When can I expect to see bonus mile offers that extend thru April. Planning a SPring Break trip with the kids and need to collect miles to cover our summer trip to Florida.
Most interested in United and American (best fares right now...) Thanks for your ideas!

Bonus mile offers are constantly posted on aa.com, throughout the entire year. The destinations merely change....

UA also has double miles offers running right now, any published fare.

All you need to do is actually look at aa.com or united.com, it's all there...

What is your Spring Break destination? AA and UA always have a set of bonus offers on targeted routes, but usually those are new routes or areas where they want to win traffic from a competitor. Since they probably wouldn't put a "traditional" Spring Break destination (Florida, etc.) on the list, your best bet is to seek out the lowest airfares and then book via the airline's website to get 1000 bonus miles per ticket.

Also: tickets to Florida in the summer are cheap, unless you are going for a special event. It's both very hot and (late summer) hurricane season, so you can score hotel and flight deals if you are a little flexible. My wife and I go to visit family in FL every summer and stay in (mostly empty) five-star hotels.

In other words: your best bet might be simply to select your favorite from AA or UA/US and seek low fares for both trips, using miles at a later date.

Udate Post:
We are flying Washington DC to San Fran/OAK/San Jose in April. I checked both sites and all current offers expire in March. Wondering if I buy now and double or triple miles offer appears later - can I call to get the miles benefit on the pre-purchased tickets? Or should I wait?

Also - banking miles to pay for week of hotel in Jacksonville, Florida in August. Currently watching those deals as well - but I managed to pay for an entire week in New Orleans by transferring miles last summer.

In my experience, which is fairly extensive with AA and limited (at least in recent years) elsewhere, it doesn't matter when you bought your ticket. If you fly when you have to fly, you get the bonus. I've lucked out more than once when a bonus showed up that matched something I had already booked.

On a related topic, check the fares for a routing through Florida since you may be past the worst of the high season there. Last October I had to fly BOS-SEA. A routing via ORD westbound cost $1,400 for the round trip. (Business trip, no Sat. night stay, not much advance notice.) Changing the BOS-ORD nonstop to BOS-MCO-ORD, connecting to the same flight ORD-SEA and with no changes to the nonstop return, cut it to $1,000. Go figure.

Not sure how firm your travel plans are, but a hotel in Jax in August can probably be secured VERY cheaply via Priceline. See biddingfortravel.com for more information about what properties, star levels, zones, and winning bids have been for that area. (Note that most PCLN winning bids occur within a month or two of the travel dates, so you could definitely wait until your dates firm up before bidding.)

If you absolutely must stay at a particular property, use a tool like Travelaxe to get a feel for the lowest available paid rates. Sometimes you'll find a rate at your desired hotel for half of what you thought it would cost you, simply by agreeing to lock in your dates and giving up the ability to earn hotel points.

I just throw these ideas out because using miles to achieve free hotel stays (whether through a conversion to hotel points or through a direct award) usually results in a lot less value-per-mile than an airline award redemption. If we're talking about orphaned miles, that's not a big deal, but you might not want to take yourself out of an award level (>25,000 miles) if Priceline (or other discounter) can put you in a nice hotel for $50 or less per room-night.

Priority club has a deal for double miles from march 1 through may 31. You can earn miles on aa or united by staying at their hotels.
http://www.sixcontinentshotels.com/h...rs/us/ho3.html

The UA deal for double miles stipulates that travel must be booked by January 21st and travel completed by April 4th.

For the air portion, I did manage to successfully price the $198 UA IAD-OAK fare on a routing: IAD-EWR-DEN-SFO-LAX-OAK-LAX-SFO-IAD for $229 including tax (posted in Mileage Run). Not that you'd want to do that with a bunch of kids along. "Mrs. TeacherType, here are your five boarding passes, and the five for your husband, and five for each of your two kids. Twenty boarding cards in all."

As for hotels, there are lots of hotel vacancies in SF because of the economic downturn. I suggest forgetting the hotel points and booking with Priceline. Check www.biddingfortravel.com for bidding strategies. You routinely see the Grand Hyatt SF come up for $55 on Priceline for a 4-star downtonwn SF property. That kind of deal far offsets any sort of mileage perk.

Nice job on the routing, channa!

Good point on that Grand Hyatt, too! I did a weekend stay there a couple years ago on a $99 Expedia Special Rate and felt like I was practically stealing a hotel room. It's a nice place - big rooms, a couple of pleasant lounges, good concierge, etc.