Savings Buried on a Website - US Airways to Europe 10% Off and 10,000 Bonus Miles

I was looking for airfares to Europe and got a reminder on why you always want to keep your eyes open...

We wanted to travel to Europe during a certain time period and were comparing deals on various airlines, checking Orbitz, Hotwire and all. Most of the low fares involved making a connection, which we'd be willing to do if the savings and schedule matched up... but along the way, Orbitz showed that one of the directions was with a connection but the other was non-stop. Struck me as interesting that an airline had a non-stop on the route - and I thought if they had it in one direction they might have it in the other. So I decided to go to the airline's website and check.

In this case it was US Airways. I did some researching and found that they didn't have non-stops between my city pair every day, but if I switched my return by one day I could fly both ways non-stop. So that was a step in the right direction.

The next interesting element I saw was the effect that multiple flights have on fees. With all the airport and security fees that are now being tacked on to flights, the taxes and fees (for international travel in particular) really add up. The base fare for US Airways was a bit higher compared to some of the other airlines, but because it was only one flight each way instead of two, the taxes/fees were way less. And that made the final net price of the ticket less on US Airways, by a good enough margin to make that the clear choice (with the benny of not having to change planes, wait in a second airport etc.)

I was getting ready to book the fare and my eyes were just sort of gazing at the screen -- and they ran across a link on the site for 20% off fares to Europe and 20,000 bonus miles. I wondered if that was on top of the lower fare I had just found, so I clicked on that link.

Turned out they had a promotion going on together with MasterCard -- if you booked travel to a few of their European destinations and paid with your MasterCard you would get 20% of Envoy class plus 20k bonus miles for your frequent flyer. We weren't planning to fly that class, but the promotion went on that if you booked coach and paid with the MasterCard you would still get 10% off and 10k miles.

The promotion is good for tickets bought through September 30th for travel between September 2nd and November 14th to any of seven major European destinations.

You had to register your frequent flyer account number to get the promotion credited, so I went ahead and did that for both our accounts. Once that was done, I went through the steps to get the same reservations, and the 10% savings just popped in there! Enough to pay for some extra special dinners out while we're there (or maybe a side trip on the bargain airlines on flylc.com)

So thanks to some digging and using the link I almost overlooked, I got the better airfare, the non-stop service, an extra 10% off and a future 10,000 extra miles!!! Wow, did seeing that link ever pay off!