Brad’s Intro: We’ve spent the length of the course trying to get you up to speed so you feel comfortable both earning and redeeming credit card rewards miles & points. We all want to travel for nearly free, and this gets you as close as possible.
That said, the redemption side of things can occasionally be frustrating and time consuming, especially on international trips or especially complex itineraries. We’re all busy with our lives, family and jobs and sometimes we can use a little help with booking these awards, which is when we think it is very reasonable to hire an award booking service.
The thing is, they are normally prohibitively expensive which defeats the purpose of “free travel,” right?
As he’ll explain below, Alexi did a lot of research and personally used Dominik Żmuda from the BoundlessMiles Award Booking Service and we can’t recommend him highly enough.
So read Alexi’s case-study below and when you find yourself short on time when it comes time to redeem, let an expert like Dominik Żmuda take over and remove all the stress from the process
Alexi’s Case for Using an Award Booking Service
One of the best things about running this website with Brad is that we have extremely complementary skill sets.
Now I’m not gonna toot my own horn, but I will call out a few of Brad’s tremendous strengths. He’s detail oriented, has uncanny business sense, and is terrific at strategic planning.
And when we put together the Travel Miles 101 course curriculum, it became clear that we had very different areas of interest.
Which is all sort of a long way of saying that I have never really enjoyed spending my miles as much as I have enjoyed earning them. Because of this personality quirk I often waited a little bit too long to book my trips, and didn’t get the maximum value out of my earned miles.
So the question was out there, what could I do (in light of my obvious laziness) to make better use of my miles?
And I essentially could see only two solutions:
A. I could force myself to study the ins and outs of award booking and to book my trips further in advance.
or
B. I could outsource the award booking to an expert.
And this post is really all about Option B.
I ended up reaching out to numerous awards booking services and offered to market their business if they came up with excellent deals for the Travel Miles 101 community.
And boy did they step up.
We were offered a number of amazing deals but one stood head and shoulders above the rest. And that was from Dominik Żmuda of BoundlessMiles.
And in order to check out the experience I took a test drive of his services. I charged him with the following assignment:
“Here is my information for the trip:
4 people traveling on points from Portland, OR to Sapporo, Japan on 7/12. We will travel from Sapporo to KIX on 7/17. Then KIX back to PDX around 7/29 to 8/2. I will purchase my own seat separately with cash as I am attending an educational conference.
Business or first seats are great, but not crucial.
Here are our miles totals.
(all displayed in me/wife format.)
Ultimate Rewards: 226,891 / 180,210
Amex MR: 215,935 / 0
SPG: 91,000/ 724
Citi ThankYou: 62,571 / 0
Alaska: 84,761/ 42,505
American: 145,197 / 75,520
United: 53,656 / 36,838
BA: 0 / 26,050
Virgin Atlantic: 13,842 / 0
I’d love to use my American miles before the deval…
-Alexi ”
A few emails later and I am to happy report that the process was amazingly smooth and the results were astounding.
We ended up with four first-class tickets from Portland to Tokyo then to Sapporo and Osaka, Japan and back to Portland.
Outbound was on United and the return was on American Airlines. The Sapporo to Osaka flight was booked using British Airways Avios.
Dominik Żmuda took care of all the booking and this amazing first class trip for four ended up costing us a total of 600,000 miles (a combination of American, United, British Airways, Chase Ultimate Rewards, and Starpoints) and $382.64 including Dominik’s fee, all taxes and surcharges!
Since I am increasingly finding that there are not enough hours in my day to get everything done, paying to book a trip like this for only $160 extra was a total no-brainer.
If you have a trip coming up and want a bit of help booking it for a more than reasonable price, I cannot recommend Dominik Żmuda’s service at BoundlessMiles highly enough.
BoundlessMiles can be reached here: