How to Plan Smarter and Save More on Summer Travel
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When should you start planning for summer travel?
This year has been flying by.
Believe it or not, it's already time to start planning summer travel if you want to find some of the best deals.
I need to get going on that. I'm flying to Northern Virginia to see my family dogs and go to my friend's birthday. I hear they even made matching shirts for the birthday.
Amazing. You are part of 44% of Americans who say they plan to take a summer vacation requiring a flight or hotel stay this year. We are going to dig into that data and share some tips for your summer travels. The matching shirts are optional though. Welcome to Smart Travel, a deep dive into the tips, tools, and tactics to maximize your travel dollars. I'm Megan Coyle. And I'm Sally French. And we're the travel nerds ready to help you plan your next big trip. Which could be this summer. We found lots of fun data, so you'll know when and where the crowds will be. Where there are crowds, there are high prices. So hopefully by the end of this, you'll know how to avoid both.
But first, the news and our usual disclaimer. We'll talk about a few credit card companies that are NerdWallet partners in this episode, but that doesn't influence how we discuss them.
Megan, there is this bank adding Lyft credits to one of their cards. As it turns out, we are no longer allowed to say their name on this podcast, but to help you listeners out, their name rhymes with face. Or space. Or trace. Or at least we can keep doing this. Anyway, this unnamed bank is adding Lyft credits to one of their most popular travel credit cards. Again, I cannot say the name of this specific card out loud on this podcast. I know, I'm sorry. But if you've been listening to this, you know what card I'm talking about. It's the one with the super high annual fee. It has good statement credits, but the bad news is they are slashing the card's earning rates on Lyft. I wrote an article which actually does have the cards named in it.
We will link to that in the show description. And we can print the names of the cards in the article, just not say them on the podcast. So again, check out that link in the show description.
I feel like there's been a lot of rideshare news lately, like Delta also moving from Lyft to Uber. So... Definitely check that out so you can plan your ride shares accordingly.
And the new era of Southwest is already here as well. The airline just unveiled its new dynamic pricing, and I guess as the name suggests, it's all over the place.
Our colleague Craig Joseph just crunched the numbers, and for Wanna Get Away Plus fares, which are sort of the new non-basic fares, non-basic economy, the valuation is around 1.4 cents per point. So not super different from... What we had before as a Southwest valuation, we used to say it was 1.5 cents per point. But remember, this is a higher fare class now. We used to see that valuation for the lowest fare class, which let you bring those free checked bags. And also you could change it like up to 10 minutes before the flight. And again, just seeing a lot of variation in flight prices, especially if you look at some of the other fares, we've seen as low as 1.1 cents per point. So- Definitely not great if you are a huge Southwest flyer and using your points a lot.
Yeah, you know, it's been a rough go for Southwest flyers recently. A lot of changes and most of them not for the best. I will say this is a good example of why you should collect transferable points because when stuff like this happens, when your Southwest points get devalued, at least with transferable points, you can just choose to transfer them to another better partner.
And if all of that makes you think about leaving Southwest, Delta wants your business. The airline's offering a higher medallion status match when you enroll in the medallion status match challenge only through September 30th of this year. So A-list will now match to Delta's gold medallion status and A-list preferred will match to Delta's platinum medallion status. And I would just say this is a great time to be a Southwest elite flyer looking to change loyalty because American Airlines is also doing the same thing. There's a limited time status match. If you have Southwest status, you should look into some of these offers.
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