Time to book your apartment in the sky

Good morning and welcome back to Daily Drop, the Lucky Charms^TM of newsletters. Our travel hacks are Magically Delicious. 

Here’s what I’ve got to round out the week:

• ✈️ Award Drop: Book Etihad’s first-class apartments with points

• 👩‍🏫 Portal Kombat: Back to school bonuses

• 🖼 Meme

✈️ Award Drop: Book Etihad’s first-class apartments with points

We’re back with another award drop segment, folks. This time, I need to tell you about a recent influx of availability on the world’s BEST first-class seat in the sky: the Etihad apartments.

The Deal:

There is wide-open availability on Etihad’s first-class apartments between London and Abu Dhabi. The reason it’s this route specifically is that the “apartments” are only available on the Airbus A380, which is currently only being flown by Etihad on this route.

Dates:

Scattered dates throughout September, October, and November. The seats are selling fast, so book it while you can.

How to book:

There are a few programs you can use to book these seats on Etihad, some of which are very easily accessible with U.S. and Canadian points and miles. For the most part, I’m seeing much more availability with American than I am with Aeroplan, though I did book my own ticket through Aeroplan!

• American Airlines: 62,500 miles

• Aeroplan: 65,000 points

• Etihad Guest: 485,000 miles (don’t do this)

A great way to find available seats is to search on American Airlines’ website, which has a nice calendar feature. Once you find an available date, make sure the type of plane is an Airbus A380, as shown below:

Transfer Partners:

I’d advise against transferring points to Etihad Guest Miles directly, given the absolute monster cost over the other programs… If you’re based in the UAE and happen to have a fat stack of Etihad miles, then be my Guest (pun intended).

Anyway, here are some ways you can easily transfer your points to book this flight:

• American Airlines

  • Bilt Rewards

  • Marriott Bonvoy

• Aeroplan

  • This Bank

  • This Bank 

  • This Bank 

  • Marriott Bonvoy

  • Bilt Rewards

• Etihad Guest

  • This Bank 

  • This Bank 

  • This Bank 

  • Marriott Bonvoy

Positioning flights:

The big kicker here is that you need to get yourself either to London or Abu Dhabi to catch this flight. Given how big of a bucket list experience this is, I’d still consider it WELL worth the effort of getting to London, especially if you can build this into an existing trip.

If you have a FareDrop membership (currently on sale for a VERY limited time), we send out tons of cheap flight deals from the U.S. to London.

Alternatively, you can use Flying Blue miles to fly from many U.S. cities to London for as little as 11,250 miles one-way, which is not a bad price to pay to set yourself up for Etihad.

Is this a good deal?

YES, 100%. This is always going to be the price to fly this route, so it’s not like it’s particularly cheap at the moment. Rather, it can be VERY difficult to find the space available to book at all.

Given the small number of planes with this seat installed, our options are limited. The fact that so many seats are open now is a rare chance to try this out.

If you book with American in particular, you can cancel for free at any time. So even if you have a tentative trip planned or want to lock something in to try and plan around, you don’t have much to lose!

👩‍🏫 Portal Kombat: Back to school bonuses

We’re already almost through our first week of August, and you know what that means for many… it’s back-to-school season.

I remember those days, but unfortunately, the travel-hacking world was not part of my life… when I was eight.

BUT if you’re a kid or you have a kid, and you’ve just gotten that long-ass list of school supplies that you’re *obligated* to buy, I’ve got some deals for you.

Right now, several airlines are having back-to-school shopping portal bonuses that could score you some extra points. Now that slaps.

I was told by an 18-year-old this week that saying something “slaps” means it’s cool 🤔

So yeah, these deals slap. Hard. Let’s check ‘em out:

Keep in mind that a lot of the qualifying retailers are also clothing brands. So if you want to make sure your kid not only has pencils but also, say, pants (pretty important), you could rack up some extra points for stuff like that as well!

🖼 Meme

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That’s all for today, friends! Before you go enjoy another lovely summer weekend, I have a question…

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