US Airways Dividend Miles (Pre-FlightFund Merger) - Help making gold?

I recently found FT. What a valuable resource!

I make PHL-PIT trips for business about twice a month. I made Silver last year on segments. This year, because of GOM (I was targetted) I'm about even on segments and miles.

Right now I have 26074 miles and 33 segments. Trips already scheduled for the rest of the year will get me up to 31176 miles and 42 segments, well short of gold.

If I try hard enough, I could probably get the 10K bonus from the Plat. Visa by the end of the year.

Questions:
1. Any ideas on cheap and fast ways to get an extra 9000 tier miles? I'd be willing to spend a few hundred bucks and a day or so to get gold.
2. I really can't play too many games with the PHL-PIT segments I fly, since if it takes too much time I'd be better off driving. Any ideas on ways to maximize the earning potential here?
3. If I barely make $25K on the Plat. Visa by the end of the year, and the extra 10K miles would push me over the 50K for gold, will I actually get gold? When? Can somebody at BOA tell me how many $ I've spent, or do I need to add it up myself?
4. I currently have an award booked to go PHL-MAD in Envoy in December with Mrs. tw0i. Would it be worth it to cancel the award for me and pay for a upgradeable coach RT? Since V class doesn't seem to be upgradeable, how do I go about figuring out how much this would cost? Did I understand correctly that upgrading from miles comes out of I inventory and gets the class-of-service bonus that counts toward tier status?

First, how soon can you spend enough to get the BofA 10k miles? Seems risky to count on that posting in time ... the sooner the better for you on that.

Second, yes, cancel your Envoy award ticket and book a revenue ticket in coach. Just go to USAirways.com and put in PHL-MAD and select Flexible dates, then look for fare classes that aren't V class by looking at the fare rules ... in this case right now the second and fourth ones listed are Q class and are $426/$476 R/T, so you're looking at $500-$550 or so for the ticket. It's tricky at best to try and book a specific fare class on the website though, so just call or book the ticket in person to make sure you get a Q class ticket (the website always wants to sell you the cheapest ticket in these cases).

I agree with Beckles, though you may end up sitting in coach to Madrid if you can't upgrade with miles or SWU's. Since you seem much closer in segments than miles, book it out of BWI (or another city other than PHL that is close to you). That will leave you only four segments short of Gold.

Depending on when you earned most of your miles and segments:

If you call DM they have a standing offer whereby you get Gold by flying 16 segements from Oct 1 - Dec 31. They may allow you to qualify retroactively.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by ATC:
That will leave you only four segments short of Gold. </font>

Not true. That would only get him to 46 segments. It takes 60 to get Gold.

D'OH! For some reason I was thinking Gold required 50 segments.

never mind.

Well, I just got off the phone with reservations. I can get a Q roundtrip PHL-MAD for my dates for $560.80, but there's no O inventory available to upgrade the outbound segment.

The agent offered that I could pay $814 for a B-class outbound and a Q class return which she could upgrade immediately.

That plus $35 to turn in my award ticket and get my miles back.

That gets me 7346 tier miles and another 3673 in bonus miles.

At that rate, I'm inclined to not think it's worth it. Hopefully they'll have a gold challenge early in 2003 that I will qualify for...

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by gnaget:
If you call DM they have a standing offer whereby you get Gold by flying 16 segements from Oct 1 - Dec 31. They may allow you to qualify retroactively.</font>

Does this apply to anybody? I'm currently GP, but it's been a bad year for flying. I'm currently doing 4 segs/week and will probably make SP by the end of the year, but sure would like the bonuses next year.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by tw0i:
Well, I just got off the phone with reservations. I can get a Q roundtrip PHL-MAD for my dates for $560.80, but there's no O inventory available to upgrade the outbound segment.

The agent offered that I could pay $814 for a B-class outbound and a Q class return which she could upgrade immediately.

That plus $35 to turn in my award ticket and get my miles back.

That gets me 7346 tier miles and another 3673 in bonus miles.

At that rate, I'm inclined to not think it's worth it. Hopefully they'll have a gold challenge early in 2003 that I will qualify for...</font>

Is Q class always upgradeable in advance anytime???

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by bfunkjeep:
Is Q class always upgradeable in advance anytime???</font>

I think it would be if you used miles to upgrade and if there was "O" inventory available.

My question is how does paying for B instead of Q make an upgrade become available? If you upgrade from Q to Envoy it comes out of "O". Is there another upgrade bucket for upgrading "B" (and "Y") fares?

Also, the fact that the B outbound instead of the Q outbound is only $254 more doesn't seem that bad. And in general, $814 isn't bad for Envoy. Of course, I guess you'd have to add in the cost of upgrading. $814, plus a couple DMUPSYS02's for Envoy is a good deal. $814, plus 30K (10K to upgrade B outbound and 20K to upgrade Q return) miles (=$600 @$.02/mi), is still $1414 for Envoy...still not bad? http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

Now, compare that with the cost of your award ticket. 80,000 miles at $.02 per mile is $1600. Put next to one another, the award ticket is $186 "more expensive" (or $137 more expensive taking the cost of redepositing your award ticket into account).

Now, if you paid for the ticket, you'd earn at least 11,019 miles that you wouldn't if you travelled on the award ticket. Assuming you could get $.02 per mile for those miles in the value of a future award, you could subtract about $220 from the cost of the paid ticket. That makes it $594, plus the $600 for your 30K miles in upgrades, which totals $1194 of hypothetical "value" paid for the purchased and upgraded Envoy ticket. That's $406 less expensive than the hypothetical "value" of an 80K Envoy award. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

Gosh, that made me tired... http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

Of course, that's just looking at the ticket by itself outside of the larger context of your goal to make Gold. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

[This message has been edited by ThisFlightNoFuel (edited 11-16-2002).]

I don't really understand people who value their miles at $0.02. If I did that I'd never use the miles for anything.

My threshold for using miles for a domestic leisure ticket is around $300. Even at that level, I wind up paying for the tickets about 3/4 of the time.

Oh, but thanks for the analysis, by the way.

I had done a similar analysis and I figured out that even if I could manage to spend enough on my Plat Visa (I'm about $10K short) AND paid for this ticket, I'd still be short about 1500 tier miles, and I just don't have any time left this year to make that happen. Basically, I'm already travelling somewhere every weekday for the rest of the year as it is.

Makes me regret not having fully taken advantage of GOM.

Have you considered the US Shuttle? They're offering triple status miles till Dec 31. If you drove or flew to LGA or DCA and spent a Saturday making three roundtrips, you'd hit 9,000 tier miles in a day, for under $350...

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by tw0i:
The agent offered that I could pay $814 for a B-class outbound and a Q class return which she could upgrade immediately.
</font>

I think we still have an unexplained point here - why does the B fare have availability when the Q does not???

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by BigLar:
Does this apply to anybody? I'm currently GP, but it's been a bad year for flying. I'm currently doing 4 segs/week and will probably make SP by the end of the year, but sure would like the bonuses next year.
</font>

Yes...you just have to register for it. Call the Dividend Miles Service Center for more information.

I'll be ****ed! I just called DM and they verified it. I have 14 segs as of today, and will pick up the remaining 2 this weekend.

The only thing that bothers me is, if they're giving it away so cheaply, maybe it won't be worth much.

BTW, where did you find out about this? It's certainly not on the website that I can find.

Okay, I just talked to the DM desk, and they signed me up for a gold preferred fast track promotion (#4965)that requires 14 segments or 10K miles between 9/1 and 12/15.

She signed me up retroactively - I'll be flying my 14th segment since 9/1 on 12/2. She said at that point I would need to call and they would manually upgrade me to gold!

Thanks for the suggestion!

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by TribeFlyer:
Have you considered the US Shuttle? They're offering triple status miles till Dec 31. If you drove or flew to LGA or DCA and spent a Saturday making three roundtrips, you'd hit 9,000 tier miles in a day, for under $350... </font>

Actually, I was playing around looking at fares yesterday, and I was able to find a run of BWI-PHL-LGA-BOS-LGA-PHL-BWI for $98. The LGA-BOS-LGA part is on the shuttle. With the triple miles on shuttle, the total is 5000 tier miles.

And with the current Amtrak sale, I can go PHL-BWI one way for around $25. On the return I could get off at PHL and only lose 500 miles.

I was tempted to do it before I found out that they would let me sign up for the challenge retroactively.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by tw0i:
Actually, I was playing around looking at fares yesterday, and I was able to find a run of BWI-PHL-LGA-BOS-LGA-PHL-BWI for $98. The LGA-BOS-LGA part is on the shuttle. With the triple miles on shuttle, the total is 5000 tier miles.

And with the current Amtrak sale, I can go PHL-BWI one way for around $25. On the return I could get off at PHL and only lose 500 miles.

I was tempted to do it before I found out that they would let me sign up for the challenge retroactively.</font>

What were dates for that itinerary?

I would be interested in this same trip too. Can you provide dates?

Chris

The $98 fare is a 21-day advance. I was looking over the weekend at doing the trip on 12/8.

I can't seem to get the same itinerary for 12/14, because flight 2635 BOS-LGA at 4:00 PM isn't available.

I was able to get a similar set of flights (except not through PHL on the outbound section) using ITN. Just look at the timetables from usairways.com, figure out what flights you want, then type it all into the multiple cities page at ITN.

Example:

BWI-LGA 3530 10:15 -11:20
LGA-BOS 2626 12:00 - 1:01
BOS-LGA 2631 2:00 - 3:04
LGA-PHL 3946 5:35 - 6:50
PHL-BWI 228 7:50 - 8:50

$98 + taxes = $129

I booked the BWI mile bonanza....I got it for about $133 r/t booked via usairways.com. Mine is actually 6 segments

I did not do the 10:00 pairing as I felt that 40 minutes connection time from the BWI-LGA to the LGA-BOS flight was cutting it a bit too close - especially in December.

Folks can e-mail if they want the itinerary.

This may be a fun little run for DC/BWI/PHL US FFs in need of a last minute boost. Moreover, it'd be a great time for a proud display of particular badges of honor...

[This message has been edited by ITRADE (edited 11-22-2002).]

Unlike most people here I didn't get in on the GOM racket so my account is pretty clean. I called DM about something and they told me that they offer the GP promotion "upon request" -- it's not advertised. I think they may have it available like the AA challenge qualification program for people who inquire. (I was fishing for getting them to hook me up with a CP promotion. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif )

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by BigLar:
I'll be ****ed! I just called DM and they verified it. I have 14 segs as of today, and will pick up the remaining 2 this weekend.

The only thing that bothers me is, if they're giving it away so cheaply, maybe it won't be worth much.

BTW, where did you find out about this? It's certainly not on the website that I can find.</font>

Actually, this was not the one that I was thinking about. It sounds like BigLar got the non-targeted promotion, which was 16 segments. Well, that was nice of them.....

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by tw0i:
Okay, I just talked to the DM desk, and they signed me up for a gold preferred fast track promotion (#4965)that requires 14 segments or 10K miles between 9/1 and 12/15.

She signed me up retroactively - I'll be flying my 14th segment since 9/1 on 12/2. She said at that point I would need to call and they would manually upgrade me to gold!

Thanks for the suggestion!</font>

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Beckles:
First, how soon can you spend enough to get the BofA 10k miles?</font>

Savings Bonds purchased by Visa from the US Treasury Department. Then cash 'em in.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by BigLar:


The only thing that bothers me is, if they're giving it away so cheaply, maybe it won't be worth much.

</font>

Not necessarily. If you're going to spend the money and go to the effort, with the potential of getting 100% mileage bonuses, upgrades, and discounted Club memberships, why not offer the promotion? It's a one-time only gig and if you don't make it, no harm-no foul.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by ThisFlightNoFuel:
Is there another upgrade bucket for upgrading "B" (and "Y") fares?

</font>

Yes. It's called "I."