First, let me say I am brand new to this, and my likely ignorant questions will probably irritate the experts, so please ignore the rest of this if that is the case for you. I'm embarrassed to say I'm over 50, have never traveled internationally, and need the most basic of help. I plan to take my 3 adult daughters and wife to Italy in May, 2014. I already booked the land portion, which you can imagine was very expensive! Now I need to book the flights. Granted, I do not currently have points, so finally I'm getting to my question. Is there ANYTHING I could do at this point to limit the cost, and secondarily, how can I maximize my benefits of purchasing these 5 tickets? Thanks for entertaining my obviously uninformed questions!

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?5Welcome to flyertalk!

A lot of what flyertalk has to offer involves taking the time to read for yourself. This is not because people do not want to help you, it is because you have to educate yourself on the miles game to avoid costly mistakes. You will still make mistakes but they will not be costly.

Here is the information we need to help you AND you must go and read the appropriate threads, use the search button, etc.

#1.
investigate your likely airlines that you will use to fly to Italy
go to kayak.com, search for your departure hub to your destination hub and figure out the airlines that take you there. There will be more than 1. Come back and list those airlines AND your departure and destination airports. This is crucial information
#2
join the relevant frequent flyer clubs and hotel clubs for the common airlines and clubs. Before you do, see if there are any bonuses for joining by using google. consider a site like awardwallet.com to track your miles/points
#3.
read read read and educate yourself.


So what we need today to help you is:
1. where are you flying from
2. where are you flying to
3. when are you flying

that can get us a start.

ps
are you willing to sign up for credit cards to maximize your miles and possibly pay for flights using miles? <--- if you are here I assume this to be true

tons of blogs out there also:
http://millionmilesecrets.com/new-to...omment-1173327
http://thepointsguy.com/beginners-guide/
http://boardingarea.com/mommypoints/...es-and-points/
http://themilesprofessor.com/resourc...-miles-points/

psps
I started out like you in the spring, thought I educated myself and posted a similar thread. Now I am much more informed after being given a few links and pointers but most of it came from experience reading threads and thru making mistakes

You may be able to accumulate enough miles for RT award travel for 1 or 2 passengers, especially if all 5 of you can qualify for and received bonuses for new credit cards. Award seats should be easier to book for May than they would be for June or July. It's hard to advise further without the information requested by aeneas3, but there are two things that can be noted at this point.

1. AA and UA offer OW from NA to Europe for 30k miles. DL and US charge the same for OW as for RT (60k). This policy allows for much greater flexibility in using miles on AA and UA, a point that may be especially important in your case since you may wish to draw on 5 separate accounts. (An example: If you and your wife each have 30k miles with AA or UA, you can obtain 2 OW tickets for the same person and buy a ticket for the other one. If you and your wife each have 30k miles on DL or US, you don't have enough to use them for a flight to Europe.)

2. Award availability is likely to be greater on UA (together with its partners) than on other airlines. Much depends on where you wish to depart from, but in general terms UA could be your best choice.

One quick point, if you have made a non-refundable commitment to a land package, you should take care to make your air/ground travel plans such that you arrive a day early (my opinion). This will make it possible for you to survive a unplanned glitch or cancellation of your travel departure without having some issue with your ground package. I mention this in case you decide that the investment of time to review mileage options and the many threads is too much and just plunge ahead.

Beyond that, welcome to Flyertalk and we hope you will review the resources here and come up with a great trip strategy.

Did you ask about including flights when you booked the ground package? Many times tour operators/wholesalers/consolidators have access to discounted airfares although those airfares may not be on the airline you prefer to fly. But if they do offer discounted airfare at least you have a benchmark for what is a reasonable price to pay.

I forgot to mention easy answers to your questions.

How to reduce airfare?
1. use miles to fully pay for or take some cost out of flights
2. set fare alerts at a site like kayak.com and monitor flight costs if paying cash
3. use a credit card that you can use miles/points to pay for flight costs after you book
4. always compare multiple sites and prices and always compare to the actual airline site. sometimes the airline site ends up being cheaper
5. see if you can add flights onto your land package at a reduced rate

Since you have gone this long without international travel, suggesting it's a once in a lifetime thing for you, I would humbly suggest that 1) having booked the land portion for 5 people to one of the most expensive countries in the world it's pointless to worry about pinching pennies now, and 2) there is relatively little benefit to spending a great deal of time worrying about miles/points. In the time remaining a busy middle-aged person is highly unlikely to learn all the tricks and techniques to earn and then book enough miles to fly 5 people to Italy, so you are just creating a lot of work for yourself to perhaps little benefit.

Use Kayak, alerts services etc to help you shop on price, and simply buy the tickets you want for your party when the time comes.

It is not particularly important to economize on something you do once in a lifetime. If you save a few thousand dollars one time it's not going to change the lifestyle of a fiftysomething any.

The value of miles etc. comes when people make many and repeated trips, thus the savings adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetime. Also saving a few thousand dollars means a lot when you're a college student but it just gets lost in the noise when you're middle-aged.

I just don't see a complete noob starting from zero miles in all programs in their 50s getting enough miles together through various hustles to get five people in business class on award tickets in the time remaining to you. I'd be surprised if you could make it happen for coach tickets TBH. And considering the learning curve, for a one-time thing, if you're going to end up in coach anyway, seems you might as well save the time and just buy the tickets and have everyone end up on the same plane...

I don't know what you mean about "maximize the benefits" of buying the tickets. Each of you is going to earn, I dunno, say 10-12K miles apiece for your flights between North America and Italy. In other words, the miles you earn for one TATL trip will be of little value, which hardly matters since you don't normally travel internationally anyway so...it's another example of frequent flyer programs are actually supposed to be designed to provide the benefits to those who fly frequently, not those who fly once...so there's going to be nothing much to maximize really.

My vote is that once you committed to this trip, it may have been somewhat unwise to look backward and worry about money. I think it's about 90 percent guaranteed to be an expensive trip. Just think of all the money you've saved by never traveling before in all those decades and don't sweat it. You're still coming out way ahead.

It is most certainly possible if you and your wife and maybe even a daughter or 2 can sign up for 1-2 credit cards each to earn miles to fly.
For economy you and your wife getting 2 cards each could equal around 190k miles which would pay for 3 economy roundtrip tickets
(60k united miles each or possibly 50k AA miles each)

Factor in the cost of 3 tickets and if you would rather spend that money in Italy then go the cc sign up route.

I think the tricky part comes into play when you eventually go to book the award flights on specific dates since you already booked the hotel.

I took my family (a total of 6 adults) on a trip to Italy in April/May (this year). Late summer last year we all got the United card with 50K sign up bonus + 5K authorized user incentive, put $5K spending on the card each, and were able to book 6 award flights on Lufthansa economy (via Frankfurt both directions). We booked around this time last year. You are a little behind our timeline but I think it's still doable and worth be little risk involved. Worst case, you have 60K miles to pay for other travel. Easily 2 domestic RTs.

if your land package is refundable, you could apply for some credit cards that match what you're looking for, and then cancel and rebook with those cards to meet the minimum spend. that way you're not adding lots of cost or dabbling in manufactured spend. but if it's expensive as you say you'll meet your bonus requirements, plus the miles for the spend, and then have a nice start on your flights.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts and advice. It all makes sense. Peachfront sounds like my two older sisters who travel all the time. They keep telling me to relax and stop stressing about the cost of a once in a lifetime trip, so that's what I'll do. My wife and I would like to start doing more traveling together after this Italy trip (domestically), so I'll plan to get something like the American Express card that will provide some miles for future use. Thanks again to everyone!!

More important than miles...... Have you sorted out and purchased decent insurance cover?

Make sure you join the frequent flyer program (beforehand) for the airline you use for the Italy trip to get those miles.

1) Where are you flying out of? That information would be the most beneficial.

2) If you can cancel the ground portion of the trip, apply for the most convenient points earning card and rebook all of it so that you can reap the benefits and potentially hit a minimum spend bonus.

Welcome to FT!

Italy is lovely and I'm sure you will have a great time!

I can't offer any better advice than you have already recieved, but here is a section FT that may be of some use to you: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/budget-travel-597/

Hope you are bitten hard by the travel bug!