Scott Barronton (00:00)
If you are anything like us, you love a great deal. Especially when it comes to travel. Welcome to Travel Deals Thursday, where each week we dig through hundreds of emails, alerts, and travel sites to bring you a few of the best deals we've found on cruises, flights, hotels, and all-inclusives.
Let's go find some travel deals.
So today we've got four hot deals to talk about. Two from Frontier Airlines, one from Iceland Air, and a Sky Miles tip with Delta Vacations. So Melissa, we've been really heavy on the cruises lately, but this time we're going to be very heavy on airlines.
Airfare is the one that's usually the biggest chunk of your vacation. And it's also the thing that we typically are like, this is what you need to book first. So sometimes these can kind of kickstart you into your vacation planning. That's right. Cause if you can't get there, then what good is booking a hotel or tours or anything like that? That's true. So let's kick it off with Frontier. I wanted to share this one because it's very interesting.
we just talked about the planning this this part of it may not be for the planners. But then the second part will be OK. So this is their go wild 2026 2027 annual pass and they're putting it on pre sale right now for two hundred ninety nine dollars. But here's the thing. If you purchase it right now, you actually get the rest of the 2025 26 in that.
So that gets you 20 months of unlimited flights, domestic and where they fly internationally for basically the price that you would pay for or even less than like one ticket. Does Frontier fly out of Jacksonville? They do. Hmm. We might have to think about this one. Yeah, they do. So, but here's a few things that you do need to know about this.
Okay. So you can fly as much as you want during the travel period to any frontier destination, including their international destinations in Puerto Rico. Okay. But here's the thing you have to confirm your domestic booking the day before departure, but you can do the international ones up to 10 days in advance. let me make sure I understand this. The kick is that you can't plan the trip or a future date. You just have to go the day before.
and book your ticket. Right. That's right. You book it through your portal and if they have a flight. So this is probably for people who can be super flexible. And you know what? This reminds me though of how you guys used to travel when you were younger. You know, where can we go? Right? A different way, right? Because you were flying, on a Delta pass, but it's kind of the same thing. Okay. Where can we go this weekend or, or whatever? And that's kind of the same thing.
So you pay one cent plus the applicable taxes, fees and charges. And then you can earn miles and points on purchases like bags and seat assignments and stuff like that. like I said, if you can be super flexible and I mean for $299, it'd be kind of fun, especially because you get so much extra time, to try it out. So how many do you think in your mind it would be worth it that you...
would book to make this worth it. Probably just two or three. Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. So just kind of a neat thing.
Well, the best part about this is you don't have to wait until 2026. You can actually start flying right away and keep going through April of 2027. And that's really a ton of value if you're like Melissa said, flexible with your dates and destinations. Yeah. And notice that their Go Wild Pass is not a calendar year. So, which is interesting. So trying to think through this as you were talking about it for us here in Jacksonville though, we would just be limited
to where they could go or could we book connecting flights as well? That's something to think about. Yeah, that's definitely something to think about.
Well, let's talk about the second part of the deal where Frontier is offering status match with other airlines. Yeah. And I think this is one of the easiest status matches that we've ever seen. So you do pay for this one. It's $69. But if you have an loyalty account with Southwest, JetBlue, Spirit or Alaska, you can jump straight to Frontier gold status. Now you don't have to have a status with them. You just have to have an account and those accounts are free to.
Yeah, I've started seeing this recently where some of these low cost airlines are offering the ability to buy a status and that's essentially what you're doing.
So if you got this and had gold status, you have some perks like free carry-on, free seat selection, priority boarding, priority customer service. Now that's one that's important. And even complimentary upgrades when available. So honestly, one round trip with the carry-on saves you more than the $69 fee that they're going to charge you for this. Yeah. So I would say...
Like if you're going to fly Frontier before December 2026, I mean, you should jump on this, right? Because those baggage fees alone, this would make it worth it. Yeah. So you're going to get the rest of this year and all of 2026.
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All right. So deal number three is Iceland Air stopover and sale. Okay. So Iceland Air is running a big Europe sale with fare starting at 329 to Iceland and then like 385 to Dublin and Stockholm.
Scott Barronton (05:59)
I saw other destinations like Barcelona, Milan, Helsinki for just a little bit more.
Scott Barronton (06:05)
we flew Iceland air from London to Reykjavik and then also then from Reykjavik home when we went to Iceland recently. Yeah. And one of their signature perks, and this is what Melissa's talking about is that you get to add a free stopover in Iceland on your way. And they don't charge you any extra airfare for that.
So one trip could give you Reykjavik and another European city or, destinations back to the U S on a single itinerary, but you need to book that by September 10th. So don't sit on this one if you want to go and chase the Aurora, because what we've been seeing right now is the Northern lights are off the charts. Yeah, for sure. And,
Here I'm the silly person. I'm like checking that Aurora map all the time. And like, I think it was yesterday we were looking at it and all of Iceland was in, in the red, which means that they were seeing it, with the naked eye, like we did, which were amazing. So like Scott said, so you can always do that Iceland stopover, but these deals that we're talking about are available for another week until September 10th. And I did check it, right? Because sometimes you see these things, okay, does the stopover really save you? So I priced it both ways. did like,
the one way and then I did it with the stopover and sure enough, was a good bit cheaper. So it's a really great way to see Iceland or at least part of it, even if you only had, we did a long weekend and we have a podcast episode. So I can link that to, you know, talking about, we actually did a whole series of podcast episodes. So I can link those if you're thinking, okay, how can you, you know, can you really do that? We covered a lot of ground, felt like in four days.
So let's talk about the next deal, which is a Delta Vacation Sky Miles boost. And I'm not sure I want to share this one, to be honest. All right. So for Delta Flyers trying to hit their next medallion tier before the end of the year, here's a hack that we actually might just be using so that Scott can hit his diamond medallion again, because we've been tracking that. It's funny that...
we actually came across this because here just recently, I think a lot of times after you fly and you get some points, you say, okay, like where am I? Because it is very important if you're chasing this to make sure that you hit certain things. So this came across my email and yeah, this is very interesting to us. I'm just a couple of thousand dollars away from that next
diamond status. So I'm interested in making sure that we do whatever we have to do to get there. So we've started putting stuff specifically on our SkyMiles American Express. So that's spend counts. And we've got a couple of more big trips this year, or at least one more big trip that we're going to be flying.
literally halfway around the world to get there. So I'm going to be really close, but this one might be something that we need to check out. So when you book with Delta Vacations, you'll earn one MQD for every dollar spent on the package price. if you book a vacation with them and it is $4,000, which includes your flight,
your hotel, any kind of transportation,
plus some excursion type things once you get there, every dollar spent on that package counts towards your MQDs. Yeah, and that's so interesting because most of the time it's just gonna be your flight, right? So normally if you book a vacation, you got your flight and then you book your hotel and you book these other things. So this lets you have MQDs on all of it. So if you've...
been eyeing a premium getaway, this could actually push you over the edge to silver, gold, platinum, diamond, whatever it is that you're trying to achieve. And you know, you're going to get a great trip. I've been looking at some of these Delta vacation options out there. And I was like, sign me up. Yeah, we were looking at some examples like packages that were built.
for Maui or just different things like that. yeah, the price points were really good and they haven't even had some examples where instead of just booking economy, right? It was like, okay, this would include like a premium seat or that kind of thing if you don't already get upgraded to those. So normally you just get, like I said, the MQDs for the flight. And we're thinking...
And this has got to be right that if you pay for that with your Delta Scott miles credit card, you'll be able to double dip because then you also get the MQDs on your spend as well. So just like you would if you had your flight and then you put it on that. So some of this might be, if you're not a Delta flyer, it might be like, okay, I don't really know what they're talking about. But if you're a Delta flyer, you're going to know exactly what we mean. the good thing is, is we can actually help you book Delta vacations at
Sunshine Travelers experiences. So reach out to us. We can get you a quote and help you book your next vacation with them. Just go to sunxtravel.com. That's sun, the letter X, and then travel.com. Click on plan your trip and just let us know where you want to go next. Yeah, and then we can help you build that out with Delta Vacations.
So whether it's Frontiers Unlimited flights, a quick status upgrade, an Iceland stopover to see the Aurora on the way to or from Europe, or boosting your SkyMiles with a Delta vacation package, these deals are definitely worth jumping on right now. We'll link all the details in the show notes. And if you want even more deals each week, make sure to join our Travel Deal Insiders newsletter at sunshinetravelers.com slash deals. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next time.
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