Use Miles To Fly To Cuba - Great News!

Great news for those wanting to visit Cuba! 

The US Department of Transportation has granted approval for the following airlines out of the following US cities. 

While you can’t book flights just yet, there will be plenty of options to use miles and points with a total of 155 weekly trips on the approved airlines.  Here are the departure options:

• Chicago – Frontier Airlines
• Fort Lauderdale – JetBlue, Silver Airways, and Southwest
• Miami – American Airlines
• Minneapolis – Sun Country Airlines
• Philadelphia – Frontier Airlines

The routes will operate between Miami (MIA), Fort Lauderdale (FLL), Chicago (ORD), Minneapolis (MSP) and Philadelphia (PHL) and Camaguey (CMW), Cayo Coco (CCC), Cayo Largo (CYO), Cienfuegos (CFG), Holguin (HOG), Manzanillo (MZO), Matanzas (VRA), Santa Clara (SNU) and Santiago de Cuba (SCU).

Under the agreement, each country can operate up to 10 daily round-trip flights between the US and each of Cuba’s nine international airports, for a total of 90 daily round-trip flights. It’s worth noting that service to Havana is not included in this announcement, and the DOT said that distribution of the 20 allotted daily round-trip flights to the country’s capital city will be announced later this summer.

This great news because if you have the Southwest companion pass, it means you can buy 2 for 1 tickets to Cuba, awesome. Southwest had a great sale this past week so I actually booked my tickets to Fort Lauderdale hoping that Southwest would be approved for flights to Cuba. You can cancel flights on Southwest without any penalty so there was no downside to grabbing my seat. 

Now if I can snag one of those seats on the flight to Cuba, I'll be on my way. My personal goal is to travel 50 countries by the end of my 50th year. Cuba will be number 48! Woohoo.