Hi. This is my first post. I am currently in the process of booking myself and my family for trip to mexico. Within the expedia checkout process I am asked for the frequent-flyer credentials for each person and this got me thinking, I should enroll in a frequent-flyers program. I've heard of people getting free flights, and upgrades but I'm skeptical as to if the hype is true or not. I guess my question is this:

What frequent-flyer program should I enroll in? Its an AA flight. Briefly, how does this system work? Can I redeem the miles flown by the rest of my family members? Is enrolling in frequent flyer worth it? Because it seems like a lot of footwork/overhead just to get upgrades?

Thank you.

Welcome to FT.

Frequent flier program to enroll mainly depends on the airline you are flying. Since you are flying AA, you can credit the flight miles to AAdvantage or Alaska mileage plan. Also these can be credited to BA Executive club points called Avois.

Miles can be credited to the flyer's account. So each flyer needs to have an account.

Most airlines don't allow miles from different accounts to be combined. BA (british airways) allows creating a family account and pooling family members miles into that account.

If you live in AA hub like DFW, MIA, ORD and if you don't travel that frequently my suggestion is to create BAEC accounts for all your family members so that you can combine all the family members miles. This way you can get enough miles to redeem for an award. Drawback of family account is that the awards can be used only for the family members. BAEC Avios can be used for AA redemptions.

If you fly frequently and you live in AA hub city, I suggest you go for AAdvantage accounts.

You will need to accumulate at least 25,000 miles to get anything interesting. While it won't hurt to enroll in an FF program, if you don't fly very much, you won't get much. If you don't fly again on the same airline again in 12-18 months your miles will probably expire.

Now, there is a whole different way to approach this. Many, if not most, of the people on this board get most of their miles from credit cards and occasionally other sources. Yes, people get free flights. My wife is flying to Europe next summer - in first class - on a free ticket. (We did have to pay a couple hundred dollars in taxes.) You may get a couple thousand miles on American for your trip; my wife and I each got 100,000 miles on American for opening credit cards earlier this year.

Getting those miles does involve some work - reading and absorbing the information on this board, applying for and managing the credit cards, etc. Just a question of if it's worth it to you to put in the work.

With BAEC the points required for award are distance based. You only need 9K points for round trip award for short haul flights (less than 650 miles). You can redeem one way award for as low as 4500 points. For this reason I suggested getting BAEC accounts and pooling the points into family account so that hopefully you have enough points for a reward or two even if you don't fly that much.

If you willing to spend some time and learn about the credit card / miles, then it is completely a different scenario.