Originally Posted by Shareholder

Since you're a newbie, and FT has been around for almost a decade, it is a pretty sure bet this has indeed been talked about quite a bit. Nothing unique...and as the caveat notes, be sure you can get a seat when you want it before buying those miles/points. The likelihood is so negligible it will only be of value to someone who is very flexible in their plans. Even if you find available F seats on SQ or any other partner airline, they are likely to have vanished by the time the miles/points are purchased and ready to be redeemed.

The classic example of such a "mileage purchase" was actually offered by FT's monthly periodical, INSIDE FLYER. It was offering SPG points for each subsciption purchased. As it transpired, if you bought $1,500 worth of subscriptions (30), the SPG points earned would be enough to get a First Class or Concorde ticket through QF's FF program. And there were lots of award seats available on Concorde once she started flying again. So lots of subscriptions were sold -- and in true FT fashion, offered up for free to those who wanted them by those who bought them. A Concorde seat went for $12,000 return back then, so quite a deal.

Of course, what also made it so good was the fact that for every 20K of SPG points one transferred to QF, SPG tossed in another 5K, so lots of us just used the SPG points we already had: It was 100K SPG points to get the 120K QF points needed.