Dear Kunoichi

Hope you enjoyed Hawaii.

Ok here's what to do.

First topping up your miles. Visit
http://www.tbsa.com.au/~ferrett/miles.htm

and see if you can get any extra free United, Ansett or AA miles there. There's quite a few United miles on offer.

So far so good.

Now what to do with those AA miles. I know a bit about this as I have 21,500 miles at the moment so our problems are similar.

If you are not fussy about where you want to go then consider AA's 20,000 miles award on Air Pacific. You get to go from Melbourne to either Tonga or Western Samoa via Fiji with a stopover in Fiji! Now you are probably not too keen on saying hello to George Speight or his cronies at the moment but once things settle down this will be quite a nice destination.

Alternatively you could aim for 25,000 miles which would get you to either Vanuatu, New Caledonia, NZ or most destination in Australia on Qantas.

As for your United miles We'll need a total to give you some idea.

As for Qantas - well you should be aiming for 38,000 points I think it is which is a business/first class trip around Australia (as long as the total is less than 11,000km).

My policy regarding airline miles is to be a member of lots of programs and then I weight up the value to me of each flight based on (1) the cost and (2) number of miles gained. I generally stick to finding cheap deals and worrying about the FF problems till later. The one thing I avoid is flights that do not give miles. You probably don't fly often enough to give yourself a hernia over status.

I might stress that with the Olympics coming up there is a very good chance of some backfilling cheap fares to places like Europe etc. YUM.

Perhaps if you can tell us what are the one or two destinations that you would really liek to visit we can devise a strategy that will help you get there sooner.

cheers Peter





[This message has been edited by ffhound (edited 07-18-2000).]