Using up my air miles

When I was working I had teams in India and used to visit quite frequently. Over the years I built up 106,000 Emirates air miles, which are soon running out. This has given me the opportunity to try to use them up and get myself a final trip back to India to see my old friends. This blog is about the challenges that I have faced trying to book. It is a real first world problem story, so if that is going to irritate you, please stop reading now!

106,000 miles sounds like a lot. It would take you over four times around the world. When airmiles first started they would relate to how many miles you could get on a free flight, but these days, they are just points. I think airlines try to give you more so you think you have a big number but they aren’t actually worth as much.

I did lots of research, found some dates in February next year, when the prices are lower, and looked at return flights between Glasgow and Chennai and Delhi. I found that if I could do a flight to Chennai, I could do that with my miles plus airport taxes, and then pay for the return from Delhi. Unfortunately this didn’t work. Turns out that flying into one city in India and back from another does not count as a return, so costs nearly double. It also turns out that you can’t go one way on miles and the other with cash. You have to choose one or the other.

Emirates do what looked like a solution where you can use cash and miles, but when I tried that, the miles were worth very little, and again it was too expensive. But then I received an email telling me that till the end of the week I could buy additional miles with a 35% discount. This would be a solution that could work. I could buy 71,000 extra miles and then fly to Delhi and back using miles alone.

But then I hit technical problems. The website took me through the whole process, as far as taking my credit card details and checking with my bank, before saying “There has been a problem” and dumping me out. Emirates told me I was using the wrong browser, so I changed that but no success. My bank tells me that there is no issue at their end. So now I am sitting here, waiting for “the back end team” to call me back, and hopefully give me a solution before the offer runs out tonight and it becomes too expensive again.

As I said earlier, I know this is a first world problem, and I am very lucky to have the opportunity to even consider a flight to India. I also know that long haul flights have a massive carbon impact, so maybe I should not be going. But India is such a great country, and I have so many friends that I never properly said goodbye to when I left work, due to the pandemic.

Any thoughts?