Looking to purchase FF Miles
 

I'm looking to purchase 1MM FF miles on any major domestic US airline. Any suggestions on the most economical way to do this? Also - any recomendations of reputable mileage-brokers would be appreciated.

all on 1 airline?....by when?

yes - all on 1 airline. Purchase time is < 3 weeks.

wow....that might cost you more than the actual flights if you were to make them ....no?

Good point - that's entirely possible. However, for my particular situation I need 1MM (transferable) miles, not flight coupons/tickets.

wow. that's a lot of miles to buy. Obviously you can buy a small amount directly from the airlines.

Most airlines limit FF mileage purchases to approx. 50k per year. Amex limits Membership Rewards point sales to 500k/year, so that would be a more reasonable option (2 seperate purchases with Amex) - however Amex charges a huge premium ($0.025/point) if making this transaction directly with them. This is why I've posted here looking for leads/info on a direct purchase from another source (private person or mileage broker).

That is against the law in some places. And you run the risk that you pay the money and then you don't get anything because the airline takes the miles away.

Against the law? Or against the terms of a particular FF program? Thanks for bringing this up - I wasn't familiar with any legal issues surrounding FF mileage. Are you aware of any cases where someone was charged for trading (either buying or selling) in FF mileage. My understanding was that this was an 'unregulated' industry.
Please advise.

A friend can transfer you up 100K AA miles from their account, and it'll cost you about $1200 in fees.

really?! well - then I guess I'm looking for 10 new friends :-) I couldn't find any info on this 100k transfer allowance on the AA website. Is this transfer allowance anecdotal or did I just miss the info in the fine print?

AA miles would be fine. Are the fees you mentioned payable to AA?

It's referred to as "sharing" miles, and the cost quoted is payable to AA. I'm sure your new "friends" would expect you to compensate them also -- which is technically against the T&C's of the AA program.

Amex is a good deal. If you do 10 transfers on AA for $1200 in fees to AA, you still have to give your "friends" something for the miles. With 1.5 cpm being pretty common you will get miles then @ 2.7 cmp.

I gotta be nosy and ask why you need so many miles, so quickly.

Your best bet would be to find a friend who has 1M+ AMEX points and is willing to do you a favor. These AMEX points can be transferred to a number of airline programs. Ofcourse, it is very likely that you may have to return the favor too. :) ^

This is a good idea. 1 or 10 or 50 friends. I think amex points will have value of 2 cpm then or so.

Does anyone have any experience transferring Amex MR points to a 3rd party account? I spoke with Amex's MR cust svc and they said it can't be done.

points would be used for an internal promotion

my thoughts exactly. have you considered some mileage runs at least for part of the 1M miles to save some money? I would think it will take some time to find the source of 1M miles/points but if you can get half of those using your own time by actually flying, it would be a lot easier.

You can buy almost unlimited miles from an airline for your business, like Citibank does. However, you might pay for it over 2.5 cpm.

thx for the analysis. Have you ever gifted MR points with Amex before?

The fine print on those contracts prohibits using the miles for yourself.

Against the law, as in being a criminal act, at least in California. However, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever been prosecuted for that particular crime.

according to this blog, mileage brokers have been taken to federal and state courts by the airlines
http://nvflyer.wordpress.com/categor...leage-brokers/

seems like an awfully big risk to me.

500k miles in 3 weeks? It might be possible to find fares suitable to earn 100-150k miles at a reasonable cpm in the next 3 weeks but I'm not sure you could consider yourself alive during those 3 weeks, or afterwards for that matter.

If it's for a "promotion" purpose, you should probably be talking to the airlines to become a "sponsor" of sorts and just buying them outright.

Open an Amex account. Buy 500k amex points = $12500. Transfer to airline of choice after holding a reservation to make sure that it is available. Get 4 tickets in business class. Then wonder, why did I not buy the tickets directly for the same price....

All airlines allow businesses to buy miles directly.

e.g., United charges 2.75c each. You are then limited to a maximum of 30,000 miles per year per recipient account.
http://www.ualmiles.com/RewardMiles....nds+and+family
If I really wanted a lot of United miles till Sep 30th, I would buy Amex as much as I can, transfer to my continental account and then transfer to UA at once, 200,000 each day.

Delta - incentives program
http://www.delta.com/skymiles/buy_tr...ives/index.jsp

US airways Had something very similar, but cannot seem to find it now.
http://www.usairways.com/en-US/divid...s/default.html

Well it all depends on how bad he wants those miles right :D

You Californians will never cease to amaze me.

Well if he wants it that bad he could buy us all a nice gift from a mileage mall too. ^

After further review it seems the best (read: safest) way to do this is through a direct corporate mileage purchase from either Amex or an airline - since we may also want rights to use mktg assests (logos, etc...).

Thanks to all who have responded/commented.

If you have (or can get, very quickly) a Barclays USAirways branded credit card *and* you have (or purchase a trial for $200) USAirways status, you can register for a promo that expires the end of this month that yields a 75% bonus on hotel-point-to-mile transfers. If you can find people who have Marriott, WR, or SPG points to give, you could have a few hundred thousand transferred to you to yield 1 million US miles. In the case of SPG, because every 20K = 25K miles as a standard bonus, every 20K = 43,750 US miles with this promo stacked. Therefore, it would take just about 457K SPG points to get you there. If you had access to Coupon Connection, you could probably find four or five willing participants to do ~100K SPG each with ease. However, SPG points are highly valued versus most other airline/hotel currencies, so you'd have make generous offers to get people to part with them. Marriott has "Travel Package Awards" that allow 120K points (worth much less than SPG points) converted to miles on a 1-1 basis, as long as you have at least 270K to include the nights portion. That could get you 210K US miles a pop, but it would probably be challenging to find five people who could swing that kind of redemption. You could also buy, at a reasonable price, up to 50K MR points per account to help out. Per previous suggestions, Amex Membership Rewards points are also an option and are valid with US, but don't qualify for the 75% bonus offer. You could combine elements of all of the aforementioned ideas to get you to your goal, as well.

A few threads that may be of interest to you:

This is some old discussion about corporate programs: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...ms-thread.html. (I recall another (or two) more recent thread about buying miles for business but can't seem to find it right now.)

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...ies-miles.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...ell-miles.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...iles-sale.html

Wow.
1 million miles?

ok...

1) sign up for like 3 AA CCs. if the 100k one is still available, get that plus two 75s. There's 250k once you make purchases, which will be a gazillion gift cards later turned into coins.

2) get the new Starwood AMEX which I think gives you 25k now. Buy GCs with that too. Then transfer them all to AA, which should give you 30k AA in transfer, plus anything you earned on the card. Now you have at least 280k.

3) I have no idea and all of the above will take you over a month anyway.

4) go back in time to when you could churn citicards and get sign on miles from them. And when you could fund citi savings accts and run up your card bal to well over the limit (like $50-$75k) but that would not work because the cards would have been too new.

5) plan for the need of this many miles well in advance next time?

6) get friends who have them and then get you or them busted by airlines who WILL take miles away if they just perceive any bartering going on at all. WILL.

7) buy them and waste money but whatever promo it is, you could do better with some other prize than miles if you are going to pay that much for it.

8) I forget what 8 was for

good luck!
love to hear if it worked out

:)MM

so op, can you share what the 1mm is needed for? I think you've got us all kind of curious.

Answered in post #18.

I saw it was for a promotion, but my guess is their is a way to do the promotion without spending so much money to attain the miles. I would love to know more in detail of what he/she is trying to do. My guess is the folks on this board will give a cheaper/better way to achieve it

What do you mean by transferable? Do you mean that after you get the 1MM, you want to transfer them to someone else? Or do you mean that you are are trying to find miles that can be transferred into a central account?

:confused:

After having thought about this thread a bit more today, I have come to the conclusion that the OP works for the airlines and has been fishing to find out how people deal with such issues, who would do what and at what lengths, and whether or not there are actually people who would bite and try to offer up miles for money

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Buying and selling miles is against the rules of most programs. I'm not sure, and I don't mean to preach, but it might be against the rules of this board to advocate activity that's in violation of program rules.

To buy the miles legitimately, you can get AMEX points at 2.5 cents each, with a max of 500K points per year. You could probably sign up for two Amex cards (and get some kind of signup bonus) and link both to your account, then buy 500K points from each. Or better, find a friend, because I think that each person is allowed to have only one Membership Rewards account and buy 500K points, but you can move miles into an account that isn't necessarily your own.

Of course, the 1 million miles will cost $25,000.

Speaking for myself, even if I had this many miles, I would be nervous about selling them to someone I didn't know. Some airlines are very active in looking for people selling miles, so for all we know, you could be a plant from one of the airlines trying to find people breaking their program rules. I have heard of Delta doing things like this, and I do know of someone who lost their Air Canada account when someone they sold miles to apparently said the wrong thing to the wrong person.