FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Buying large quantities of miles
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Old Jun 26, 2010 | 9:01 am
  #26  
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Originally Posted by ttervooren
I'd be interest in banding together to purchase. I tried to buy some through the American Airlines "OrderAAmiles" in the business section of their website. We are having our annual meeting in Jamaica in March and I thought it would be cool to give out some miles to our key employees as a reward. We are a small company and I want to buy 200,000. But I could not do it as we don't have a website and that is a "required" field on their form. I guess I could build a website, but haven't yet. Anyway, if you are taking names, I'd be interested in buying some miles.
I seem to recall a few years back someone had this as an idea (create a company, buy the miles in the name of the company, and "award" the miles to the promotors). As I recall, the airlines they were interested in buying the miles from had a limit on the number of miles that could be given to any single "employee" or user account. The limit, although high, made this mechanism not useful for someone who wanted hundreds of thousands of miles. (As I recall, the limit was something like 100K miles per year.)

I was thinking at the time that there must be some way to do an exception (see Pudding Guy, etc.), and it may be that the airlines would permit such large transfers on a case-by-case basis. Whether a promotor could persuade them that simply using the miles to reward the promotors was something they should approve, however, seems problematic.

Or it may be that the annual limits are no longer applied.

Anyway, that looks like an avenue that merits exploring . . .
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