For those who follow me on Facebook, you already know that my last trip didn’t exactly go as planned. My late night Virgin America flight from San Francisco to Las Vegas was cancelled, and it took me about 15 hours to get to my destination, via American Airlines. To keep the story short, I was eventually re-booked in AA first class, access to the Alaska lounge at LAX (highly recommended), 5,000 Alaska Mileage Plan miles, and a $350.00 Virgin America travel bank. I am still working on this issue, and expect to receive additional compensation in the future.
Unfortunately, since neither Alaska or Virgin America operate out of Atlanta, I knew I would have to book a flight through another city. I closely follow The Points Guy, and on Friday, I read an article saying Virgin America flights would no longer be bookable which would make using my travel bank credit more difficult, so I knew I needed to act fast. I contacted Alaska Airlines on Facebook, and after a little back and forth, their team agreed to convert my Virgin travel bank credit into 14,000 MileagePlan miles. Combined with the 5,000 that I had received earlier, I now had 19,000 miles.
I knew I wanted to go back to New York after having an amazing time there for the Classic in July, where I made some lifelong friends in the city, and even some from across the world! I also knew that JFK is definitely serviced by Virgin America, and if I wanted to snag a seat in Upper Class before Alaska retrofits the one-of-a-kind Virgin fleet, I had to act soon. I looked at flights and I found the one I wanted: a one way from New York JFK to Las Vegas McCarran in Virgin America for 25,000 MileagePlan miles. If I wanted to pay cash, it would be $699, which I obviously didn’t want to pay. But I was short 6,000 MileagePlan miles.
Luckily, as part of the Virgin America -> Alaska merger, Alaska will let you exchange each of your Elevate miles into 1.3 MileagePlan miles. Luckily for me, even though I didn’t have any Elevate miles, I do have American Express Membership Rewards points from my Platinum card sign up bonus. So I converted 10,000 Membership Rewards points into 5,000 Elevate miles, costing me $6 (American Express charges a tax offset fee to convert points into domestic airlines miles). Once I converted them to MileagePlan miles instantly, I had just over what I needed. So with a quick redemption online, and another $5.60 (required 9/11 fee charged on all award travel in the US), I had turned a failed 1.5 hour flight into a transcontinental Virgin America first class experience for $11.60 and some points I already had.
I’ll call that a win.
Ramblin' Rewards 