“A $24,539 flight for free?” you might say. Well, if you’re a travel enthusiast like I am as well as a points collector, you’ll know full well that some of those seemingly unattainable flights are actually, well, quite attainable. One of those flights that sits atop my bucket list is flying First Class Suites on Emirates’ A380-800 Airbus, known to be one of the few planes that carries an onboard shower.

Pre-Flight Experience

Chauffeur

Before even boarding the Emirates A380 beauty in First Class, the luxurious benefits and amenities start right at your home. You can schedule an Emirates driven chauffeur to come pick you up (within a pretty decent radius from the airport – Ex. 60-mile radius from LAX) and take you to the airport. Note: Emirates doesn’t generally offer chauffeur service for award tickets booked through partners, but it’s worth a try!

First Class Lounge

Emirates hosts some of the most beautiful First Class lounges in the world. The lounge in Dubai screams luxury, while the brand new lounge at LAX (my local airport) is exclusive to its Emirates A380 passengers on their once-daily flight to Dubai. Seems like a waste, but it guarantees privacy and an enjoyable experience preparing for that ~16 hour flight ahead.

Onboard Experience

Suite

The Emirates A380 First Class layout consists of 14 private first-class suites, arranged in a 1-2-1 configuration. The seats come with a 79 inch pitch and a comfortable full mattress. Seats include a tablet that you can use to maneuver your seat and the suite is fully enclosed with a sliding door ensuring privacy at any moment. Enjoy your suite in utmost comfort with complimentary pajamas, slippers, and an amenity kit for you to enjoy throughout the flight.

Food & Drink

First Class customers enjoy a complete range of complimentary drinks including cocktails, champagne, and vintage wines, except on flights to Saudi Arabia. With a phone call to the crew, First Class passengers may order multi-course meals and snacks from an extensive menu at any time. If you’re bored at your seat and what to walk around and grab a drink, you can go hang out at the onboard lounge bar.

Shower

It’s so unnecessary but when has excessive luxury ever been necessary. Well if you’ve been to the UAE, you’ll know that they have ATM’s that dispense bars of gold.

So what’s wrong with a little showering onboard a piece of metal suspended nearly 40,000 feet in the air flying to the other side of the world? NOTHING! Hence the $24,539 price tag for a one-way flight. But who are we kidding, none of us can actually afford that. And that’s where the next section of this article comes in…doing it for FREE.

Getting this $24,539 Flight for Free

I searched for a one-way first class ticket on the once-daily LAX-Dubai flight and found this:

Now if you were to use points to pay for a flight like this with one of those crappy credit cards where you can only redeem 1 cent per point towards travel expenses, then this flight would run you over 2 million points! Obviously I don’t have any dumb readers because if you’re reading this and learning how to take a $24,000+ flight for free then you’ll have your friends calling you a genius in no time!

Booking this flight with Alaska Air Mileage Plan Miles

• Alaskaair.com allows you to search and book award tickets on Emirates in Economy, Business, and First Class with fantastic availability. You can search for other coveted options like flying to Hong Kong in First Class for only 50,000 points!
• I searched for LAX-Dubai on May 10, 2015 and found availability on the once-daily flight in First Class for 90,000 points and $20! Now you may think 90,000 points is a lot, but when you compare it to the price of the flight, that’s a 27 cents/point redemption – an incredible value!

• There are two ways to get Alaska Air Mileage Plan Miles in an efficient way:

1.  The Alaska Airline Visa Signature Card offers you a 25,000 point bonus as soon as you are approved! The card is offered by Bank of America and is known to be a very churnable card. You can potentially get multiple Alaska Airline Credit Cards and increase your points balance by a huge amount to attain that First Class ticket in no time! You can search for this card and other Airline, Hotel, & Frequent Flyer Credit Card Offers.
2. Another great way to accumulate Alaska Air Mileage Plan Miles is through The American Express Starwood Preferred Card. The Starwood Card is known for being one of the most valuable award currencies of any other card as it is transferrable to almost every major airline with a free bonus of 5,000 points for every 20,000 point transfer made to the airline of your choice! Thus, you could transfer 75,000 Starpoints and have enough for a free $24,539 flight! The Amex Starwood Card only has a 25,000 point sign up bonus after you spend $5,000 in 6 months and you can leverage this by signing up for the business version of this card as well. You can also search for this card and other Airline, Hotel, & Frequent Flyer Credit Card Offers.

Conclusion

If you are looking to experience the flight of a lifetime and, most importantly, attain the flight in an affordable manner, now you can! I recommend applying for some Alaska Airline Credit Cards and spending now in order to have enough points for that next trip! Good luck and I look forward to hearing your experiences on that Emirates A380 First Class Suite and onboard shower!