Buy Samsung Tablet & Get 25,000 Delta Miles Free!

Quick deal alert:

Until Sunday, September 18th, make $500 in SkyMall purchases through this link, and you'll receive 25,000 Delta miles.  That's a pretty great deal:  Even if you value Delta miles at only a penny each, its like getting $250 back from a $500 spend. 

One of the best items I've found on SkyMall for $500 is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.  If you don't yet have a tablet of your own (or you want to gift one to someone), this might be the time to do it!  There are two versions of the tablet: one for $499 and one for $599.  If you go for the $499 one, make sure to also purchase something else to get over the $500 threshold.  Taxes and shipping don't count.  You can find the tablet by searching for Galaxy Tab in the SkyMall search box.

If you don't need a tablet, you might also checkout Samsung TVs and monitors.  I own both a Samsung monitor and TV myself and they're both great!

Delta: International business class for the price of coach! Hurry...

Until the end of September, Delta is offering to double SkyMiles that are transferred from one person to another.  This is the perfect time to make use of little pockets of miles in different family members’ accounts by consolidating all in one place, and doubling miles as you do so.  Unfortunately, transferring miles isn’t free: Delta charges a penny per mile plus a $30 transaction fee (up to 30K miles per person per transaction).  However, the result is that by shuffling miles around from one person to another you can effectively buy SkyMiles for just over a penny each. 

Is this a good deal?  It definitely can be if you know you’ll use the extra miles.  Recently, when I looked into a few potential personal trips (to Europe and to Central America), I found that if I used this trick to buy my way into First/Business class, I would pay about the same as the best coach ticket I could find with a similar itinerary.  Or, I could use half the miles to travel in coach and pay far less than I would have by buying tickets outright.  Note that if you use SkyMiles awards to book your travel you won’t earn miles or status from the flight so you need to factor that in to your situation to determine if it’s really a good deal.

Save money with one way flights

A few days ago I decided that it would be fun to join my wife on her business trip to DC.  She already had her trip booked on United and I wanted to join her on the outbound flight (for various reasons we'll be on our own for the return).  The round trip fair for this trip, for me, would have been close to $500.  This is more than I wanted to pay for a short trip.  After a bit of investigation, though, I found that I could make this much more affordable by splitting the trip into two one-ways:

For the flight out to DC, I was able to use my small bank of United Miles to book a one way trip on my wife's United flight (only 10K miles for the one way!).  For the return trip, I found a one way on Delta for only $69.  I could have saved a few more dollars by flying Southwest, but my status is on Delta and so I always welcome chances to earn more MQMs.

So, the point is that even though airlines usually discount round trip fairs it sometimes pays to look into one-ways instead.