The purpose of this post is not to tell you whether or not you should be traveling. Rather, I’d like to share my experience and my impressions of what it’s like to travel right now. I’ll share my experience with booking flights, what it’s like to fly and stay at hotels during the pandemic and my overall impressions of the precautions taken by hotels, airlines and tourist attractions.

Planning the Trip and Finding Award Space

At the beginning of September, my friends and I felt safe enough to travel abroad and decided to take a trip to Turkey.

United recently announced that they will commence service between San Francisco and Papeete, Tahiti (PPT) as of October 30, 2018. This is great news as it theoretically means more award space to a destination infamously hard to book an award to. At the moment, the only direct flights between the continental United States and Tahiti are on Air Tahiti Nui and Air France, both of which depart from Los Angeles.

I tweeted this deal first from @MileValueAlerts. Follow @MileValueAlerts on Twitter and follow these directions to get a text message every time I tweet from that account.

Edit November 18, 2017: Three more positive reports in the last two weeks. This trick may never die. :)

In Don’t Pay the $75 Close In Fee on United (Trick!), Scott wrote about an easy way anyone can avoid the fee United charges non-elites for booking an award within 21 days of departure.

In addition to United's recent devaluation, United recently made its award searching worse.

If you search on the home page for an award--like say New York to Paris next June--

you'll get one week of award prices in one cabin.

You used to get shown two months of award space in economy and premium cabins. You can still get shown that.

As a reminder I'm bumping this post to the top of the blog since today is your last day to redeem United miles before the devaluation kicks in tomorrow!

Back in June I wrote about the changes United MileagePlus announced to go into effect November 1, 2017.

United, American, and Southwest are all offering bonuses for shopping through their portals. The bonuses are in addition to what you’d already be earning by shopping through the portal. Shopping portals allow you to earn miles by making your normal online purchases through your favorite online stores. Just by starting at the loyalty program’s portal and using its link to your favorite online retailer, you can get extra miles for your purchases.

With each holiday shopping promotion, the more you spend, the higher your return is.

I recently booked myself in United economy to fly back to the United States from Buenos Aires for Christmas. Why would I torture myself in economy? Well, a few reasons...

It's the holidays. Holidays = not much premium cabin award space, and economy cash tickets are pricey.
There aren't too many Business Class product options between Buenos Aires and the United States, and the one that has the most award space tends to be United. United's Business Class is OK, but nothing to write home about. Sometimes I don't feel like using more miles for it.

Avianca LifeMiles has introduced new (cheaper) award prices to fly shorthaul flights within the continental United States on United. Before, Avianca's domestic award prices were market standard--12,500 miles one way from anywhere to anywhere.

You can now see Singapore Airlines award space on united.com, which means you can book Singapore award space on united.com. This was not the case as of a few days ago.

Singapore doesn't really release premium cabin award space to its Star Alliance partners, so you won't see much Singapore Business and First Class on United's website.