Fiji flights for $5.60

The joy of travel rewards!

After years of listening to award travel gurus talk about the magic of Chase Ultimate Rewards points, I have become a believer. I have listened countless times as Choose FI podcast host Brad Barrett described how "easy" it is to book award flights, but it always seemed too complicated. Then I was faced with $713 flights (one way!) from Honolulu to Fiji (times 4 people) and I was finally motivated to figure it out.

I had been watching this flight on the airlines websites and on Hopper for months, and prices did not budge AT ALL, despite Hopper's reassurances that the price would decrease by half by December (they never did). I had started to look at flights from Hawaii to New Zealand, completely bypassing Fiji, but those were even more expensive.

After hearing a ChooseFI podcast episode with the founder of Point.me, I decided to try again. I used point.me to find that Chase Ultimate Rewards points and Capital One points both transfer to British Airways Avios, which can be used to book Fiji Airways flights on the BA website. (For some reason this only came up once. When I did the search again, only Qantas codeshare flights were visible-but those had fees of $650/person, vs. the $5.60 per person on Fiji Airways.)

I logged in to my account to access the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal and transferred 68,000 CUR points to my husband's (old!) British Air Executive Club account number (still active, and holding 15,000 Avios from years ago!). I think I refreshed the page about 25 times and the miles were NOT showing up! But after logging out and back in...there they were! I went ahead and booked the flights for the four of us using those Avios.

Actually---it was an easy process (but not necessarily simple). Steps involved:

1. Find the desired flight (Fiji Airways departing Honolulu on 16 Sept 2023, arriving in Nadi on 18 Sept 2023....only a 6 hour flight but we lose a day crossing the international date line). 2. Point.me search for the flight (do this multiple times since sometimes not all options show up).

3. Check the partner airline (British Airways) website to find out how many points/miles are needed, and how many are in your account already (set up loyalty membership if you don't have one).

4. Log in to Chase Ultimate Rewards account and transfer the points required to the partner airline (BA) loyalty account.

5. Refresh Refresh Refresh Panic Refresh Refresh Panic LogOut LogIn Celebrate.

6. Once the miles/points show up in your partner airline account, use them to book award travel through their website.

7. Celebrate again!