Afternoon everybody, been reading for a long time, just started posting recently. To date I am going to be a few segments short of silver at the years end as I changed jobs in July. I am looking for help gaining a few segments between now and the rest of the year. The hard part for me is I travel on 24 hours notice.

For example, I need to go from ATL to MSY tomorrow and back at some point Wednesday, I am open to a few legs tomorrow if possible and potentially on the way home, it just seems as though the $/mile or $/segment is crazy high for anything I can find.

Is there a better way or avenue to look for cheap segments than what is commonly known?

I am sure this has been asked, unfortunately I could not find the info in search. Thank you all for the help.

Try to call and use SDC/SDS to add segments. You will be hit with a $50 fee.

Do you have enough MQDs (or a waiver)? I would think the answer is yes for your travel pattern, but you should check.

Thank you for the reply and idea, I do have the MQDs well beyond the level that I am able to obtain with MQMs or MQSs. Next year will be different travelling at this clip all year.

How many MQMs do you have? Last year DL sold MQMs (but not MQSs) at the end of the year, but they were generally expensive.

Otherwise, you might need to devote a day of so to flying before the end of the year. Check the MileageRun forum on FT for ideas.

Roughly 11,992 MQMs, a lot of flights from ATL-TPA and ATL-RIC so the MQMs accrue slow. I am fine with a run if need be, I was/am hoping to find a few easy MQS on my way places if possible.

Most fares out of ATL on DL in the eastern US require non-stop routing. You might find an agent who will ignore the fare rules and add a segment for you just for MR purposes, but I wouldn't necessarily count on it.

There are a few smaller destinations out of ATL where DL allows one-stop routings and the prices aren't too high. For example, you can do ATL-DTW-CAK-DTW-ATL for $200 on Saturday, December 6th (and a number of other midweek dates in December). Otherwise, you pretty much need to look at flying out of nearby airports (BHM, CHA, AGS, GSP, etc.) to get decent prices on segment runs.

I would also add the ITA Matrix is pretty good at finding multi-segment broken fare options which aren't much more (and sometimes less) than non-stop fares (use DL+ for the routing option).

this is probably your best bet when it comes to adding a couple of segments onto a trip that would otherwise originate and terminate ATL

However, if it's a business trip, it could be strange to explain why the person suddenly decided to fly from some airport other than ATL. There could be reimbursement issues. OTOH, if OP stresses cost savings of doing this, he/she could be expected to do that all the time.

Last December I did a few Saturdays with RT's from ATL-JAX. It's a 30 min flight with roughly 45 mins on each end. You can do up to 3 RTs in a single day giving you 6 segments. I booked the tickets mid-year last year, so they weren't very expensive. Don't know what they are now.

Good luck.

Thank you all for the help, ended up booking direct for tomorrow ATL-MSY (P) seats and will try and complete a run before the end of the year.

As mentioned flying out of a different AP is rough due to expense report reasons, however numerous segments in the middle are not hard to get by. Ultimately that is a blessing and a curse flying out of ATL.

Thank you again and hopefully I will be able to get the remaining few segments out of the way before 1.1

there are a LOT of things that COULD happen, but I'm seeing an awful lot of academic "what-about?" and "what-if?" rebuttals to pretty much everything pretty much ALL the time ...

I just chose to echo the point that LBJ made to the OP (which happens to be one that we both made in a similar thread last week)

I requested to fly out of and back into CHO a couple years ago: fares out of both DCA and IAD to wherever I was going were ridiculous, so I would have had to provide a pretty strong justification for not using BWI ... the drive to/from CHO was about 15 miles farther each way but significantly less stressful, and the extra cost for mileage ($15, at 50c/mile) was offset by $5/day parking rather than $9-15 at BWI ... and had I chosen to do use CHO again it would have been a simple matter to show the math again