The Extra Mile program? worthwile??
 

i just got an email about this program:

* For a $125 fee, you receive a 50% mileage bonus on Continental flights. You can earn a maximum of 12,500 bonus miles.
* For a $175 fee, you receive a 50% mileage bonus on Continental flights. You can earn a maximum of 17,500 bonus miles.



is this worth it??

at $0.01/mile, yes, IMHO.

However, I'm not registering until the last possible day.
Why let CO have my money any sooner than necessary....

If you fly 25K or 35K miles, respectively, most here believe it is a good value.

If you did a $175 mileage run, best case (for example DCA-IAH-SFO) you would earn 11,372 miles plus any bonus for credit card charge. So 17.5K miles is a better deal. Plus a $175 mileage run is hard to come by.

This year there is a 500 mile bonus if you enroll by Dec 7th.

Plus if you put it on your CO MC, you can earn 17,500 + 500 + 350 miles. In total, that's 18350 at 0.954 cents/mile... better than I've ever seen for a MR, but it doesn't net any EQMs.

so what exactly does this program do for me?? thank you.

It earns you more redeemable miles.

Be careful - I’ve been CO Silver for the past 2 years and signed up for this at the beginning of the year, fully expecting to easily earn the miles. But then AC had some great deals and I credited about 28K miles to my Mileage Plus account. Then double EQM came out so it made sense to fly my 2 planned west coast trips on UA, where I’m now Premier Executive. So I haven’t flown a single mile on CO in 2009, despite having paid for this promotion!

That is the big downside. You aren't given the miles, you have to fly to get them.

So if, as above, you expect to possibly *not* fly at least 25k or 35 miles on CO this year, then you could be leaving money on the table.

I certainly plan to at least make silver this year ( yes it is sad to be going back down to that lowly level, but life is cruel). So I'll be doing the $125 for both myself and dergon_gf

thank you for these responses; they were very helpful.

I dont think it is at least for me

@ 1 cent per mile it means paying $250 for 25k = a free coach tkt. I can usually get to where Im going for that amount Southern Cal and would rather not use miles when I can earn 5k in EQMs

So unless the destination you will be using it is usually available for Saver Awards and the fares are usually very high. Id rather use the $175 towards the price of a tkt

then again I have 500k sitting in my acct

using it for Intl upgrades is a different calculation

What are you waiting for? There's still time. :D

I'd argue that using CO miles for domestic flights is never an efficient use, regardless of where they originate from. 25k miles pretty much a quarter of the way towards a transatlantic J flight which could often cost >$5k.

I guess it depends on what trip you're looking to take, but for domestic flights I'll almost always pay $, get EQM, EUA, etc. and save the miles for "real" trips.

True, but if you were paying and there were no miles, would you be paying $5K+ for the J seat, or would you just go in coach, or coach and upgrade?

Not saying I disagree with your value proposition. I, too, use miles for premium int'l trips -- they're more fun. But to use the $5K number as realized value is a bit inaccurate, unless you would've spent the $5K to begin with.

Ok for Intl if 17.5 is 1/4 of a coach tkt then its $175 x 4 = $700. J is min 100k so its $1050 for a J tkt thats if its availble for Saver.

No doubt if a person flys reg and has other ways of getting the additional miles that being able to get a Biz tkt @ saver level is a very good deal

Now someone who doesnt fly so much (obvious theyd want to fly at least 17.5 actual to max out the bonus) then it can take awhile to get all the miles needed for that free BF tkt

I still have a conversation I had with a friend many ayr ago fresh in my head. He basically wanted to know which Carrier to amass his miles on he wanted a free tkt to Europe. He didnt fly on areg basis, maybe 1 time a yr. He basically was gonna do via the CC. Well he didnt charge that much per yr but said I was a waste of his time. After close to 10 yrs of using the CC he finally got enough miles for the free tkt, well that was 9 annual fees he paid, I said you over paid for your tkt just as I told you you would when we spoke about it 10 yrs ago. He paid $675 in annual fees and could have purchased the tkt for less then that.

Point is a person has to look at the forrest and not only the trees. In order to properly decide if something is a good deal Each person must work out how they will use the miles, and how long will it take to get the # of miles needed and the cahnces for being able to get the type of tkt they want , to where they want, when they want