Are You Making These Mistakes with Your Points & Miles?

The Thrifty Traveler Podcast

Gunnar Olsson and Kyle Potter dive into common pitfalls in award travel, sharing personal mistakes and expert insights on maximizing points

Key takeaways

• New international airline routes in their first few months often have low load factors, offering better space in economy class.

Main topics

• Award travel mistakes
• Empty seat analysis on new long-haul routes

Notable quotes

"If you're flying economy, you have the best chance of snagging your own row or at least an empty middle seat."

Conclusion

By learning from common award travel missteps and leveraging data on underbooked

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Yo, welcome to the show. I'm Gunnar Olsson and with me as always is the foremost punk rocker travel journalist in the greater Twin Cities area. It's Kyle Potter. Speaker 4 (0:10) Kyle, welcome in. Speaker 3 (0:11) That Speaker 4 (0:11) is a title not to be trifled with. Speaker 3 (0:13) It is not. And you are the king, my sir. You are. Of that specific designation. Of course. Yeah. The greater Speaker 4 (0:20) Twin Cities area. Maybe just the western Twin Cities. With Speaker 3 (0:22) a Speaker 4 (0:22) background in punk rock. Exactly. Yeah, sure. I'll take it. Speaker 3 (0:25) All right, today on the show, we're going through some of the most common award travel mistakes. But first, we're going to go through Kyle's analysis of the best routes for finding what we call poor man's business class and a little bit of news. But first, Kyle, there was a report last week that the TSA is considering a new policy that would allow TSA pre-check customers to bring a full water bottle through security. It'll only be at a few airports to start, but the TSA says that its technology can actually make this happen. going forward. So Kyle, I want to find something out. Are you going to miss the panicked end of the TSA line water bottle chug? Speaker 4 (1:02) I will not miss that. I will, however, miss the times, the increasing number of times, I will say. over the last few years where I've gotten all the way through security, opened up my backpack and been like, oh, there's a half a bottle of water in here. I guess they just didn't care this time. I think that's the most frustrating part about all of this is it's just like totally up to the discretion of TSA officers and what day they choose to care about these things. So this will be good, I think. It better be a step towards lifting the 3.4 ounce liquid limit altogether, or at least changing that and making it a little bit more generous. Yeah, Speaker 3 (1:39) that's the rule that we really need to fix. And, you know, last summer, we were told by the Trump administration's TSA that they were looking at getting rid of that restriction altogether. And, you know, we're still we're about 13 months away from that, and we still haven't seen anything. So hopefully we do. I am. gonna miss the line chug i needed that hydration break in my travel journey every day it was just a good like forced here's 16 ounces of water you need to take down all at once gunner it's a good reminder to me Speaker 4 (2:06) yeah it's good to get some water in your system before you get into the airport behind security and it's just six plus wines through the rest of the travel day, right? Speaker 3 (2:15) Yeah, it's usually the only water of my whole vacation until I get through security and coming home as well. So I needed that line chug. I'm going to miss it a lot. Just nothing like going through security, just harried, covered with a little bit of the water because I missed some. There's nothing like it. Speaker 4 (2:29) You know you can, in fact, like you are allowed to drink water elsewhere on your trip. You're allowed to order water on the plane. I'm Speaker 3 (2:37) not sure about that. We'll put our fact checkers on that one. All right, today on the show, we're breaking down the most common award travel mistakes we see and some that we've done so you don't make the same mistakes too. All that and more. Speaker 1 (2:48) Buongiorno. Good morning. From the Dolomites in Northern Italy, I'm Holly. Welcome back to the Thrifty Traveler podcast. Speaker 3 (3:02) All right, welcome back. Buongiorno, Holly. Thank you for sending in your video from the Dolomites. I'll say this. A ski trip to the Dolomites is in my crosshairs, Kyle. Holly is making me feel a little booksy. I really need to get to that mountain range and go see what those mountains are all about. If you had to pick between the Dolomites and the Caucasus, what would you pick? Don't make me pick. Am I bringing my wife or not? If I'm bringing my wife, we're going to the Dolomites. Speaker 4 (3:26) I am not the one who decides whether you bring your wife or not. Speaker 3 (3:30) The Caucasus Mountains. of Georgia are a trip that I badly need to do. I don't know if Megan is interested in going on that one with me, but she definitely wants to go to the Dolomites. All right, let's get into something hot and something cold to look at the good and the bad news out there for travelers this week. And we're actually going to flip it and start this week with something cold, but it's really only something cold for the airlines. For us travelers, it's actually quite hot. Kyle, you got freaky with some data this week, as you're known to do. Tell Speaker 4 (3:55) people what you've done. Freaky with some data. You left out the freak in the sheets part of it and just said freaky with some data. That has some different connotations. I Speaker 3 (4:03) guess so. But you know, you're good with data in a way that nobody else is. So tell us what you did. Speaker 4 (4:08) There are so many people who are so, but I can't even do basic math. So let's pump the brakes on the compliments a little bit. No, you know, there's so much data in the airline world. And for whatever reason, I just asked myself the question, what if we could look holistically at airlines route by route and determine the long haul international routes that are the most likely to go out with empty seats, which means if you're flying economy, you have the best chance of snagging your own row or at least, you know, an empty middle seat. If you're really lucky, you get poor man's business class or as our coworker Nick called it, Y-flat, which is just genius. And it turns out, of course, you can. There's, again, so much data. So what we did is we analyzed a year's worth of load factor data. Load factor is just the percentage of seats that are full on a given route for leading up into May of 2026, which is the most recent data that's available for this kind of information. So that's a huge grain of salt here. This is looking back into spring. everything can have, will have changed by the time you get into the summer and fall. But we crunched the numbers and determined, you know, the top 50 airline, long haul airline international routes for empty seats. And I'm, there are some things where it's like, of course, this one is going to be on the list. That makes a lot of sense. There are other things where I was really surprised at some of the routes that cropped up on this list. Speaker 3 (5:38) Yeah, I think this list was really cool. It was just interesting to see. And yeah, like you said, there were plenty of surprises. Number one on the list was this new Cabo Verde Airlines route from Praia to Providence nonstop, which is a shocker when we saw it. This is also the first month of this route. It was before things like the World Cup. And I'm sure Cabo Verde is on everybody's minds a little bit more because of their kind of Cinderella World Cup run this year. But a 41.1 % load factor in its first month. That route just got renewed this week for next year. So that is actually coming back. But that was an interesting one to top it. Any other routes that caught your eye from that top 10? I think Speaker 4 (6:22) the newness of that one. is the common theme and the biggest takeaway from this is there were like seven different routes that had just started in May of 2026. Again, the most recent month for which data was available. So again, grain of salt, this is a very, very small sample size, but it's also so, so telling that if you do want to book economy and you want to. have the safest bet you can to have extra space to stretch out on that long haul flight. Booking one of these new routes in the first month or two is probably the best choice that you can make. So there were a handful of others. United started Washington, D.C. to Reykjavik. That one is basically at this point notorious for being empty. It was less than 50 % full in the first month in May of 2026. All of Alaska's new nonstop routes to Europe. from Seattle to London, Rome, and also Reykjavik, pretty empty. A handful of others, including United's, I mean, now what, fourth or fifth nonstop route to Australia from San Francisco to Adelaide. It only runs seasonally, but that one had tons of empty seats for the few months over last winter that it was running. Just a lot of, honestly, pretty fun options where... Maybe you can't bet on all of those being just as empty, you know, this fall and into next year, but it's going to be worth a look, I think. Speaker 3 (7:43) Yeah, Delta's Boston to Nice and JFK to Sardinia were both in the top 50 as well as were United's new long hauls to Glasgow and Split from Newark. Yeah, the new routes kind of underperforming, but giving you a really good shot at getting a roadie yourself is really cool. I was really interested that some of the Iceland routes. were performing so low. And I'm interested because Iceland is kind of the perfect way to get a Y-flat seat because it's a short enough flight. So if you don't get one, you're going to be fine anyway. But it's really nice for that overnight flight to Iceland to have a roadie yourself. But yeah, you mentioned that Dulles flight on United, Alaska's flight from Seattle, both in the top 12, and then Detroit's. flight on Iceland air was also in the top 50. So that was pretty interesting to me. And then the most surprising one, I still can't believe this LAX to Heathrow on United at 67 % low factor seems incredibly low. Speaker 4 (8:39) That is that is such a perfect route because it's something that I just can't can't even fathom that United would ever cancel. They need to fly that they need to have that, you know, flag in the ground in LA to get people all the way to London. That is a long flight. But if you can do it in economy and know at least you're going to have an empty seat next to you, hopefully, that is an amazing option. I will say, I think it's tempting to look at this list and say, oh, well, there's so many empty seats. Obviously, this route is going to get canceled. The number of routes here that we know are going to get canceled despite a year or even years of pretty empty performance is pretty small. Because there are a lot of reasons that airlines can make this work despite not filling up the planes. You know, they can carry a ton of cargo. That's definitely what happens for a lot of these Iceland routes is planes can be full of cargo because Iceland needs it. And they can, you know, make that route work basically on cargo alone. And whatever passengers get on that plane is just a bonus for the airline. That's obviously also what's happening with Emirates' weird fifth freedom route from Miami to Bogota, which is like less than 60 % full on average, and in some cases, closer to 40%, depending on which month you try to fly down to Colombia. That plane is clearly full of cargo, which is just a win if you want to try and take a fun trip down to Colombia and maybe branch out elsewhere in South America. That is a great way to start that trip. Speaker 3 (10:11) Really cool analysis, Kyle. I mean that. That was awesome. Check it out. I'm going to put the link in the show notes for everybody. Kyle's putting in a lot of work. He's locking himself in the data den. It's just a dark closet we have here in the office and actually opened the door to try and get you some water and you hissed at me. I wish you wouldn't next time, but you did really good work in there. I have no words. Can we please move on? We can move on to something hot. Okay, Qatar Airways Avios is a solid award program. It's the go-to way for booking Qatar Q suites. Qatar also arguably or maybe inarguably has the best business class in the world. But this summer, the airline put in place some new restrictions that made it virtually impossible for most of us to search and book for more than two passengers. We've covered these on the show before. But if you fast forward to present day, the worst of these restrictions has been lifted Speaker 4 (11:02) as of earlier this week. Kyle, what happened here? So over the summer, I think in July, Qatar put in place a restriction that to my mind is basically unheard of. And it was really three different things. The first was that in order to search and book for more than one passenger, that person needed to, you needed to have some kind of a pool. So they have what's called my list or a friends and family group that you could create in order to add people to that list and be able to book for them. that person needed to have their own Qatar Airways account and that needed to be open for at least 30 days. Okay, that just means you need to go out and set up these accounts sooner rather than later. That's just good practice anyway. But the real killer here was that Qatar Airways, in order to be eligible to search for and book these awards, that person on your list... needed to have earned Qatar Avios through flying Qatar or another, you know, Qatar Airways partner throughout the One World Alliance, let's say, or have earned miles from a Qatar Airways co-branded credit card. I don't know anybody who has a Qatar Airways co-branded credit card. There's probably some of you out there listening, but I assure you, you are few and far between. This was... the single most restrictive