I'm actually helping my parents buy tix for my grandparents. They will come from DEL and need to go straight to IAH or stop at BOS then go to IAH. After IAH attend my brother's wedding in ALB, then drive to BOS stay with my uncle and then leave for DEL. I priced out DEL-ZRH-DFW-IAH, then IAH-DFW-EWR, then drive with my brother from NYC to ALB for wedding, then hitch a ride to BOS with my uncle, then BOS-ZRH-DEL. With some rather ingenious ticketing on my part I have knocked the whole thing down to $1090 from aa.com.
However my uncle is a professor and will be driving down to IAH for the summer. They can fly on Royal Jordanian from DEL-NYC for only $900. He offered to drive to NYC from BOS to pick them up, take them back to BOS for a week, then drive from BOS to IAH, then Drive back to BOS, then drive to wedding in ALB and back to BOS for a week, then drop them off in NYC.
To me it seems crazy to do all this driving for $190 X 2 tix. Granted my uncle will be doing the BOS-IAH rt anyways, but my grandparents are probably 80 and I don't really think driving 2000 miles each way sounds fun or practical. Also BOS-NYC for 2 RT's is not exactly nothing.
My parents offered to buy their tickets, but grandparents won't let it happen. However they seem to feel that all this driving is worth the $190 fare difference. I probably have no understanding of how tight money is to people in India. But I'd gladly pay the extra money, enroll them in FF accounts and use the miles for myself. I'm sure my parents would have no problem doing that either. Just have to convince the grandparents that this isn't actually charity but something we want.
It's not exactly 25K but close enough. About 19K miles + 1K Online booking. If I sign them up for gold challenge, it seems they could net another 2300 or so. I'd top off the account with Kelloggs miles.
By the way, this is actually a pretty good mileage run. Get's even cheaper by replacing BOS with ORD. You could probably get some more miles by adding short segments and maybe could go even further out of the way then IAH. It is pricing as DEL-EWR outbound, BOS-DEL return.