25% award sale with Virgin Atlantic!

Good morning from Manila, the city that - and this is true - is already celebrating Christmas. 🎅

But whether you care about Christmas or not, here’s some stuff for y’all to celebrate:

• ✈️ Virgin Atlantic 25% Award Sale (ends tomorrow)

• 🍪 Tasty Travel Tidbits

• 🏨 Marriott’s new “Points Multiplier”

✈️ Virgin Atlantic 25% Award Sale (ends tomorrow)

The best way to kick off a new week is with one of our favorite airlines offering yet another way to save points (and therefore save money) on flights to Europe.

Virgin Atlantic is currently offering a 25% sale on award flights in all classes of service (i.e., economy, business, etc) on all of their routes.

The big catch here is that this sale is only good for flights booked through TOMORROW and valid for travel through the end of the year.

Still, this is a great opportunity for anyone looking to book some fall or winter trips to Europe.

For example, you can fly from the U.S. to London for just 15,000 Virgin miles ROUND-TRIP.

Even with the uncomfortable taxes and fees, that’s still a good deal considering how great of an airline Virgin Atlantic is.

If you wanted to head to the Christmas markets later this year, you could book some nice Virgin flights to London and then a cheap cash flight to somewhere like Vienna.

Or, if you wanted to get realllllllly saucy, you could save 25% on business-class flights to Europe, too.

With this sale, a one-way to London in Virgin Upper Class will only run you 35,600 miles.

Although… the cash fees are pretty overwhelming… so this is really for people who are trying to ball out.

And if you’re interested in this and want to make some plans happen fast before it’s too late, here are two tips:

1. Transfer points from a card like the Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card, which many of you recently signed up for (as did I).

2. Use Virgin’s “Reward Seat Checker” tool to find availability and save time with the searching/booking process.

Anyway, it’s always great to see Virgin drop deals like this.

If you don’t have any points to transfer, I’d recommend signing up for this card right now, which is currently offering 90,000 UR Points.

Next time Virgin has a sale like this, you’ll have enough points to transfer over to Virgin and book a trip for the whole family!

🍪 Tasty Travel Tidbits

💳 Our favorite bank is expanding its famous lounge network yet again, planning to open a brand new lounge in Salt Lake City next year. Not many details are available yet, but it’s good news for people with this credit card.

✈️ Two of Asia’s largest airlines, Air India and Vistara, are finally completing their merger this year. This will mean more ways to book Vistara (an excellent premium airline) and more ways to connect through India to travel to Asia and the Middle East.

🏨 Marriott now allows you to convert Bonvoy points to MGM points at a 1:1 ratio. It’s pretty niche and not super valuable… but for anyone who frequents Vegas and cares about MGM hotels, it might be worth paying attention to!

🏨 Marriott’s new “Points Multiplier”

Speaking of Marriott…

They just launched an interesting new “Points Multiplier” feature that could offer a unique and affordable way to boost your points balances… though you’ll want to be careful to crunch the numbers first.

Here’s how it works:

If you’ve completed a paid stay at Marriott (or any stay that has earned you points) within the past 12 months, you should see an option to multiply the points you earned from that stay.

You can check out this link and log in to your account to see what options you have, but mine looked like this:

Since most of my stays are booked on points, I don’t have a ton of recent points earnings, and therefore the amounts are pretty low.

Still, as you can see, the price for points goes down as the multiplier goes up.

A 4x multiplier (earning 12,612 points) would cost a total of $118.24.

To calculate the value per point here (a.k.a. how much I’d be paying per point), we use the classic equation. 👇

In this case, I’d be paying about 0.94 cents per point (less than one penny each).

That’s far from the best deal for buying Marriott points…

Right now, in fact, they’re offering a 30%-40% sale on points that lets you buy them for around 0.8 cents each.

Still, when Marriott ISN’T having a sale, this is a far better price per point than what they normally sell points for.

Plus, buying points this way doesn’t contribute to your limit of purchased points, which is nice.

So here’s the bottom line:

If you need to rack up some Marriott points quickly and can generally get more than one cent per point in value, this is another creative way to do so.

Also, just go check your accounts - you might well have better offers at better rates than what I have!

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That’s all for today, folks!

Paying massive taxes and fees on award flights and paying for points are both pretty divisive topics in this world, so I’m curious to know:

Thanks for tuning in, and I’ll see you tomorrow! ✌️

14.5995° N, 120.9842° E