Points Got Us a $43K Trip for Just $1,314 - Part 1

The process to book flights started just over a year in advance of when we were thinking of travelling to Spain. Reason being is airlines open up their seat award availability; which means you can book with points, about 360 days before; with this fluctuating depending on the airline.

See here for a complete list for when airlines open award seats - https://onemileatatime.com/guides/when-do-airlines-open-award-seats/

Being that us LYLE Travelers were flexible on when we could travel, but not too flexible as we wanted to go before the busy season, yet still get warm weather, we were left with a window of about middle of March to end of April.

With that in mind, around the end of March, 360ish days in advance, I started looking at different flights to see if we could find any award availability, which I did, and wrote about it in my article; A Potential 2025 trip.

However, I only found award availability for up to beginning of March, about 330 days before we were thinking of taking our trip. Knowing this, I realized I'm going to need to wait almost another month, so that I can see award availability to and ALSO from Spain for when we wanted to actually travel.

Which brought us to around the beginning of May 2024 to really start looking, which was now about 330 days in advance of when we were thinking of coming home from our trip, and around 315 days in advance of departing to Spain.

Exciting right!????

Well, more like frustrating!

I could find flights home from Spain, but nothing to Spain, unlike previously when I searched for flights as I talked about in my article; A Potential 2025 trip, I found flights to Spain, but couldn't find anything home.

So, after days and days of searching different days to fly to Spain, and fly home from Spain, and lying in bed thinking about different ways to book this trip, whether it was on this airline, or a different airline, and what points could I use, and what points do I have, and what airports to fly in and out of, I FINALLY found flights that would work, on on the days that worked, and even the times flying that work, to and from Spain, in business class, for us 3 LYLE Travelers.

ALL for 445,442 points!

Now, you're probably wondering of course, how did we do it!!!!???

Well to start, here's the breakdown of the points we used/converted:

To get to this point though, we first needed to decide on where we wanted to go, which we agreed on Spain in the spring of 2025, departing from North America.

From there, I would recommend you use an award searching website, such as my favourite one, seats.aero, to begin your search.

Seats.aero is very quick in displaying results, allows you to input multiple departing/origin airports and multiple destination airports, allows you to input minimum seats available, allows you to filter for only business class, and the best part, it allows you to search up to 180 days before and after your departure date.

Since we were somewhat flexible on dates, I used a range of +-28 days from a departure date of March 15, 2025, to see what was available.

I also played around with where we were flying out of, as Chicago and New York usually have more award availability to Spain, specifically to Madrid and Barcelona, 2 places we were open to flying to.

However, every time we searched, I couldn't find business class, or I couldn't find direct, or it would be to many points, such as Etihad kept coming up, but for 92K points one way.

Thinking that maybe seats.aero wasn't capturing all the award availability bookable with points, I jumped over to seatspy.com to see if their were other airlines, or other routes that would get me to Spain.

However, it's limited on airlines, and for airlines that flew to Spain, it was showing me the exact same results as seats.aero.

It's still a good award searching tool to have as its nice to verify your searches, so I do still use it.

I then jumped over to PointsYeah, another great award flight search tool, to see if it would find me award availability to Spain and Points.me as well.

But still no luck.

Then I decided to start looking at adding a positioning flight, or layover on our way to Spain and back instead of direct to Madrid from major North American cities such as New York, Chicago, Washington, and Boston.

Which brought me to using flightconnections.com, as this shows you all the flights that occur all over the world and on which airline.

I wanted to see all the Star Alliance flights going to Madrid, reason being, is I wanted to use our Aeroplan points, and all Star Alliance flights can be bookable with Aeroplan points. This resulted, as you can see below, in only a few locations in Europe such as Frankfurt, Munich, Brussels and Zurich, where Star Alliance airlines fly to Madrid.

I then searched from Detroit, which is the closest airport to us, again filtering for Star Alliance flights only, which again allows me to use my Aeroplan points, to the above destinations, and this is where I found out that Luthfansa flies to Frankfurt from Detroit, which was great. As now I wouldn't need a positioning flight to New York from Detroit on the way to Spain. I just needed one before got to Madrid in Frankfurt, flying from Detroit.

Basically I just switched up my positioning flight from one continent to the other.

The best part was that when looked at airline for this route, it was all Luthfansa, as they flew Detroit to Frankfurt, and also to Madrid from Frankfurt!

With this knowledge, I then went back to seats.aero to start searching for award availability from Detroit DTW to Frankfurt FRA, and there they were, with many dates available via Aeroplan as you can see below.

I then searched Frankfurt FRA to Madrid MAD, and again, tons of award availability via Aeroplan.

My thinking was that since these were both Luthfansa flights, then I could just search and book Detroit to Madrid, with a layover in Frankfurt on Air Canada's website, allowing me to use Aeroplan points.

And sure enough, there it was, Detroit DTW to Madrid MAD, with a layover in Frankfurt FRA, for only 70K Aeroplan points, for business class seats, just as seats.aero said!

Note, you could even do a stopover in Frankfurt, which is essentially a long layover, and Aeroplan allows you to do this for up to 45 days. This is can be done right on Air Canada's website when your booking and it would only cost you an extra 5,000 Aeroplan points.

Just for fun, I ran a search, stopping over for 3 days in Frankfurt, and there it was, now 75K points, in business class, with the extra 5K points being added for the stopover.

Now this is all fine and dandy, but we still needed to get home!!! argh.

This is what made it hard, as we were trying to find award availability before someone else gets it, but you also need to wait for return flight award availability to be released.

Sure the experts say to book right when airlines release availability, the approx. 360 days in advance as I mentioned in the beginning of this article, but if you're going for a 2 week trip, and you can't book your return flight just yet, you don't want to just book your departing flight, without knowing if you could get home.

So, we needed to wait until about 330 days out, basically beginning of May, so this way we could see a months worth of availability, up to beginning of April, to show us flights for the way home.

It's a risk, and as I said, seats might get booked, but it worked out for us.

So stay tuned for part 2, on how we booked our return flight home from Spain.

What do you think about that!!??

PS, in case your wondering how I knew this trip costs $43K, here's the actual flights if we were to have paid cash (in USD/person, which converts to approx 43K CDN)!