Next Fall we will be traveling to Europe for close to 8 weeks. I'm struggling with where to end the trip. I will be using United Airline miles and am finding that while I'm able to find tickets from Sacramento (SMF) to Budapest for 30,000 miles and a flight from Budapest to Munich (no miles, just taxes and fees), to get home just about every airport I check is 70,000 miles or more. And that's for flying to San Francisco! Before coming home we will be visiting relatives in Germany. We will probably be somewhere around Cologne, where my cousins live. We can be a bit flexible with time. I think we can fly from Luxembourg to SFO FOR 30,000 miles. I used a dummy date since we are a few days away from being able to book a flight on November 1st. I was thinking we could spend our final week doing a combination of visiting towns along the Mosel by car, dropping it in Trier, then spending a couple of days in Luxembourg before flying home from there. I welcome any comments or suggestions about this plan. I've been wanting to explore the Mosel. I have spent a day/night in Trier only. Luxembourg looks interesting as well.
Posted by
Seattle, WA, USA ☔️
6788 posts
I've been to Luxembourg a couple times, and liked it well enough. There's good stuff to see there.
Anyone sitting on a stash of United miles should be aware that they (United) have just gone through a historic devaluation. First, they have hidden their award charts (they surely still have award charts, they're just hiding them from customers). They have also switched from their historic practice of having predictable "prices" to redeem specific awards, to what they call "dynamic award pricing", where the cost (in miles) can not be predicted. Basically, the cost for any given flight is now whatever their computer spits out and says it is. United is following Delta (and American) in this respect. The bottom line is that United miles are now worth a fraction of what they were worth a year ago. IMHO United's FF program has gone from best (among major domestic US FF programs) to the worst in the past year. I've got a modest stash of United miles; I just figure that now, for any given flight redemption, I need to spend twice the number of United miles that I used to. That's an over-simplification - some award redemptions can still be found for a relatively low cost, but more often than not, award redemptions using United miles now cost 2X (or more) than the same flight did one year ago. The best way to use United miles right now seems to be on their foreign airline partners; prices for those redemptions have not gone up nearly as much as they have for flights on United's own planes (but it's a good bet that will happen soon enough, once they figure out how to make it work in their system).
By the way, I'm pretty sure that United does not fly into Luxembourg. Any flight booked through United is going to probably be on their partner, Lufthansa. From SFO, you're probably going via Frankfurt.
All that said, I see no reason to avoid flying in to or out of Luxembourg, if that's where you want to land or takeoff from. Good luck.
Posted by
OP
Sacramento, California U.S.A.
10580 posts
David, you make a good point about the mileage program. Thanks you for your thoughts. The flights I'm currently looking at are -
To Europe:
Sacramento - Los Angeles on United
LAX - Warsaw - Budapest on Lot Airlines
In Europe: Budapest - Munich on Lufthansa
From Europe:
Either Luxembourg - Frankfurt - SFO on Lufthansa OR Luxembourg - Munich - SFO on Lufthansa
Posted by
San Francisco Bay Area
5697 posts
Zurich>SFO on Swiss is also good -- we will be going Berlin>Zurich>SFO in January on the almost-last of our United miles.
Posted by
OP
Sacramento, California U.S.A.
10580 posts
We will be in Switzerland in late September. I'm not sure that I want to backtrack that far. It's definitely something to consider though. Thanks Lauri.