mooper

If you have (or can get, very quickly) a Barclays USAirways branded credit card *and* you have (or purchase a trial for $200) USAirways status, you can register for a promo that expires the end of this month that yields a 75% bonus on hotel-point-to-mile transfers. If you can find people who have Marriott, WR, or SPG points to give, you could have a few hundred thousand transferred to you to yield 1 million US miles. In the case of SPG, because every 20K = 25K miles as a standard bonus, every 20K = 43,750 US miles with this promo stacked. Therefore, it would take just about 457K SPG points to get you there. If you had access to Coupon Connection, you could probably find four or five willing participants to do ~100K SPG each with ease. However, SPG points are highly valued versus most other airline/hotel currencies, so you'd have make generous offers to get people to part with them. Marriott has "Travel Package Awards" that allow 120K points (worth much less than SPG points) converted to miles on a 1-1 basis, as long as you have at least 270K to include the nights portion. That could get you 210K US miles a pop, but it would probably be challenging to find five people who could swing that kind of redemption. You could also buy, at a reasonable price, up to 50K MR points per account to help out. Per previous suggestions, Amex Membership Rewards points are also an option and are valid with US, but don't qualify for the 75% bonus offer. You could combine elements of all of the aforementioned ideas to get you to your goal, as well.

lin821

A few threads that may be of interest to you:

This is some old discussion about corporate programs: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...ms-thread.html. (I recall another (or two) more recent thread about buying miles for business but can't seem to find it right now.)

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...ies-miles.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...ell-miles.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...iles-sale.html

Marathon Man

Wow.
1 million miles?

ok...

1) sign up for like 3 AA CCs. if the 100k one is still available, get that plus two 75s. There's 250k once you make purchases, which will be a gazillion gift cards later turned into coins.

2) get the new Starwood AMEX which I think gives you 25k now. Buy GCs with that too. Then transfer them all to AA, which should give you 30k AA in transfer, plus anything you earned on the card. Now you have at least 280k.

3) I have no idea and all of the above will take you over a month anyway.

4) go back in time to when you could churn citicards and get sign on miles from them. And when you could fund citi savings accts and run up your card bal to well over the limit (like $50-$75k) but that would not work because the cards would have been too new.

5) plan for the need of this many miles well in advance next time?

6) get friends who have them and then get you or them busted by airlines who WILL take miles away if they just perceive any bartering going on at all. WILL.

7) buy them and waste money but whatever promo it is, you could do better with some other prize than miles if you are going to pay that much for it.

8) I forget what 8 was for

good luck!
love to hear if it worked out

MM

crazypalooza

so op, can you share what the 1mm is needed for? I think you've got us all kind of curious.

lwildernorva

Answered in post #18.

benjamino

I saw it was for a promotion, but my guess is their is a way to do the promotion without spending so much money to attain the miles. I would love to know more in detail of what he/she is trying to do. My guess is the folks on this board will give a cheaper/better way to achieve it

skimple

What do you mean by transferable? Do you mean that after you get the 1MM, you want to transfer them to someone else? Or do you mean that you are are trying to find miles that can be transferred into a central account?

Marathon Man

After having thought about this thread a bit more today, I have come to the conclusion that the OP works for the airlines and has been fishing to find out how people deal with such issues, who would do what and at what lengths, and whether or not there are actually people who would bite and try to offer up miles for money

HikerT

<deleted>

redtop43

Buying and selling miles is against the rules of most programs. I'm not sure, and I don't mean to preach, but it might be against the rules of this board to advocate activity that's in violation of program rules.

To buy the miles legitimately, you can get AMEX points at 2.5 cents each, with a max of 500K points per year. You could probably sign up for two Amex cards (and get some kind of signup bonus) and link both to your account, then buy 500K points from each. Or better, find a friend, because I think that each person is allowed to have only one Membership Rewards account and buy 500K points, but you can move miles into an account that isn't necessarily your own.

Of course, the 1 million miles will cost $25,000.

Speaking for myself, even if I had this many miles, I would be nervous about selling them to someone I didn't know. Some airlines are very active in looking for people selling miles, so for all we know, you could be a plant from one of the airlines trying to find people breaking their program rules. I have heard of Delta doing things like this, and I do know of someone who lost their Air Canada account when someone they sold miles to apparently said the wrong thing to the wrong person.

aviators99

This makes no sense. You can't transfer the miles, once you have them. The right way to do this would be to give "a trip anywhere in the world", etc., and just book for the winner when they need it, paying with dollars. It would be cheaper.

Marathon Man

that's why I said what I said in a recent post about the OP. He/she was too vague anyway. This is a set up. I say the thread gets closed so no one who may just be too nice or forthcoming gets burned.

the best advice on here has been the post from Mooper and if OP were legit he or she would have already thanked him for this.

Just an opinion tho.
MM

HikerT

I don't think it's a set up. OP is probably in sales organization and doing a promotion where top rep(s) wins miles. If that's the case it's probably best to query the airlines and see if any are willing offer a package deal which it sounds like he's going to do.

MyTravels

Doubt it, at least unlikely in this instance as a solution was reached relatively quickly

flo_147

Citibank, etc. pay for their miles 2.5cpm!? How will they then ever be break even when they have to pay 2,500 USD for 100,000 miles ie for their respective sign-up promos?

So it's way cheaper then to purchase the miles directly through a promotion ie from US Airways (I am aware of the fine print of the corporate purchased miles)...

-flo-