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How to redeem Etihad Guest miles on Air Serbia

Etihad doesn’t belong to any airline alliance, however they’ve got quite a few airline partners and some of the partner redemptions are great in value. I accrued some Etihad miles when flying with Philippine Airlines a few years back, and I’ve always wanted to visit Belgrade, so why not book an award ticket on Air Serbia?

Although I managed it in the end, the process was far from pain-free and there’s very little up-to-date information on the Internet, so I’ll try to give some detailed tips today. First of all, although you are using Etihad Guest miles, you don’t talk to Etihad at all for the booking – the whole process involves Air Serbia only!

[Pricing]

You can find all information on Air Serbia’s website here. As you can see, you could redeem Etihad Guest miles on:

  • Award ticket
  • Cabin upgrade
  • Air Serbia Premium Lounge access
  • Additional luggage allowance

Booking an award ticket in business class is the best option. A one-way ticket between London and Belgrade costs 10410 miles in Economy and 14834 in Business, whereas cash prices are usually £150+ and £300+ respectively!

Air Serbia flies to many other major European cities such as Berlin, Paris, Rome, Madrid and Stockholm. Their only long-haul destination at the moment is New York, which costs 44970 / 64082 miles.

Obviously you still need to pay taxes and charges. For London – Belgrade in business class it’s €94.64 (!!), and for Belgrade – London it’s only €22.59.

[Transferring Miles]

Even if you don’t have any Etihad Guest miles, it’s very easy to acquire some. They are a transfer partner of American Express Membership Rewards, so you can transfer your MR points to Etihad Guest miles at the ratio of 1:1.

Although Amex’s website quotes a 48-hour lead time, the transfer is actually instant, which is very useful.

[Ticket Rules]

As explained in their conditions:

  • You must book at least 24 hours in advance
  • You can change for a €25 fee
  • You can cancel for a full refund, less 10% of the Etihad Guest miles

I booked my London – Belgrade trip in business class, and it’s in the I fare bucket. I’m not sure how many award tickets Air Serbia releases per flight, but it seems to be on the generous side.

For my Belgrade – London flight the business cabin had already sold out when I called to redeem, but they somehow still managed to fit me in. A couple of days later they told me it was a mistake and downgraded me to economy instead, alas…

Economy award ticket is booked into the N bucket, which comes with a free 23kg checked bag. You can pay for seat selection and other services, for example:

  • Seat selection: RSD 902 – 1578
  • Seat selection + priority boarding: RSD 1167
  • Sear selection + fast track: RSD 1173
  • Premium lounge + fast track: RSD 2322

I paid for seat selection + fast track (€9.99), which lets me select any seat including front / exit row, so apparently a good deal. I can access the premium lounge with my Priority Pass already.

[Contacting Air Serbia]

Once you are ready and have sufficient Etihad Guest miles, you can find your local contact number and call them. All calls are handled by the call centre in Serbia, and they operate long hours. I used the UK number 020 37 695 856.

All the representatives I talked with (and believe me there are many…) are very familiar with the award ticket booking process. Here is what it usually looks like:

  • Provide your name, contact information, flight details and Etihad Guest membership number
  • Air Serbia has a dedicated back office that checks availability and your Etihad Guest account information
  • You’ll be asked to call back in a few hours or the next day
  • If everything’s good, they’ll take your credit card details and issue the ticket

So it takes two phone calls and potentially a day to redeem an award ticket, which isn’t the simplest, but not too bad either. I had a nightmare when booking my first ticket though, as my Etihad Guest account turned out to be locked for some reason so I had to sort it out first; then Air Serbia’s back office was unavailable so I had to wait a few more days. But in general, their call centre staff know what they are doing and are very helpful.

I hope you find this article useful!

Book Virgin Chauffeur service for 17,500 points

Like many other airlines that wanted to impress their premium passengers onboard and off the plane, Virgin Atlantic used to offer free chauffeur service to Upper Class customers. The service has died down over the years though, and they no longer offer it in-house, but have partnered with a third-party provider and it is not to free to anyone anymore.

However, it is still possible to book the chauffeur service with Virgin points. It has a very limited audience though: only Upper Class reward tickets (booking class G) are eligible, although upgrade from paid Premium tickets are booked in the same class so I believe they qualify too.

You can read about the benefit here.

  • It’s available at UK and US airports
  • You pay 17,500 points per way
  • It covers a 75-mile radius from the airport
  • In the US it’s possible to pay $3.5 per mile if your travel distance exceeds 75 miles

I live near Heathrow, so Uber or Bolt costs me only £30 therefore the benefit doesn’t really apply. However, if you live further away it might start to make sense.

As you can see, the 75-mile radius covers almost the entire Southeast, as well as many other counties around London (I never realised England was so small).

If you already have a Virgin ticket, you could make a dummy chauffeur booking online to see what kind of car and service to expect. If I remember correctly their partner is Tristar, which was acquired by Addison Lee in 2020.

17,500 points isn’t cheap, but if you travel from far and especially with many bags, it may be a great redemption choice.

Turn your Shangri-la points into voucher now to avoid devaluation

Shangri-la Golden Circle is launching its refreshed program on April 28th. Most importantly, the way to redeem points is reforming: whether to spend points on reward nights, dining or spa, they will have the same value: 15 points = $1.

There are different takes on this change. On the one hand, Shangri-la’s reward night pricing at most hotels was unrealistically high, so the new fixed-value redemption is an improvement. On the other hand, dining reward gets much worse, as you were able to exchange 10 points for $1 ($1.25 for Jade and Diamond) instead.

If you prefer to spend your points on dining, there’s a workaround to save them from devaluation, via Non-Room Awards.

You can access the page here. The feature allows you to exchange your points to a dining or spa voucher, which is valid at a specific hotel.

Three types of voucher are available:

  • $50 Restaurant & Bar Voucher
  • $100 Restaurant & Bar Voucher
  • $100 Chi The Spa Voucher

Redemptions are at the rate of 10 points = $1. Note that some hotel restaurants and dates are excluded.

The catch is the voucher is only valid for six months, and you must spend it at the designated hotel. However, if you know for sure that you can use it within the validity period, you should consider exchanging your points now.

Save Avios with British Airways’ Multi-Carrier Award

The Oneworld alliance has a unique feature called Multi-Carrier Award, which means if an itinerary involves multiple airline partners, the pricing of the award will adopt a different chart, and it could cost significantly less than travelling on a sole airline.

Airlines have different definitions of multi-carrier and also different pricing systems. You could find BA’s relevant page here. Basically it applies whenever your itinerary includes at least two Oneworld airlines (whether BA is one of them or not), and the following chart is for economy class redemption:

The only deciding factor is your travel distance, whether it’s one-way, open-jaw or return. In general the longer you travel the sweeter the deal becomes, and for other cabin classes you simply multiply the Avios by a factor accordingly:

  • Premium Economy: 1.5x
  • Business: 2x
  • First: 3x

By comparison, the multiplying factors of BA’s regular redemption chart for long-haul flights are roughly 2x, 3x and 4x, although it’s just approximation and varies by distance.

It doesn’t take a genius to tell multi-carrier awards on business or first class can have tremendous value, although the latter is probably much less practical due to availability. An ultra-long 50,000-mile around-the-globe trip in business class costs only 480,000 Avios, plus other fees.

BA’s website can actually price such awards correctly. For example if you want to book Tokyo Narita – Kuala Lumpur – Singapore:

The first option which is a multi-carrier award, costs 35,000 Avios in economy and 70,000 Avios in business. The second option on the other hand, falls into BA’s regular partner redemption and costs 26,750 Avios and 74,500 Avios respectively.

Unfortunately BA’s award search engine doesn’t handle open-jaw or complex itineraries, which are what multi-carrier awards are designed for. You’ll have to come up with your itinerary, make sure there’s availability for each segment yourself, and than call BA’s customer service to book.

How to find hidden Hyatt reward availability

Hyatt is generally quite good with reward availability, since as long as a standard room is for sale it should be available for redeeming with points too (not applicable to Small Luxury Hotels). However sometimes it may still be difficult to find availability at certain hotels, and today we’ll talk about a couple of tricks that are helpful.

Take Hyatt Centric Waikiki Beach for example, which is a hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii. The problem is, they are blocking standard rooms at the moment, and you must book at least 5 consecutive nights to be able to see them and thereafter redeem standard awards.

Here is what you see when booking 4 nights:

And when booking 5 nights:

Which means, if you want to stay four nights only or less, you are stuck unless you are willing to pay more for a suite.

[Book and Delete]

The first trick is, book five nights on points, and then delete the first or last night(s) you don’t want. By doing this you basically circumvent the minimum-night stay requirement imposed by the hotel.

Note that you can’t possibly manage it yourself. You must phone World of Hyatt’s hotline for help.

[Pay My Way]

The only trouble with the approach above is you need enough points in your account to make the placeholder booking in the first place. There’s a further trick to work around it.

First of all, switch from View Points to View Rates and assuming that you are signed-in, you should see the option to Use Pay My way:

Click it and then you can customise the payment methods for your stay. Let’s say your desired stay dates are 11-14 November, choose to pay cash for the first two nights and points for the next three.

Then it’s the same story – call Hyatt’s customer service to delete the first two nights. This way you don’t need more points than you actually pay, unlike in Book and Delete.

And this concludes my blog post. The question, of course, is whether Hyatt’s call centre is able or happy to delete the nights as you request. This is not something I can guarantee, however from the many data points that I have seen, it is absolute doable at least for now, although you may need to try HUACA if unlucky.

Travel business class from US to France and Caribbean for only 34,500 miles

I wrote an article to talk about the boomerang tricks for redeeming Flying Blue miles. Basically Flying Blue’s redemption chart is zone-based, and the pricing doesn’t change even if your interchange airport is out of the zone.

A reader just approached me about an interesting itinerary he found:

Instead of flying directly from Seattle to St Marin in the Caribbean, you can do it the long way by stopping over at Paris first. The flight time will be MUCH longer, however you get to travel in business class with both Delta and Air France. Even better, you only pay 34,500 miles plus €183 in fees which is dirt cheap!

As I mentioned, this is because the pricing is based on your departure / destination and Paris doesn’t play a role here. You can also book SXM-CDG-SEA the same way but surcharges will be much higher.

You may be able to use this itinerary to just travel to Paris (cheaply) and drop the second leg. If you are handbag only there shouldn’t be any problem, otherwise make sure there’s a long transit time so you can convince the airport agent not to check through your luggage to the final destination. Also beware that if you do this too often, you may be on Flying Blue’s radar and get into trouble.

Unfortunately the max stopover time is 24 hours so you can’t really break the itinerary into two proper trips. However, if you are very keen on going back to travel after having been trapped home for the last year, this can be an attractive deal.

You can force open IHG reward availability

Being able to redeem “free” nights using points is one of the best benefits of hotel loyalty programmes. Most hotel groups abide by the Last Room Availability principle, i.e. standard rooms are always available for redemption as long as they are not fully booked.

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Redeem IHG points for executive rooms and suites

One complaint that I’ve heard from many frequent travellers is the lack of options to redeem for non-standard rooms, and it is especially inconvenient when you travel as a family. Some hotel chains, including Marriott and Hyatt, have introduced features to allow for booking higher-category rooms in recent years, at least to some extent.

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