A good book?
 

I'd love to find a good book on miles, points, travel tips, etc. You have a Bookclub section but it has not been kept up. The top book listed was written in 2005 and I'm sure much has changed by then. Anyone suggest an up-to-date book they loved??

I suspect it hasn't been kept up because so much of the information has moved online in the last dozen years. Airline, hotel, rental car and credit card programs are constantly changing, meaning that most books would be outdated before the book hits the shelves.

With the constant changes, a book is likely to be outdated by the time it's been produced. Plenty of online material though...

Books outdated?
 

I agree about bookings being outdated quickly, but even an ebook would be nice rather then having to sort thru gobs of online info. Just to sit back, relax and catch up, with all the info in one place.

I don't think this exists. It seems you are looking for 'airmiles for dummies' kind of thing? As others have said, there is little point in publishing this.

You're right, if you're thinking of FTers as the audience - but I bet it would sell if someone wrote it (and it was reasonably current as of its publication date).

Any would-be authors want to give it a shot?

Yes, but with the correct info? :confused: That requires a ton of proofreading. There's a ton of blogs about points/miles stuff out there that are often quite wrong about this or that. It's the interactive nature of those that take feedback that corrects such errors. A book that doesn't go through an equivalent process would likely be filled with information that was just wrong (not out date, but always wrong).

And, no, it wouldn't have all the info in one place. No one person knows everything, so any book by one author would only have some of that information, not all of it.

Why don't you start with a list of topics you'd want covered, and see any one person thinks they could write thoroughly about all of those topics.

Yes, when I explain to people, they sometimes say "you should write a book", but I know how little I know about some things in this points/miles sphere, because I've concentrated on other things. For example, I've accumulated more miles than I currently need in all the major US-based airline programs, and so while I have a bit of understanding about transferable points programs, and I've been building up points in some of them, I've never really used them to date (other than to transfer to those same few US-based airline programs I already have other miles/points in). And since I have more miles than I need for quite a while, I'm not an expert on what to do when you're short on miles (but that's a very major concern to many other people).

But, btw, many of the ways I accumulated those miles (and hotel points) in the past no longer work, so I couldn't even explain to someone how to replicate my position today, even if that was all I wanted to do.

I agree that the details keep shifting so much that a book would be outdated and even misleading as soon as it's published.

Perhaps the best "book," then, in terms of educating a newcomer, would be FT. Some of the better blogs would also be useful, though with the big caveats that even they occasionally get things wrong and most of them push credit cards in ways that may or may not benefit the reader.

Thank you all for your input - I'll just have to dig in to FT and learn the basics. So I gave up on finding a miles and points book and just decided to order Matt Kepnes (Nomadic Matt) revised book How to Travel the World for $50 a Day. I have the 2013 version so it'll be interesting to see how things have changed. For me, if I can't travel, the next best thing is reading about it. If you get it, be sure to get the 2017 version. If anyone has a favorite travel book, fiction or nonfiction, let me know.

While there isn't a book, for offline reading until about two years ago, there used to be the print InFlyer magazine, which was exactly what you were looking for, except in monthly magazine form, rather than book form. But unfortunately, publisher Randy Petersen retired from publishing, and no one took it over. (Unfortunately, it didn't switch from print to online only, it simply stopped publishing totally.)

You might want to see if anyone has the last year or two's worth of issues that they're willing to sell used. That would probably be the closest you could come to a reasonably-recent book about the miles/points world.

In more general frugal travel, there was also Budget Travel magazine (originally by Frommer but bought by Lonely Planet) but it too seems to have bit the dust as far as I can tell.

As to recent books, a little searching on Amazon (starting with an old book) led me to realize there's a Christopher Elliott book called "How to Be the World's Smartest Traveler (and Save Time, Money, and Hassle)". I have no idea whether it's good or not, and I have mixed opinions on Christopher Elliot's columns I've seen in newspapers (you may have sort of the fact from the opinion in what he writes), but it's from March 2014, so from not quite so long ago:

https://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Smarte...dp/1426212739/