What got you interested in Avios/ air miles?
 

There are plenty of people who travel often and who just collect air miles/ status naturally. On Flyertalk, and these threads everyone clearly loves finding the best TP/ Avios earning, and spending methods and tricks. What got you intrested?

I gather from this forum that a large proportion of posters are in Finance/ VC/PE etc - is the love of miles in some way related to this and the nature of your jobs?

I can see this thread being moved pretty soon...

That said, what got me interested was the ability to do one of the things I love the most (travelling) and do it by flying on premium cabins.

A really awful experience flying LAX-LGW on a Norwegian 787.

The 100,000-mile sign-up bonus when the Chase/BA credit card was introduced here in the U.S. several years ago.

I started with the 72 points per dollar Nordstrom deal and continued with the 100,000 credit card signup. Since then there have been other ridiculously good deals such as the Iberia Avios GroupOn deal and the more recent Iberia deal where you got points upon purchase without the requirement to fly.

In 2005 I had just about had enough of Air Canada's dirty,duct taped and ancient international J seats and a FFP that had gone from being about the best to being only useful if Super Elite. I had always envied people flying BA J as at that time it was the best out there transatlantic. I'd already been on FT for quite awhile and realized with some well planned flights I could hit Silver really fast while only actually buying CW once and transferring SPG points to pay for my WT+ to CW UuA flights which was cheap and easy to do back then. Here we are in 2018 and now I always prefer flying AC J transatlantic but BAEC is still the best for me and staying Gold is easy. I still can get AC/*J by transferring hotel and MR points to Aeroplan. Always been a leisure flyer and have just recently retired from business.

A family holiday to Paris (from Malaysia). I didn't particularly want to fly 13 hours in economy class so started looking at premium economy options. As we were flying with a toddler, I wanted a program with family accounts. BAEC fit the bill and we signed up for it, earning 42000 avios for the 3 of us.

A cheap business class flight to Seoul on MH got us 360 TP and pushed us to Silver. Loving it right now.

In my case, it was 1989 - when my dad proudly announced we were having a mini-break in Brussels, via BA - a *scheduled* airline! That was apparently A Big Thing, but as a 9-year-old I didn't appreciate the difference.

I don't know how he spent enough to do it, but he mentioned it was paid for by "Air Miles", which he'd got via his NatWest credit card. As a result, my mum, dad and I had a really nice long weekend and yes, the flights were fine (and didn't involve getting up at 3 AM as the trip to Malta two years earlier - my first flight - had done!)

It had such an effect on me that when I later got my own credit card, in 2001, it was with NatWest. The earning rate was pants (1 Air Mile per £20 spent, as I recall, which is 0.5 Avios per pound in today's equivalent). I didn't get close to earning enough for a flight, but it gave me the bug.

It was then with great satisfaction that thanks to Flyertalk, Tesco, Topcashback and a number of online casinos offering silly signup cashback that I was able to take my dad via BA First to LA and Vegas several years ago. I'd like to think it was a nice way of paying him back for showing me what Air Miles could do! We subsequently had a couple more trips paid for by Avios until he died two years ago - he gathered them with great relish and to this day I still have a substantial Avios balance I'm working through.

To see for myself how useful avios can be*, after having read a lot about it on the fresh discovered FT, just 4 years ago.
Pity I can earn them basically only flying; there is almost nothing in BE to collect any kind of air miles.


*(way better than M&M in my case).

Whilst I was working away, I started to stay in chains a lot more when I moved jobs. One of my colleagues told me about the BA Amex and the 241 voucher. Found FT via google and the next thing I know Mrs Toothy and I are flying F to LAX and we've done quite nicely out of it since.

Ironically I was doing a lot more flying before changing jobs, including J across to the US every other month, but with different airlines and I wasn't aware of the points game. I did get to gold with BD though from the MAN-ORD flight a lot.


T