Originally Posted by
cayohueso
In my particular case, only 20% of the miles I used were from flying, the rest were transferable credit card rewards from my day to day spending not MS.
Yes, that's one way to do it (and it helped push me into Million-Mile status for Lifetime Gold before AA changed it to count only actual miles flown). Now, though, most of my spending goes on a Fidelity Visa- 2% cash back on everything and the cash goes straight into my travel budget, meaning I can choose whatever airline I want. I use dmy AA MC enough to get the sign-on bonus and now I use it only for gas, restaurants and airfares on AA, all of which give you 2 miles per $ spent. I look for the highest return on my credit card spending (I pay in full every month so don't care about finance and other charges) and airline miles generally aren't it.
Originally Posted by
BearX220
Back in the first decade of the century I redeemed to take the family to Oz three times in business. That era is over. Either the seats aren't available, or the "price" would be more than a million miles per trip. If anyone still thinks they can earn miles flying a modest number of paid trips for two or three years, then easily end up in J or F to Australia, they are kidding themselves; the airlines tease great things when hawking credit cards with big bonuses, but the big aspirational redemptions are actually rare and take hard work and compromise.
My favorite "score" during that time was rescuing 100,000 miles that were in DH's account from expiring by buying a $15 iTunes gift card off the AA.com portal. (Gift cards don't always qualify for points but this did.) We later used those miles to fly to Spain in Business Class.
Bet we couldn't do that again.