Three CRAZY airline deals

Howdy, friends, and welcome to Daily Drop.

I was going to spend today telling you about Alaska’s sweet spots, but too much crazy 💩 happened yesterday in the points and miles world, and y’all need to hear about it:

• 🇺🇸 Southwest 40% sale (both cash and points flights)

• 🇪🇺 Flying Blue offering cheap flights from a TON of U.S. cities

• 🇬🇧 Virgin Atlantic announced a devaluation (with a heads-up)

🇺🇸 Southwest 40% sale (both cash and points flights)

Southwest is back with another solid sale, but you’ll need to act fast for this one…

Until the end of the day TODAY, you can get a big ol’ 40% discount on both award flights AND cash flights with Southwest.

Here are the deets:

• You must book by TODAY

• Travel can take place through the following windows:

  • Domestic Flights: October 29 through January 31st, 2025

  • International, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii: October 29th through March 5th, 2025

• You must use promo code SAVEWOW when running a search

• There are a butt ton of blackout dates (read about them on the sale page)

So yeah - huge discount, huge travel window, teeny booking window…

The good news here is that Southwest doesn’t have any nasty change and cancellation fees, so you can book something today even if you aren’t 100% set on traveling.

In terms of good deals, I was able to find quite a few.

This flight from New York to Orlando, for example, is discounted by more than $70, which is great:

On the award flight front, there are actually some pretty ridiculous deals…

I found plenty of discounted flights, including this one from Boston to Nashville, for less than 4,000 Southwest points… that’s freaking awesome!!

So here’s the bottom line:

Many of you have signed up for the airline’s co-branded cards recently and are probably sitting on stashes of Southwest points.

Even if you aren’t, you can simply transfer some UR Points over, book some flights, and enjoy some tasty savings.

🇪🇺 Flying Blue offering cheap flights from a TON of U.S. cities

If you’re in more of a Europe mood today, then I’ve got even more good news for you.

Every month, Flying Blue comes out with discounted rates on flights between certain U.S. cities and Europe, with economy flights costing as little as 15,000 miles one way.

This month is no different, except for the fact that it includes a larger list of cities than we’ve seen in a long, long time.

If you book your flights by the end of this month, you can fly from any of the following cities to Europe as far out as March 31st, 2025:

• Atlanta

• Dallas

• Detroit

• Chicago

• Austin

• Los Angeles

• Houston

• Miami

• Toronto

I won’t spend too much time going into this, because by now y’all know that this is just an amazing sweet spot that you should be paying attention to EVERY month.

But still, it is fantastic to be able to fly from West Coast cities like Los Angeles all the way to Europe for just 15,000 miles.

In my searches, I even found many days in a row with availability at these prices, especially in the new year.

Sadly, there’s no transfer bonus right now (one just ended literally the day before these awards were announced), but you can still transfer points from all of the following programs at a 1:1 ratio:

• Capital One Miles

• ThankYou Points

• MR Points

• UR Points

• Bilt Rewards

Since it’s still early in the month, you could easily open a new card like this one (though you might want to hold out for a better welcome offer 😉), earn a bunch of points, and transfer them to Flying Blue to book a bunch of flights like this.

Overall, it’s great to see such a massive list of cities that most people in the U.S. should be able to easily take advantage of.

🇬🇧 Virgin Atlantic announced a devaluation (with a heads-up)

Ugh… I knew this day would come sooner or later…

Virgin just dropped a press release with a bunch of updates to their program.

And, as the headline aptly suggests, you’re gonna want to take a seat for this one.

Here are the main points that are most relevant to you:

• Award pricing will become dynamic starting October 30th

• Virgin will introduce “Saver” awards that will be even cheaper than the current awards

• Every seat will be bookable with points with pricing based on supply and demand

Okay, so let’s talk about the big downside first…

Moving to a dynamic pricing model means that the higher the cash price is, the higher the points price is.

This means that the days of getting extreme outsize value for Virgin points are probably long gone… it also means that MANY flights are going to increase in price, likely resulting in some unfathomably high award costs.

But here’s the part that got me excited:

Flights between New York and London currently bottom out at 10,000 points one way.

With these new saver awards, prices can theoretically be almost 50% lower than that at 6,000 points, which is great.

Virgin’s flights on this route are often actually super cheap. Right now, this route is priced at just $300 in economy for most dates:

With the current pricing in off-peak times (like the one above), you’d pay 10,000 miles and $153 in taxes…

That means those 10,000 miles are getting you just $147 in value, or around 1.5 cents per point.

With the new model, a saver award at 6,000 points for the same flight would yield 2.5 cents per point in value, which is significantly better.

If you account for transfer bonuses, award sales, etc, this could mean some ridiculously cheap flights to Europe if you can find these “saver” awards.

To make things a little more palatable, they’ve also given us almost a month of heads-up, which is more than we can say about some other recent award devaluations… 😒

So, if you do have travel plans that might involve booking Virgin Atlantic flights in the future, I’d highly consider transferring points over soon and booking them before October 30th.

Flights aren’t the only part of travel that you should be trying to save money one… You should also be looking to save your cash and points on accommodations!

In this week’s podcast, Megan shares five strategies for how you can save on accommodations—especially if you’re interested in long-term travel.

Listen along here, or hop over to YouTube to view it there!

Phew, that was a lot, eh?

I love days when we see tons of great opportunities to save money and points on some of our favorite airlines like Southwest, Virgin, KLM, and Air France.

I hope many of you get to cash in on these deals, and I’ll be back bright and early tomorrow to keep you up to date on even more.

Ciao,

22.3193° N, 114.1694° E