Over the past few years, I’ve taken about 3 of 4 major international trips per year. Each on different airlines, always the economy seats.
I don’t have or use credit cards, so the entire “credit card rewards” thing is also a mystery to me.
So every now and then I get a letter from American Airlines, or Continental or whomever, telling me how many miles I have and usually bundling a bunch of marketing stuff along with the usual credit card offer. I have just tossed em in the past.
Just got back from a 10, 000 mile trip and was wondering if I should look into this whole mileage thing and if I can do anything with what I have earned, if anything.
But what puzzles me is that I fly a different major carrier almost every trip. Can you collate all earned miles from all different airlines into one, usable account? If not, is there any point for someone who only flies maybe 20,000 miles per year?
If you fly different airlines every time, you are out of luck. They don’t collate unless they are associated through a particular credit card. There is really no point for you to do anything.
I’m more interested in how they let you fly without a credit card? What kind of increased security and screening have you noticed?
Mystery? When you pay for something with your credit card, the CC company charges the merchant a transaction fee of a few percent. Then the CC company turns around and gives you a benefit typically amounting to about 1% of the transaction. The benefit may be cash back, frequent flier miles on a particular airline (example: American Express and Delta Airlines), or “points” that can be used to purchase items from the CC company’s rewards catalog.
If you purchase an item with cash (or with a debit card), you pay X dollars and receive no such benefit.
The prices of merchanidise are set by a merchant so as to offset the transaction fees incurred by the portion of his customers who do pay via a credit card. Since I use my credit card as often as I can, I’d like to extend my gratitude to you and other cash-only customers for subsidizing my credit card perks.
In addition to the per-dollar-spent perks, CC companies often dangle a big lump of rewards in order to get you to sign up for (and use) their card. Example: I just signed up for an American Express card that gives me one Delta Airlines FF mile per dollar I spend on the card. Simply for signing up and making a single purchase, they will also put an additional 25,000 frequent-flyer miles in my Delta Airlines account. But wait, there’s more: if I spend $10,000 in the first six months, they will dump another 25,000 miles in my Delta Airlines account (that’s in addition to the 10K miles I get for spending $10K). I put about $35K through my CC every year, so this is an easy target for me. Basically, in six months I will have accumulated 60,000 frequent-flyer miles, enough for a free round-trip ticket to Japan, all for spending money I was going to spend anyway. Plus, AmEx waives the card fee for the first year. I think I can cancel the card before that first year is up; even if I can’t, one annual fee for the card (I think it’s $75) is a pretty cheap way to score those 50,000 bonus FF miles.
This Christmas, I flew to see my family (1200 miles one way) using a ticket I obtained by converting just 20,000 accumulated frequent-flyer miles. Check your FF accounts with the various airlines you’ve been flying, and see what you’ve accumulated; you might be pleasantly surprised.
Some people lack the self-control needed to manage a credit card, and they’re wise to stay away. But if you have some measure of self-control and financial discipline, and are able to pay the balance off every month so you don’t get charged interest, you might consider getting and using a credit card that provides you with some sort of perk as described above; it could be to your benefit.
The problem with frequent flyer programs is that there are too many miles (trillions, really) out there being collected by millions of flyers, so that it’s very hard to get a free ticket without using a lot of miles. So I don’t recommend paying for a mileage rewards card or taking a more expensive flight to get miles.
I got 75,000 miles as a Citi aa program. I’ll be flying to Peru (from SE US) and back this spring for a total of 30,000 miles. I’ll also be flying back from Paris this August for 30,000 miles. Leaving me with 15,000 miles left over after applying for credit card and spending $1500 dollars on it as part of a promotional offer. The deal is still available, but you need to spend 4 grand now.
The cost of the card is $85/year, but the fee is waived for the first year (after which you just cancel it and get a different rewards card if you like).
In 2003 when I last worked for a large hotel chain that offered airline miles, we would get charged 1.8¢ (just under two pennies) for each mile we gave.
So in other words if you spent, $500 at our hotel, we gave you 500 airline miles (we had five different airlines to choose from).
It cost the hotel 500 X .018= $9.00 to do this.
As another poster said, the cost of this $9.00 (and all the other points awarded) was factored into the prices for each room we sold
I had two FF accounts, one with Delta and one with Northwest. Imagine my delight when they merged and my FF accounts merged! My miles doubled overnight. Awesome! I thought, now I can take a trip!
No. Not so much. Every time I have tried to cash in my miles, either FF miles reservations are blocked out for that particular flight or the flight requires way more miles than I have. They used to give you free flights at 20K miles. When I hit about 19K miles, they changed it to 25K. Then when I hit about 24K miles, they changed it again to be dependent upon the costs of the different legs of your trip. I think they want 20-25K miles per leg. It takes two flights to get anywhere and two more to come home, so I’m looking at 100K if I want to fly for free. I don’t travel that much. It took me about 15 years just to accumulate the under 50K that I have.
It’s tough to get enough miles to do anything with by just flying unless you travel for business. You need to use reward programs and promotional offers.
For your 3 to 4 international trips per year, do you accumulate the miles for those flights, regardless of how you pay for them? Some airlines do not let miles expire, others will allow you to convert them to a certificate to extend their life. Getting free tickets using miles is not difficult to do.
WRT credit cards that have rewards features, the best one IMHO is American Express. I use AMEX to pay almost ALL of my personal expenses, gasoline, groceries, clothing, even monthly expenses like cable and internet, and certain utility bills. I always pay it off each month, but I accumulate at least 1 point for each dollar I spend and in some cases 3 points for each dollar I spend. All of these points are convertible to multiple airline and hotel points. Almost every vacation I have taken for the last 10 years, the airfare and usually the hotel has been paid for by points.
I have Qantas Frequent Flyer points and have never used them for a ticket or an upgrade (though my wife used some to go on holiday once). I do, however, use them to buy stuff. Qantas have an online store where you can purchase items with your FF points. If you are like me and fly on your employer’s chequebook, collecting and spending FF points is very good as it is a true freebie.
My husband travels a lot on business, and when he can he flies with a Star Alliance airline in order to collect Aeroplan points, and will stay in hotels that give the same points (Marriotts) when he’s in North America. He also has an Aeroplan credit card. He accumulates points at a pretty ridiculous rate, and I get to spend them (usually to join him wherever he is on business)!
In the past couple of years, I’ve used his points for a quick weekend trip to Toronto, a week in Seattle and so far two round trips to England. We are looking at using them for a trip together to Europe this summer. I think he used his points to fly my sister back home from another province at one point too, but I might be misremembering - I know we looked into it.
With Aeroplan, you usually still have to pay airport fees and taxes, so the tickets aren’t free but I’ve never had blacked out flights. It’s a pretty good plan, and has allowed me to take trips that I never could have afforded otherwise. Definitely worth using.
To add another layer, my credit card has “travel rewards.” What this means in my case is that I get double points for spending money on travel (for example when I buy a monthly subway pass for $96, I get 192 points) , and I can turn in my points to reimburse travel-related expenses that I put on the same credit card. So rather than trying to deal with “free tickets” its just a reimbursement program, and you can use the points on any travel related purchase.
I was also going to recommend reading the boards over at Flyertalk. The people there know how to milk frequent flyer programs for all they can get. They know the tiniest details about all the programs, and are usually friendly when newcomers ask questions.
Many of the people who post there are super road warriors, flying every week or two.
I’m not the OP, but I can provide a partial answer based on my experience.
SPI to MCO, 2003ish. I searched via various online travel brokers, found an itinerary and price that I liked, and headed to the American Airlines desk at SPI to purchase my tickets. I told the agent the flight numbers, confirmed times/destinations/etc. and was given the price. $638.21. I pull out my wallet and produce twelve fifties and two twenties.
AGENT: [Eyes get about this big]. Cash? We don’t take… cash.
So I called my mom, asked her to buy the tickets in my name and put them on her credit card, gave her the money, yada yada yada.
No extra issues at security, at least not that I remember.
I understand the OP’s problem, given that I am still getting mail about my Air Canada “frequent-flyer” account based on one return trip from SFO to Vancouver in 2003, which might have earned me as much as eighteen air yards.
Likewise, I recently got sent an Accor Hotels “a|club” card (to use their annoying punctuation), which I assume is because I spent three nights at an Ibis hotel in Budapest in the summer. Do they really send out this crap to any schmuck who passes through their door for a day or two?
Two other points about air miles - there are several “alliances” of airlines which all share a rewards scheme. Star Alliance is one - it has 20 member airlines.
And bear in mind that if you do use miles to buy a flight (especially a short-haul), you often end up paying as much in booking fees etc as you would for a budget airline fare anyway.
Down to basics, which I think the OP means considering the question about merging miles.
Back a long time ago when American started a frequent flier program, the whole point was to build brand loyalty, since in those regulated times there was often not much of a price difference between airlines, and you booked depending on schedule and amenities. If you had a lot of miles on United, say, you’d tend to book other flights on United to get more.
Now things are a lot more complicated. There are lots of alliances, and you might be able to get United miles from flying a Lufthansa flight which is code shared. But you have to book it that way. Airlines discovered that they could make a lot of money by selling frequent flier miles to credit card companies, hotels, or rent-a-car companies, which is why you can sometimes get miles for that. But now they all have their own programs, and would rather build their own brand loyalty.
With the airlines selling miles all over the place, there soon was a glut of them, and booking flights on miles at times you actually wanted to go became more difficult. Ditto for getting upgrades, which 25 years ago was cheap and easy. If you fly often you will see long waiting lists for first class upgrades. They tend to go to frequent fliers with lots and lots of miles, which isn’t people with one overseas trip a year.
As for credit cards, you can get free cards (no annual fees) which give cash back. Discover gives 1%, and up to 5% on things like groceries or gas quite often if you go to their website and click one button - nothing easier. I prefer actual cash to miles, and use it to pay a good chunk of my Christmas credit card bill.
Like the others, if you pay off your bill every month credit cards are good things, and even give you protection from unscrupulous vendors. I don’t know how you would rent a car or even check into a hotel without one these days.
I’ve had very good luck with the frequent flyer program that American has. In addition to my trips for work booked through American as often as possible, I charge everything on my trip to the American AAdvantage credit card. I always offer to book the trips for my co-workers and pay for their rooms as well because they want to simplify their expense reports, and they have an issue with ‘fronting the company money’ for a trip they were required to take for work. Meanwhile, I get thousands of extra miles for all their purchases, and the company pays you back immediately for all expense reports, which are always turned in prior to the bills coming. So, while I sometimes have a $7,000 credit card bill, I pay it all off and get all the miles.
The result is a free trip about once every year and a half. I plan the free trips as far out as I can with as much flexibility as I can because the miles always seem to work on a sliding scale. That is, they theoretically have a 20,000 point ticket to most places you’d want to go, but to go anywhere near the dates you want to go, you can expect to use 35,000. You can also expect multiple leg journeys and red eye flights, but if you willing to put up with that, you can get a lot of free travel. There’s a fee for the card somewhere in the $70 range if I recall, but I find it is well worth it.
I have about 500,000 miles, mostly built up through use of my Alaska Airlines card. Alaska is partnered with several other airlines, such as Northwest, so the miles can be used across carriers. We don’t do any traveling to speak of, but when I do need to it’s nice to have. For instance, I’m flying out to my son’s wedding next may, 1st class for 40K miles. Rule of thumb for mileage is (I think) 2 cents per mile used. If a ticket would cost you less, then you’re probably better off just buying it.
I don’t travel that much. It took me about 15 years just to accumulate the under 50K that I have.