The de-I Guilde to Air Travel Planning - Part Five - A Real Case Study

So how does the de-I methodology play out in real life? Wife and I are just launched on one of our Eldership adventures. We are staying overnight at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, doing a self-transfer to a flight that will take us to Madrid, Spain. Let's go through the entire planning process for this trip.

Step One - Where the heck are we going?

We knew we were going to spend the month of October back in El Campello. But we wanted to add something additional to the trip. I have always wanted to go to northwestern Spain and Toledo and suggested we make them add-ons to our agenda. Our ultimate agenda started in Bilbao, Spain, went through Toledo, and ended up in El Campello.

Step Two - First Schedule Attempt

The first screen is looking at absolutely direct travel. In this case the idea would be:

• Fly from Albuquerque to Bilbao Spain
• Drive from Bilbao to El Campello stopping in Toledo
• Fly from Alicante (nearest city to El Campello) back to Albuquerque

  It would have been nice but the price of the flights was prohibitive and a one-way car rental was costly too. On to the next step.

Step Three - Focus on a hub

In this case the nearest hub was Madrid. I checked out rental car cost picking up and dropping off from Madrid. It was far more affordable. Now I had to research round trip travel to Madrid. I used the same methodologies I've explained to you in previous posts. Sure enough, I was able to find a flight itinerary on Turkish Airlines out of Chicago that for two people was $3,000 less than anything comparable. But it would require a self-transfer in Chicago and an overnight stay on both legs going to and coming from.

Step Four -  Lock in the savings with points

I still had to get us to and from Chicago and had to deal with the overnight segments. As I have status on United Airlines for life (long story of accumulating frequent flyer miles of an entire business career), I almost always look to fly from hubs that I can reach from Albuquerque on United. Chicago is one. Using the points to pay down price strategy I explained earlier, I was able to cut the cost of flight to Chicago in half. The most convenient airport hotel in Chicago O'Hare is one where I had points as well. So we were able to get tonight's room for points. I will still need to purchase a hotel in Istanbul for the return. Overall I expect to keep $2,000 of the savings I got from doing the self-connect. 

Eldership Out Of Drydock! Next Mission - Return To Spain

We are warriors. True soldiers. Firm in our duty and commitment to ElderFleet Command. But standing on the bridge of Eldership as we (that would be me as our crew consists of Wife and I) piped aboard the return of our wounded Captain (this week) Wife, back, free from her boot, ready to travel again, a tear formed in our (my) eye. It was good to have her back. 

It was equally good that I was here at all as I have been serving time for my felony assault on Wife with a suitcase in Sweden causing her broken foot in the first place. However, the bureaucrats of ElderFleet Command HQ ran the hard numbers. No de-I onboard, no crew, no alternative Captain, no ability to man the Eldership. Hence, I have been given a release for good behavior with my rank and privileges returned.

Official lift ff will be this Wednesday. Mission cameras have been checked and batteries charged. Brandy and bourbon bottles filled. We will be implementing the very travel practices discussed most recently in this blog. We'll fly to Chicago and overnight. Change airlines Thursday morning and fly to Madrid, Spain via Istanbul. Not the most direct flight, but an incredibly good fare. 

Both Wife and I are very excited to be doing what we truly love once again. 

The de-I Guide to Air Travel Planning - Part Four - The Points Game and Some Conclusions

If you have been following these posts on travel planning, and specifically air travel planning, you have seen that it can be complicated...which is why a lot of people dislike doing it. I'm going to conclude with (I hope) is some guidance to try to make the whole process easier. But first I want to touch upon the subject of trying to score free or discounted flights using miles. 

This is a massive subject. There are tons of pundits and services that discuss this subject and I am far from an expert. I will say, however, that the game boils down to two considerations:

• How are you going to get the points?
• How can you use the points?

The first is done either by flying on airlines and being part of the loyalty programs or using credit cards that allow you to earn points. Optimizing either are a huge can of worms which I am not an expert. The second usually requires a degree of flexibility and quick decision making (deals come and go fast) that also does not fall into my area of expertise. 

However, as I mentioned in my recent post on booking a flight to SE Asia, I do have one little hack that works pretty well for me. That is the use of United Airlines Cash & Miles feature. I made the decision to focus my travel with United Airlines decades and decades ago so I have lifetime status. While scoring fully free flights with miles is a real challenge, using the Cash & Miles feature, I can reduce prices substantially. And I can transfer points off my Chase Sapphire or Capital One Venture cards to United in a matter of hours to. I've managed to save a lot of money on both domestic and international flights this way. 

CONCLUSIONS

In the end, it really is about knowing your own personal preferences and pain points. Given the amount of international travel I do, buying the lie flat business class seat is critical to wear and tear on my old body and allowing me to manage the jet lag problem. I doubt I could travel as much as I do internationally if I didn't fly business class. So for me, it is well worth the price. Your needs are probably completely different. That's going to affect your choices.

The more you travel, the more experiences you have which will influence your decisions. You remember me vehemently stating I would not fly British Airways or go through Heathrow. That comes from experience. There is no substitute for experience. However, if you use the process I've outlined for you, you will be able to cut down on the amount of time it takes you to determine your options.

 

The de-I Guide to Air Travel Planning - Part Three - Conducting a Sample Search - Self-Connecting

We are continuing our samples of how I actually do my flight searches and selections. I had made a claim that one can frequently find better options in terms of price and other factors when one looks to book from a hub, especially going to another hub. I then was proven COMPLETELY WRONG when I, at random, selected some routes. This teaches us a valuable lesson. Don't do in real time research when you write your blog post. 

Today, I have done my research ahead of time to demonstrate the point of using a self-transfer going through a hub. For today's search I have chosen to research going from Albuquerque to Dubai, leaving on October 27 Monday and returning on November 19 Wednesday.

Here's what came up

Not particularly great. $5k is barely acceptable on my budget. And it is on American connecting to British through London Heathrow which is a no go for me. I hate British Airways and hate Heathrow. But the other options are $6.5k and 6.7k. Not attractive either. 

So I did the same multi hub search I showed you last post. And I came up with this.

OH! Now this is interesting. Two options, one Turkish Airlines, the other Royal Jordanian for around $3.7k. WOW, that's a $3k savings. If two of us are flying, that's a $6k savings. That's nothing to sneeze at. 

But wait, there are additional costs. You will have to book a round trip from Albuquerque to Chicago. Fortunately on the way out, the flights leave late so you won't have to do a hotel. Based on experience I know I can get to and from Chicago for about $500. 

So which one might I choose. Well, I checked the detail of the two flights. I like Turkish but it is flying an old Boeing 777 that has a 2-3-2 configuration in Business. It means there is a high likelihood you will have someone having to climb over you to get to the toilet or you will have to do the climbing. And there isn't much privacy. I am not crazy about the arrival time either. 

So I checked out the Royal Jordanian flight details

 They are flying a 787, a much nicer plane in my opinion. I like the arrival time a lot more. What about the seat configuration. I checked it on SeatGuru. It is a 2-2-2. So if you are in the center, both seats have aisle access. Looking at pictures, there isn't much privacy. But  saving as much money as this looks like, I would make that tradeoff. One thing I need to do is check what the return flight would look like.

The return is not bad. It gets into Chicago at 3:05pm. With going through passport control and switching terminals for a self-connect, I would stay overnight and make the last leg the next day. That would add maybe $200 in hotel cost. 

So in conclusion, if I choose the self-connect through Chicago I would save $3 thousand in airfare, give back $750 in connection to Chicago and hotel for a savings of $2,250. And it would take me another day of travel. Especially if there were two of us and I was doubling that savings, I would totally go this route.

 

The de-I Guide to Air Travel Planning - Part Three - Conducting a Sample Search (Part One)

Enough of preparation and background, let's look at how this plays out when one actually wants to find a flight.

Let's put together a hypothetical example. For this example, I am going to do a search I've never done before. Let's assume I want to go from Cleveland Ohio to Ljubljana, Slovenia and back in April of 2026 for two weeks starting the second week of April and that I want to travel business class on the over Atlantic portion of my trip in both directions.

Before I even start to search, I will take the following things in account:

• Trying to book flights from a spoke city to a spoke city will almost always end up with something more expensive and convoluted. 
• The better option is usually to book your over ocean flight from hub to hub and do a self-connect to get to your final destination.
• Or do a hub in the U.S. to your international spoke city
• Except for those situations where the spoke to spoke route comes out better.

Totally confused? Let's actually do this and see if we can shed light on how it works. 

I start by doing a search using a site that aggregates flight information from many airlines. I used to be a big fan of Kayak. But recently I've moved to Google Flights  because of a feature that allows you to put in up to 7 departure cities and arrival cities in one search. It also shows just airline deals and not agency deals. I don't do agencies. That is another post altogether.

 Okay let's do the search

WTF!!!!

Okay, one clearly has a helluva a lot better options from Cleveland than from Albuquerque lol. These are seriously good options. A business class round trip fare from spoke to spoke for under $4 thousand with two stops, and 13 to 18 hours total travel time is a killer deal. $5 thousand for transatlantic would be a more normal low end price. Just for grins, let's see what this would look like from my home town of Albuquerque.

Now we're seeing what I normally run into. Take into account that Wife and I fly and that $4,200 to $4,600 fare translates into $8,400 to $9,200. That is about what I would expect to find.

 Let's change the locale we are going to. Let's say we are going from Cleveland to either Kuala Lumpur or Singapore.

Those are in the almost $9 thousand and up for two people. Looking at going from Albuquerque.

Similar pricing

But one needs to look beyond the price to see the total travel experience. Notice on each listing you will see it has the total hours of travel time and the number of stops. If one clicks on the arrow to the far right, you will get the details of the flight including what kind of aircraft is being used. This can be significant as there is a wide variety of comfort available depending on the aircraft per airline. 

So let me give you a bit of homework. Go to Google Flights and enter the exact parameters I have for this Albuquerque to Kuala Lumpur or Singapore route in April. Then go click on the flight details and study what you see. In the next post, we will start to analyze this information because it can be key to the kind of total flight experience you might have. 

And we will look at the options to us if we look at a hub to hub routing with our doing a self-connection to get to the hub.

 

The de-I Guide to Air Travel Planning - Part Two - Understanding the Airline System

We are in the second of the four part series discussing how de-I and Wife plan their travel. Please note:

• I am focusing primarily on international travel though many of the issues we cover would apply to domestic or short-haul travel.
• I have a bias toward what I will call standard, full-service airlines as opposed to discount airlines. This ties into my first post where I talk about the variables important to you. With my preferences, the advantages of a discount airline often disappear as I have to pay extra for all the things I prefer.

So with that in mind let's talk about how the majority of main stream airlines operate, and why that is important to your planning. 

The vast majority of major airlines that serve the international trade operate with what is called a hub and spoke system. The hub and spoke system makes use of a small number of major airports that act as 'hubs'. Traffic is funneled into the 'hubs' from a wide number of outlying locations. These routes are the 'spokes'. There are also only a limited number of major airlines flying these international routes. When you combine these two sets of data, you find that your options on how to get from Point A to Point B reduce substantially. Here is a non-complete, unofficial list of major international carriers and their hubs. (I am leaving out airlines and locations in Latin America as I've had no experience with them)

United States

• American Airlines - Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Los Angeles
  
• Delta Airlines - Atlanta, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Minneapolis, Detroit
  
• United Airlines - New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, Houston, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco
  

Europe

• British Airways - London
  
• Air France - Paris
  
• KLM - Amsterdam
  
• Lufthansa - Frankfort, Munich
  
• Lot - Warsaw
  
• Iberia - Madrid
  
• ITA - Rome
  

Middle East

• Eithad - Abu Dhabi
  
• Emirates - Dubai
  
• Qatar - Doha
  
• Turkish - Istanbul
  

East Asia

• Asiana - Seoul
  
• Ana - Tokyo
  
• Japan Airlines - Tokyo
  
• Korean Airlines - Seoul
  
• EVA - Taipei
  
• Malaysian - Kuala Lumpur
  
• China Airlines - Taipei
  
• Starlux - Taipei
  
• Singapore - Singapore
  

You will note that the vast majority of the 'hubs' are located in major cities around the world. And the majority of long haul international travel is between hub and hub. Unless you live in one of them, you are going to have to take a 'spoke' route into the hub to get where you are going. 

One should also note that these airlines have combined in three major alliances - One World, Sky Team, and Star Alliance. These alliances allow airlines to show flight options booked on one ticket as if they were one airline. I will discuss why this is important in a later post.

When planning international travel one should understand that each of these airlines has flights going from their hub to other major hubs. If you know this you can in your own mind map out the possibilities of getting from one place to another. 

For example, I recently planned a trip in 2026 to South East Asia. But I didn't know exactly where in SE Asia I was going to go. So I chose a couple of hubs in SE Asia where I know many other short haul flights go in and out of. These were Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, With this information, I could now limit the number of options on how to get to these hubs. And I could, in my own mind, start thinking about how I would get from where I am, Albuquerque, a minor spoke city, to where I wanted to go. 

This still leaves you with a heck of a lot of options. So how do we refine things so we can find what we want and not go crazy? In my next post, I am going to walk you through an actual search and purchase I recently conducted to show you how I use this information.

The de-I Guide to Air Travel Planning - Part One - Understanding the Variables Important to You

I have been asked by so many people...

1. You actually like planning travel? (The answer is yes I do)
2. How do you plan your trips?

 The answer to #2 is much more complicated. But I have decided to give it a try. (Please note this is the de-I Guide to Travel Planning not the de-I Sandia Outfitters Guide. The later can only be found on the dark web with the proper authorizations and access money provided). 

This Guide will focus on international travel because that is where the bulk of my heavy duty planning is spent, where things can get much more complicated, and the trade-offs between cost and other variables become the greatest.

Here are the things we will be discussing:

• Understanding the Variables Important to You
• Understanding the Airline System
• Conducting a Sample Search
• Working to Get the Optimum Value

Let's get on with our first topic, Understanding the Variables Important to You.

Every time we make an air flight reservation there are a host of variables that you are going to be dealing with...whether you understand them or not. A bit of intentional thought on what is important to you and what's not can save you a lot of time when conducting your search as you can eliminate certain options quickly if they don't fit your preferences. 

Here is a list of some of the things that I consider whenever I start researching a flight.

• Total flight time
• Cost
• How early or late the flight leaves (Wife HATES making early flights)
  
• How early or late the flight arrives
• Total travel time
  
• Checked luggage allowances (what I am considering will vary depending on the nature of the trip)
• What kind of seat location I can get (I like aisles toward the front so I can get to the toilet easy and get off the plane faster)
• Leg room and seat width
• Connection time
• Food options
• The particular airport I might be flying from, arriving, or changing planes (Example the flight I booked to SE Asia recently, I did from San Francisco instead of Los Angeles because  the former is easier to change terminals when doing a self-connect)
• Particular airlines one might prefer or want to stay away from

I often make trade offs to get the best experience for Wife and I. I might be willing to pay more to have a flight that is shorter and/or departs and arrives at a more reasonable time of day. I will avoid specific airlines if at all possible because of past experience. I am very aware of seat size and leg room. I will even consider where my seat is in terms of my ability to find overhead baggage space.

The point being if you know what you like and don't like, you can screen the information you are getting when doing your search so as to optimize your final experience.

In my next post, I will explain some of the basics of how the air transportation system works. Knowing this allows you to be realistic about your scheduling expectations, and reduce the number of options you research for any given trip.