Originally Posted by Gardyloo

An example: although AA's program has recently changed (much for the worse IMO) a few years ago my wife and I instituted a rolling three-year plan that was - for us - a very effective way to travel very comfortably at remarkably low cost. We would buy a DONE4 or DONE5 (usually starting in South Africa) in year one and use it to travel for that calendar year, visiting places on our own priority lists - Africa, Australia, South America, family in Israel, New York and Alaska... all of it in business or first class.

Over that year we'd each earn upwards of 120,000 AA frequent flyer miles (counting elite and class of service bonuses) that we'd then spend in the following year with a limited travel plan - maybe just a return trip to Europe in business class, or a couple of domestic first class trips within the US.

Then in the third year we'd repeat the process. Pay for an RTW for year 3, fly on awards in year 4, and so on. We did several iterations of this.

The result was, counting the 16 segments in the RTW and, say, 4-6 segments using the miles, that we were getting upwards of 20 business- or first class flights over two years at an average cost of something like US$250 or $300 per flight. That's pretty good for Seattle to Chicago, but hard to beat for London to Sydney or New York to Hong Kong.