<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Sweet Willie:
I know this is blasphemy on this board, but I would like to inject some reality.
If neither you or your fiancé are traveling for a business it will take awhile to earn award/free airline tickets.
There is a nice boost of miles at the onset of getting a credit card and applying for other programs, but unless you will be charging a good amount of $ on the cards, it will take awhile to earn enough miles.
I?m not saying FF miles are a bad thing to persue, just want to temper your expectations.
I would try to earn FF miles, but not make that a focus. For instance, for me personally most of the FF mile earning restaurants are very poor or mediocre at best. So even though I?m earning some miles do I really want to spend the $ for a mediocre meal, I know I don?t.
Your honeymoon trip should be based upon your dreams first, then put your pocketbook into the equation to see what you can do. Maybe the dream honeymoon you are thinking of now, becomes your 10 year anniversary trip.
Just my thoughts, I wish you joy in your upcoming marriage.
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Sweet Willie, I'd like to respectfully disagree. I was in the same situation barefoot is currently in 8 months ago. At that time, I had literally zero FF miles and didn't belong to any programs. I currently have 126,000 in AA. I don't fly for business, and only 30,000 of that is from actual flying I've done (a few vacations and a good MR).
I was able to accumulate so many miles by investing a heck of a lot of time to FlyerTalk. I did a lot of research, signed up for credit cards, opened bank accounts, found some loopholes, participated in many offers, and now find myself earning over 12,000 miles a month without paying a dime (through banking and other means). My wedding is still a year and a half away, and I'll reach my goal of 250,000 miles easily.
So barefoot, don't get discouraged. But do realize that you're going to need to spend a lot of time researching to reach your goal. Good luck!
[This message has been edited by MeLike2Travel (edited 07-09-2003).]