Changing my award flights to/from Costa Rica

My kids and I are crawling to the finish line of this school year, and thankfully we are just 5 weeks away! That means our trip to Costa Rica is quickly approaching. Although I booked our award flights last year, I’ve been monitoring award space to see if better options opened up. This past weekend, I made changes to our flights.

United Award Flight Change

When I booked our return flights from San Jose to DFW for 20k miles each, our flights included an overnight stopover in Houston before heading on to Dallas the following morning. That wasn’t a big deal to me, since there are plenty of hotels near IAH airport that we could book reasonably using points or cash.

But still, every now and then, I checked on United’s site to see if we could get back to DFW the same night as our flight from Costa Rica. And the other day, the ideal flight showed availability.

It was fairly easy to make the change on United’s website. I just clicked on the “change flight” option in my reservation:

I kept the date the same, and I could see all the flight options I could change to and how many additional points they would cost. The evening flight to DFW was the same amount of points, but taxes were 45 cents more per person. No biggie. I switched all of us and canceled our hotel in Houston.

American Award Flight Change

I was pretty happy with our award flights on American that I booked last year. We had nonstop flights from DFW to San Jose for 22,500 miles per person. But since I had just changed our return flights on United, I decided to take a peek at AA to see if there were better options. Much to my surprise, there were!

A nonstop flight earlier in the day was available for all 5 of us for the same amount of miles. We could change to that and gain an afternoon in our destination.  Or, the same flight we were on had 5 more award seats available for 15,500 miles each, which is 7000 miles less than what we paid.

I decided to stick with our later flight and save the miles. After all, 7000 X 5 is 35,000 miles we could use towards flights to Japan next year.

Changing our flight for the reduced price was not quite as easy as it was on United. The online “change flight” link said my flight was not eligible to change online. Instead, I put the flight at the new award price on hold (AA is one of the few airlines that allows award holds). Then, I cancelled our existing flight and booked the new flight after our miles were redeposited.

Bottom Line

I don’t often change my award flights after the original booking. Some airlines charge fees to redeposit miles. But in this case, I was able to get a better flight schedule and a better price by rebooking my award flights on United and AA.