I have been exploring opportunities for mileage building also out of St. Louis. I'm primarily interested in weekend trips. I think that the best way to add miles to one's account in the shortest amount of time is to look at numerous round trips here in the midwest to places like ORD, OMA, MCI, LIT, OKC, TUL, IND.

Taking advantage of the minimum 1000 "actual" miles flown on flights, several quick MCI to ORD round trips with connections in STL will build the base and status miles quickly and cheaply.

The $140 SA14NR fare from MCI to ORD has no minimum stay requirement. Starting early in the day from MCI you can make 2 roundtrips for a total of 8 segments. That's 8,000 base status miles for ~$300. Do that again on Sunday, plus maybe squeeze something in on Friday night, and in a weekend you've got yourself ~20,000 base status miles for $700. I'm trying to think of where you could do this other than flying to Riyadh and back in a weekend, or hoping that several dot com specials to Paris show up again.

I wouldn't wish this itinerary on my best friend, and the possibility of missed connections, etc is very high. If you're elite 1 at least you would get to spend the time in first class. The crews would surely think you're crazy. For each booking you would also get bonus miles and online booking bonus' so it would certainly add up mileage-wise.

I've kept my eye on these midwest fares where TWA competes with Southwest. Generally, they are not great right now. When Southwest runs the $29 each way specials here in the midwest (about 2-3 times per year) all the fares, including the no minimum stay requirement fares drop substantially. I remember seeing the no min for $88 at one point.

My problem is that I always make Elite 1 based on $$ spent and not the miles. I might get close to Platinum this year based on $$, but probably wont get $20,000. So I might consider 2 or 3 weekends of flying to get that extra 50k.