Live Search Club/Bing -earn up to 2500 miles on various airlines
 

I searched and was not able to find anything about this. Wasn't sure where to post, but since S.P.A.M. is alternative points and miles, I thought this was definitely the place to start.

I stumbled on this strictly by accident, but the bottom line is, you can play various games (word search, etc). and earn tickets that will allow you to convert to up to 2,500 miles at a time on the following airlines: Alaska, American Airlines, Delta, Frontier, Hawaiian, Midwest, and US Airways.

There are other prizes too (all microsoft products), but I thought this was interesting. Unfortunate for me that NW is not one of the airlines, but I guess I will dump them in US. In any event, this could be a way to earn a free ticket without ever getting on a plane. Slowly, but hey...


http://club.live.com/home.aspx

It's a great find! Since it's a Microsoft-owned site, I guess we have some assurance that the miles would actually be awarded. If nothing else, I would be interested in getting a small amount of points into a couple of programs to keep my accts active.

Do you have any idea how much time and effort you have to devote to this to actually earn some miles? Judging from http://club.live.com/leaderboard.aspx someone has earned 21,000 "tickets" in a week, and http://club.live.com/get_prizes.aspx says 4300 tickets gets you 2500 miles, but I have no idea how much time, energy, and skill are needed.

Here is what I have discovered:

1) I think the people who have earned 21,000 tickets in a week have nothing better to do. I pick it up when I can (kinda like flyertalk). I am curently up to about 3500 points, and have played off and on the past week.

2) Flexicon is the game that awards the most tickets in 1 game (25), and it actually goes pretty quickly. Every once in a while there will be something that stumps me and I will have to go away and come back. I would not call it hard. You also have clues and can always go to google if the particular one doesn't have a clue. Also, it's fun if you like that kinda thing (I do). They seem to add new puzzles daily, but I have worked all the puzzles currently available and had to wait until the next day (or whenever I got to it) to play again. I have played some of the others, they are okay, just not as rewarding.

I tried out Flexicon and Seekado. Flexicon seems like the best--good ticket value, enjoyable, and slightly intellectual.

Take note that the airline awards have different ticket values--you get more miles per ticket at the 2,500 level than the other levels. (If you only redeemed 100 miles, by the time you used the same amount of tickets that you could have used for 2,500 miles, you would only have 1,700 miles.)

I wonder how long the airline rewards will last, and if there may be a ticket devaluation down the line.

That seems to be the case with alot of redemptions, I didn't calculate it, but figured as much, so I was waiting until I had the 4300 before I redeemed. But thanks for noting. I'm sure that the more people who redeem for miles, the will reevaluate it. But I figure may as well get it while gettings good.

The other thing I noticed is the more you do, the clues start reappearing, so that's good, you will eventually be able to do them "in the dark". :p

Great find. I'm not as good with the crosswords so far, so I'm having better luck with Clink. It's only 10 points per, so maybe I'll go back to Flexicon.

I thought I would be the guinea pig to test out the redemption process. I just redeemed for 100 AA miles, and it told me it would take 19 days.

I'll post when I get the miles. :cool:

Great find - thanks! It'll take me a month to burn out on it, but by then I might have a couple thousand US miles.

Good find OP!
I kept seeing that Chickionary banner, but it never made me think miles were involved! With me nursing Mom after her broken shoulder and surgery, I have plenty of time to kill!! Miles here I come!!

At least there is a variety of airlines, and there is not a limit as yet, like the 1 per household limit on hardware and software items.

JudyJFLA

The jury is still out on this one. I redeemed for AA miles back in November and I'm still waiting for them to hit my account. If it is reliable, this will be a nice way to keep an account active as there are several airline options.

Is it just me or are some of these games really difficult? I'm a scientist so I just draw pretty molecules all day...haven't had to use real words in a while. :D

I found the easiest (and mindless) way to get points is via 'Chicktionary'. I type the letters into an anagram dictionary like this one:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/adam.bo...gramsolver.htm

and it gives me the answers. There is no time limit for this game. I get the max of 20 tickets every game. A game lasts me aprox 3 minutes.

Hint: You can use your keyboard to type the solutions rather than clicking on the chickens.

I think the point to the flexicon game is that msn is most likely getting paid for some of the search clicks?

As long as they pay us off I will be happy. I am still fighting with Bointz for a $75 gift card since they just shut down without warning last month.

JudyJFLA

I was already addicted to Chicktionary... like I needed an excuse. :)

You stole my advice! :p

I got thousands of points using chicktionary a few months ago (I could get the full 20 points in under two minutes, I was that good :D). I would use the 'word builder' on hasbro's scrabble website:

http://www.hasbro.com/games/adult-ga...ictionary/dict

The only thing that limited me was that after about 20-30 games it says no more are available and you have to wait a week or so for more.

Also, I saw in an article in the International Herald Tribune that Microsoft gets money from these games as each time you hit something, it does a search on their 'Live' search engine, which artificially inflates their independently measured share of the search market... Kinda smart.