.

I know there are plenty here who get some phenomenal routings through to GUM, yielding 000's of kms of flying for a few hundred $'s worth of points, but I'm stoked at the prospect of being able to do return to Europe for SWMBO and myself for around $2,000 each off the back of the recent share promo (and that assumes I have to purchase the balance of points at rack rate, so should be able to do better).