Newbie Getting Started This Year!
 

Hello to all FFs!

I have been reading up a lot on these forums about ways to earn miles and status qualifications, and I think I'm going to give it a shot this year. I'm hoping to use this first post as a guide to myself, and hopefully some of you can help me along the way! Perhaps once this year is over I can even be told the secrets of YQ dumping... :p

In any case, I have memberships with both AA and US, and have actually been Platinum with AA in the not-so-distant past. I actually have 366k lifetime miles with AAdvantage. I live in the DFW area, but travel frequently to California, the Northeast, and England where I have family. I have some other hobbies that require travel and am pretty much open to going anywhere (and hopefully I do!).

To start off this year I have a roughly $700 credit on United that I'm planning to use to go to London at the end of next month. I figure since I'm starting off on *A I'll try and reach elite status with my US Airways membership.

I've loosely been following the rubric found here:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/milea...leage-run.html

Although it's somewhat outdated it is definitely a help! I've also found a lot of useful links from here:

http://flyaow.com/classavailability.htm

So... using the ITA matrix I found this:

DFW-IAH-EWR-DUB-LHR on Feb 22nd and LHR-MUC-IAD-IAH-DFW on Mar 7 for $855.70. It's only 11330 miles but it seems like a good deal for the number of segments? Plus I wouldn't mind taking a quick look at some of the European cities. I'd like to turn the trip into a more traditional MR but after looking for some time it didn't seem like it was possible.

As far as booking, do I just call United and give them the booking and fare codes listed? Is this the easiest way to do this?

Thanks for your help everyone... hopefully this post can belong in this forum! :D

Is there any reason you can't book this on united.com? You'll save yourself the booking fee. You will need to play around a bit with the multi cities option.

I am not sure why you find this to be a good deal. You aren't getting tons of extra miles for the extra cost of paying a booking fee (if you go that route). You could get more miles heading to SFO or LAX first and then to DUB with a simpler routing. It also seems strange that you are using an international itinerary to accumulate segments. It would be much wiser to go for miles.

I know it's not a great deal... but I wanted to go to LHR anyway, so I figured this would be a good "experimental trial".

The reason I couldn't book on united.com is I had credit from a previously canceled international fare.

As it turned out, calling United and telling them the routes I wanted worked out perfectly! I had a little trouble with some of the routings:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/milea...-question.html

but once I figured this out it was easy... the price they quoted was the price on the ITA matrix.

I'll be keeping my eyes open now for some good MRs!

Getting ready to go and on seat guru I noticed that there are no flights with wifi anymore, short-haul or long-haul...

http://www.seatguru.com/charts/shorthaul_economy.php

Is this true? Has wifi service been discontinued everywhere?

If you are flying on UA/CO, check these out. Great TPAC runs at or close to 4 cpm.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/milea...82-4-6cpm.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/milea...rt-593-ai.html

One person booked a run from IAH to PVG via EWR for 3.8 cpm

I'm guessing that table just hasn't been updated. I know that DL has finished WiFi on all their mainline aircraft (and I think I read soon to be expanded to CR7 and CR9s), AirTran has WiFi fleetwide, US has WiFi on their Airbus A321's, UA just has it on 757's between LAX/SFO-JFK, not too sure about AA....but it definitely hasn't been discontinued, it's expanding for sure.

I can never get the puddle jumper to come up, even if I just put in hnl-gum on a MWF. What am I doing wrong? I've tried multiple destinations with KOS as a stop and I get either CO doesn't publish fares between those city pairs or it doesn't have a service between them. (I do set the number of flights to be returned at 50).

Hi everyone, I'm a very new FFer and am just getting into it so please excuse my ignorance/newbness :p..

I have been reading up A LOT on the forums as well as various resources.

I just had a couple of general-specific questions for anyone:

- As of right now, I'm only a United Mileage member as far as FF programs - what is the general process that you use when constructing a mileage run (after you know where you want to go). Any specific sites or tips & trips would be pretty useful, it just seems like there's so many sites and whatnot that you can book tickets from.

- Which brings me to the next question - what is your process in general when you are looking for a specific flight (not mileage run) from point A to B (is this any different than planning for a mileage run?). I have a pretty normal job that will allow me to travel to several weeks in a year and I am flexible as far as dates and would just like to book a cheap ticket that might mix in some stops for a mileage run / semi-vacation.

- What sort of things do you guys do to accumulate mileage the fastest? From what I have read from the S.P.A.M. threads and mileagebuzz - Points sites like MyPoints lets you exchange points for mileage, having a card will let you double+triple dip sometimes with various promotions and programs. Doing certain promotions for points, doing mileage runs. What sort of things should I look for and what is a good priority to use to rack up the most miles?

That's all for now, thank you for your time and I apologize if this is in the wrong forum/thread. I'm just pretty new to the game and flying in general (just graduated from college last spring) so any help or advice for a newbie would be greatly appreciated.

Win