Triangle Trip

New York City is known as a great place to shop. If you are in retail or any type of brand, you must have a New York address. This also applies to retail outlet stores. If you really want a bargain and have a few days left in New York after you have completed my efficient New York City Guided Tour, I highly recommend you visit Woodbury Commons – a place where you will find all the major brand names in one location.

There are multiple ways from NYC to Woodbury Commons. You can rent a car and drive North on New York State Thruway (I-87) to Harriman, Exit 16. You can easily find Woodbury Commons after the toll plaza. The drive from NYC to Woodbury Commons is about a 90 minute drive with traffic plus approximately $10 of tolls. One day car rental in NYC will cost you around $80 with taxes.

To save you the hassle of driving and some money for shopping, there are buses that operate hourly from NYC to Woodbury Commons. You can take a bus from NY Port Authority Bus Terminal (on 42nd Street and 8th Avenue, one block west of Time Square) to Woodbury Commons. Here’s the link to the NY Port Authority bus schedule.

If you are staying on the East side of NYC and do not want to cab/walk cross town, there is a daily bus that will take you to Woodbury Commons in the morning and back in the evening. The East side NYC to Woodbury Commons bus goes up 3rd Avenue at around 8AM and returns from Woodbury Commons at around 2:00PM. Here’s the link to the East Side bus schedule. Enjoy your shopping.

Here are two recent posts regarding New York City:

1.  Economic way to get from NYC to Philly, DC and Boston

2.  Where to eat in NYC Chinatown

Due to the double EQM promotion by United I have been banking United miles.  However, I’ve been keeping my Delta account active by banking Delta SkyMiles through other means, namely Hertz.  Now Delta has made it even more worthwhile.  Delta is now offering additional bonus Skymiles when banking with their partners, up to 25,000.  Here the link for more details and to register for the promotion: http://www.delta.com/marketing/pileonmiles/

This is not to undermine my arch-nemesis’ post regarding banking AA miles when renting cars 😉

Most major car rental companies allow you to choose from earning airline miles, hotel points or their loyalty points. I have never been a huge fan of earning car rental points because they generally expire after one year. In addition, I lost about 10,000 points when Budget decided to end their PerfectDrive program without notice. In order for you to earn the hotel points, some hotel requires you to book the hotel with your car rental. Booking hotels on a rental car site makes me nervous and complicates the points earning process. Hence the best practice is to choose airline miles as your reward on all your car rentals.

For every car rental day, major car rental companies will give you 50 airline miles. However, the car rental companies do not tell you upfront that they are passing on what they called “Frequent Flyer Service Charge” or “FF Surcharge” to the renters. This means you are paying US$0.50 per rental day to earn 50 airline miles, making each airline mile = $0.01. A penny per airline mile is not that bad value wise but there is a way to get around it.

To avoid paying the US$0.01 per airline mile surcharge on your next rental car, you should choose American Airline miles as your reward. Hertz and National Car Rental do not apply the Frequent Flyer Service charge or (FF Charge on your Hertz bill) if you select AA miles as your reward. For all other airline programs, Hertz and National will charge you US$0.50 per rental day.

Since we are talking about rental cars, I would like to pass along to my reader the following: National Car Rental is offering triple airline miles for car rentals from April 29 to June 25, 2009. Here’s a list of National’s airline partners. With the National triple mile offer which will give you 150 miles per rental day on most airlines, paying the US$0.50 per day is not so bad.