Get the AMEX Starwood Card. Good sign up bonus. Transfer 20000 points to AA and you will get a 5000 miles bonus into you AA account.

Skywalker,

The Starwood AMEX card gives you a mileage bonus (an extra 5k miles for every 20k points transferred) and flexibility since the points can be transferred to some airlines at 1:1 ratio (I think United is 2 for 1). With your annual spending that could be a lot of tickets!! The down side is not all vendors take AMEX. I haven't had any problems with their customer service but YMMV.

The Schwab card (at least the only one I know about) gives you 2% cash back, not miles and doesn't charge foreign exchange fees. These are the only 2 cards I use - when I'm not churning.

Also, you mentioned 900K AA miles, that means you should be close to the million mile mark. This would give you lifetime gold status which lets you pick the exit row seats and no charges for your first 2 checked bags. If you are close, you might want to make that milestone before switching to another airline.

Sorry to hear about the diagnosis. My best wishes to you and your loves ones.

I'm not sure if any of AA's partners flies into FLR; but both BA and IB fly into PSA, which is about an hour away from Florence.

AA's regular, all-partner awards only permit a stopover at a North American gateway; no stopovers are permitted elsewhere. So you could conceivably do a one-way LAX-BOS-PSA (via LHR or MAD), stopping over in BOS; then a one-way intra-Europe award PSA-MUC (probably via LHR or MAD, again); and then MUC-LAX via some connecting point. (If you fly from Europe nonstop to LAX on the award, you could treat LAX as your gateway stopover, and then continue on from there weeks or months later to another North American destination.) You can search oneworld schedules at this site:


http://www.travelsked.com/itdpda/html.asp?custcode=ONW

As an alternative, you could look into using a distance-based oneworld award, which permits stopovers at all connecting points, but requires that you use at least two oneworld partners other than AA (BA and IB would qualify). But, depending on the class of service and routing, the oneworld award might cost more miles than three one-way awards. You will need to price it each way, assuming that you can find award seats. There is an excellent sticky in the AA forum explaining the rules and award levels for oneworld awards.

Mellie: Thank you for the good wishes and your good comments. I spent the 900K miles on travel - does that still count then for lifetime Gold status? Or does one get the status only when one has 1 million in the bank?

Yes to first question. No to second question.

Log in to your AA account, and see your "Program to Date Miles". That is what matters in qualifying for Gold, irrespective of your current "Total Available Award Mileage" (account balance).

Best wishes for a full recovery, skywalker22.

WOW! My first post here! Just wondering what that AA Platinum Challenge is and a link to it. Also, just stumbled onto a bonus offer when buying additional miles for my AA account...looks like a good deal....does anyone have any thoughts on either of these?

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ameri...-platinum.html

Buying miles makes sense under some circumstances.

It sure depends on where you want to go, but for worldwide travel I suggest Miles & More, as you will be able to collect miles with all airlines of Star Alliance, incl. US, UA, CO, and many more (majors). Good luck!

Thanks for the link!

Now, about my other question.....AA has a deal for purchasing 40K miles for $1,000 with a bonus of 15K miles so 55K miles for $1,000.....I'd only need 5K miles more to get a RT to Europe during high season....sounds pretty good. However, you all know how to play the mileage game better than I so wondering if this is a good deal. Since I'm a newbie, please take it slow and spell it all out for me, ok? Vinaka!

That comes out to 0.018 a mile which isn't bad but you shouldn't be using miles purchase to fund a trip. Generally you are not getting a good ROI for it beyond that trip. If that is the only trip you do in a year, no biggie. If not, purchasing the ticket plus other regularly scheduled flights through the year could give your extra bennies like upgrades and such.

I totally agree with this, if you are near 1MM with AA you should probably concentrate on getting lifetime status with AA. This way you will always have this "in the bank" and can then possibly concentrate on another airline if you need to. Lifetime status is something that I would go for if I were close to that goal.

You have come across the best resource on the internet to answer your questions here at FT and you will get a huge amount of useful information if you post questions with specific information and respond to questions from members.

I think I know very little compared to most people on this site about travel and I probably would rank in the top 1/10th of 1% of the traveling public. That may give you an idea as to the knowledge base of the members of FT.

Good luck.

I have a question about the AA FFP. How long on average would it take to earn a million miles. I am 23 now, but recently read in article about FFM, and there value and I have decided it is a great thing to get started on while I'm young. I mainly fly out of STL or KCI, and can't decide on an alliance FFP to join. I was thinking Star Alliance, but I'm confused and a little unsure about making a commitment. I know the FFP's value Loyalty and so I would like to start building miles now. This 'lifetime gold' status is something that intrigues me, and I would love to start accumulating miles now. Any advice on choosing a FFP would be much appreciated. On a final note, I am probably going to get an SPG AmEx card, because of the great value it also offers. Are there similar status's you can reach with that card? Thanks for everyone's help, and good luck with your battle skywalker.

-BW

Awesome, I'm going to sign up myself.

I think there's a thread on the AA forum where people shared how long it took for them to reach 1M. I've done very little business travel so the vast majority of my million miles on AA is from credit cards and it took about 15 years. About 300K+ from churning (churning is being curtailed but if you don't already have cards with AA you can still get at least 1 bonus - see the Other Credit Cards Forum for more info) and probably 500K+ miles for transferring points from Starwood - earned using the Starwood Amex. I wish I were 23 again and had a resource like Flyer Talk - I'd have made that 1M mark a lot faster!

Regarding which FFP - I concentrated on AA because they had a hub where I lived when I started collecting miles. Now I'm hooked on the benefits so I don't know enough about the other airlines to advise you. But there are plenty of others here who will.

Great, thanks Mellie! So the dollars I spend using a credit card can turn into miles towards the 1M mark. Good info to know, and I appreciate the advice. Starwood AmEx also seems like a great deal and you mention that you transferred points from Starwood into your mileage? FT has been great to me so far, and I look forward to learning more, and then helping others! On my way to a 1M! haha!