Do you believe in miracles? Si! Refresh, refresh, refresh is all I did today. And just like waiting for final exam grades, the result of whether Iberia would honor the deal appeared. Unlike in school, where I would refresh the page out of disbelief that I had done so poorly, I refreshed the Iberia page to make sure the points were truly in my account.
A forever optimist, I began looking for flights yesterday in anticipation of this working out in my favor. As I wrote before, there is plenty of availability for us Puerto Rican residents going to Madrid in business. And there was plenty of availability for me to return to my new home even during the peak Europe travel months.
It cost $68.53 to fly to Madrid this August and $104.88 to return along with 80,000 avios points which cost $330 to buy and 20,000 of my own Avios points which were already in my account. Why 80,000 and not 90,000 you ask? For some reason, 10,000 promotional points did not post. Rather than being put on hold for an eternity and wait for that to be sorted, I pulled the trigger on the booking and will deal with that annoyance at a later date. If and when the 10,000 points do get credited, I’m not worried about using them before December as there are many AA flights from here to all over. The total cash out of pocket is higher than a normal points ticket but $500 round trip in business is still a great deal.
Initially, I didn’t want to participate in this promotion because I am so damn lazy. But after seeing post after post after post, I knew I didn’t want to be left out if it did work.
Finally, and most importantly, I get to go to Albania and quasi-honor a promise I made to move visit there. (I’d rather break a promise and not pay federal income and state taxes by living in Puerto Rico than be a man of my word. America!)
Anyone else book already? Anyone else not get all their points? Who’s coming with me to Tirana! Brent? Trolls who voted for it?
Thank god you moved to Puerto Rico, you now are my neighboor (I live in San Juan) and I can mimic your travel tactics out of PR. Jajajajajjaa. I was able to cop the whole 90k and I am also already booking to Madrid. I don’t know if you do private travel consulting, but this past weekend I lost 200k Etihad miles because I wasn’t able to find anything out of San Juan , in addition I’ve been having electricity issues after Maria and it almost impossible contacting them to book flights, but do you think there’s a way to reinstate them ???? If you can please help me with this issue I’ll be gladly to pay you for it…. we can go to La Placita and have some Medallas and do some brainstorming…… thanks in advanced, Fernando
Anytime, amigo! Happy to help. I think we can try to get them back. What’s fun here for the 4th?