Are you kidding, I've been at it ONE month and my family has accumulated OVER 700,000 miles!!! I'm loving this shark and may it continue to jump!

Yup - you got 7 new credit cards. Get back to me in 5-10 years - when you're no longer eligible for new card or other promotion deals. I've been traveling and using credit cards for 35+ years now - and don't qualify for most promotions. FWIW - when I looked into the recent AMEX/Delta transfer miles deal - they had a record of a point transfer I made almost a decade ago (and that transfer disqualified me in terms of the promo). Robyn

I'm all for companies making money. Although it has been an elusive goal for airlines:

The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.

� Warren Buffett, annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, February 2008.


OTOH - it would nice if flying were more enjoyable today. Note that my feelings about flying have nothing to do with FF programs - and sometimes don't even have to do with the airlines themselves - but with third parties - like the TSA. Robyn

It ain't what it used to be.

This 1k MM has seen a steady decline in the utility of both miles and status.

1k rooms, paper (and therefore unlimited) upgrades that cleared at time of booking, saver awards on all but a few flights. All gone the way of the dodo.

And now it appears that my airline's ff program is going lowest common denominator all the way around.

Having lots of miles and top status used to be something special. Now it's just something.

The airlines are likely making more money overall, but there is less and less loyalty engendered through their frequency programs.

So be it. I'll take the discounted business fares on whatever airline is cheapest and leave the status on the table.

Thanks for letting me know MCO is difficult to obtain.

I'm under the mindset that if I can't get $1.00 per mile I don't use miles. So for me to fly to Orlando and use 50,000 round trip that would mean I can't find flights for less than $500.00 which is never the case. Thus I would just pay for the flights instead and save the miles for another day.

If I had a million miles lying around or didn't travel often then it would be a different story.

since when does 25k miles a year mean someone is a "frequent" flier?

I guess I'm in the second camp of active FF program members - the frequent (and heavy) user of credit cards (don't the airlines make money by selling miles to credit card companies?). I think the highest charges we ever racked up were when my late FIL was in a nursing home - and we paid his nursing home bills through a credit card (nursing home for a year = about 3 trips around the world).

Perhaps the inflation in the miles required for award travel isn't being caused by people like me - or the real FFs - but by all the promos that are around these days - promos that don't reward loyalty to an airline - or a credit card company.

FWIW - it's a real bi*** for my husband and I to go through security - because he needs a big leg brace to walk. But I think we have the routine down pat now. Robyn

Since nearly all US-based airlines set 25,000 flown miles as the threshold for elite status.

That has been my experience as well. I think what bothers me more than anything else are things like CO not having any BF seats on its best routes to many international destinations at any price (at least that was my experience when I was looking over the winter planning travel for 2011). (I fly mostly CO and Delta because they have the most service out of my home airport).

Your idea about the airline/hotel switch in terms of using points/miles might make sense for some people on some trips. Robyn

That's the direction I'm taking.

Things have changed a lot since the mid-2000's (we were able to get CO/DL Saverpass BF rewards to Tokyo - Germany and France in 2006 - 2008 or so - and not in the middle of January either).

As for the poster who got 700k miles. No big deal these days. CO BF is 210k miles Saverpass to Europe - 500k for Easypass. Asia is 250k SP - 600k EP. And try finding any availability on a flight with a lie-flat seat. Robyn

+10

Being an old fart (at least in the eyes of some of you) - I am not entirely sure what you mean in terms of being a twitter substitute. Could you explain? I think perhaps some of these messages - like I'm in Chicago and my flight is now 2 hours late - I don't have a clue what's going on - does anyone know - might be useful. OTOH - you can usually get that info in a more primitive way (walking up to the agent at the gate and asking).

Note that I always travel with a notebook - have been doing that for 20+ years now - even when I had get on line using acoustic phone couplers. The problems I run into with wifi anything in most places is that the connections aren't secure. I will never log onto a non-secure connection - wifi or otherwise. I do that to protect the personal data on my computer. I suspect there are corporations that have the same security protocols (because I frequently pick up their secure password protected connections when I'm in a hotel room - or even here at home). FWIW - even though I am close to Medicare - if I had a device that I'd be willing to use to log onto a non-secure network - if you gave me about 30 minutes - I could probably hack your computer. A skilled teenager could probably do it in 5 minutes . Robyn

I have never had more success than in the last two years in avoiding payment for flights and instead flying nearly free for most of my flights.

That is the case with CO - where one year I got my husband CO silver elite status. And I now remember how I did it. We flew to Japan. Got one free BF ticket - one paid (only cost about $2.5k - a relative bargain IMO). With the mileage - and the mileage bonus for BF - we only needed a few more miles to get to that magic 25k. So I booked the cheapest east/west coast ticket possible at the time - which happened to be Jacksonville to San Jose California. The tickets were about $200 each. Extra bonus - relatively inexpensive Four Season in Palo Alto having a buy 2 nights - get 1 free offer. Extra extra bonus - it was a nice trip to a part of California we had never seen before.

Only problem is silver elite never did much for us. Got one upgrade on one segment of a domestic flight. And this was 5 years ago.

Today - an important perk - at least on a relatively inexpensive short haul flight - is not having to pay for checked baggage. Way I look at it - annual fee for most airline credit cards about equals the fees for 2 checked bags on 1 round trip for 2 people. Sound about right? Does lowest elite status get you free checked bags on most airlines? Robyn

Maybe FT could charge for each posting; that would cut down on the chaff!