The "game" since Flyertalk
 

I'm starting this thread as a companion to https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/mile...flyertalk.html

Following are my favorites:

1. Valuemags ---> Concorde

2. Dollar coins
-I even bought a minivan to support this venture

3. Thank You Points for redemptions like ACY-YEG
(this provided around $5,000 in DL credit)

4. Budget car rentals at locations with dirt cheap weekend rates

5. Mistake fares
-these typically lasted for around 7 days during the early years

CNZ (upgraded to F) in 2007!

1. USAir FC $46 Watertown (ART) fares-made both LH SEN and bmi top status with just a few of those;
2. bmi in general: Hertz HLE deals and hotel deals (i.e. <US$15 for 5000 miles though I did get tired of every trip to BKK making a US$5 "checkin" at some run down Chinatown motel there though the one I used in Buenos Aires was just down the calle from the Sheraton Librator so it was easy;)
3. MH US$260 Z fares ex BKK to PEK which got my Thai GF and me AA EXP in 8 weeks, as I just couldn't do back-to-backs on that lousy MH schedule to PEK and back;
4. Two years (8+ weeks) of "free" Hertz Premium car rentals for $700 between Daily Getaway Hertz points package and eRewards redemptions;
5. Post 9/11 fares to Europe apx US$200 RT immediately UPG'able and VIPOW's in general;
6. #2 all time: Hyatt FFN's where you could use a FFN and got half of the 2 stays needed for another, plus the $39 to $49 rates at Denver Tech Center, HR Cincinnati, and the HR's that Mary2e always used, online check-in and no show still got credit, so I've never paid (retail/rack) for all those nights at PH's in Paris, Zurich and Milan, and the GH in HK; and
6. The big dog of them all: CX FC ex-DAD to NYC for $870, so I finally got to try JFK AA FC Dining.

For some reason I completely forgot about BMI, but yeah that might have been my favourite ffp of all time. Then moving on to BA gold with 500k points from credit card signups was a fine dessert:D

How could you forget bmi? My favorite too. Used to do 9 segment USAir FC RT's to Freeport and always worked in the PHL-DCA/BWI segments: 90 miles of straight up and straight down for the segment minimum x3.

Oh man, the memories here...

1. Those early Thank You Points days! For some reason I recall the magic number being a $2700 domestic F itin - something like JFK-LAX R/T.

2. The US Airways Grand Slams. That was one where I owe my FT friends for showing me how it was done. Every Grand Slam turned into most of what I needed for 2 J tickets to North Asia and back.

3. The Hyatt FFN's and, in some years, a similar Starwood promo.

4. Marriott's promos were usually lame by comparison, except for one summer when you earned 5,000 DL miles per stay. I hotel-hopped some bad North Dallas Courtyards collecting those miles...room rates in the $30's. Although after the night when a drug bust went down outside my window, I upgraded to the finer area Courtyards which were closer to $45/nt.

5. Marriott Bonus Bucks, Extra Euros, and Premium Pounds. Back when paper certificates were a thing, the world was awash in those.

6. Probably my first Flyertalk-induced promo chase: Hilton's conquest bonuses. Every 4 stays yielded 54,000 bonus points in an era when a 6-night award at the HWV or HHV was 100,000 points. I hotel-hopped Doubletrees and Hamptons in and around Tampa during the course about a month of work trips and paid for 2 weeks in Hawaii. You weren't supposed to be able to repeat an individual conquest, but there were a few slightly-different conquest codes so people earned hundreds of thousands of points through them.

001 ticket stock fuel dumps thanks to Cape Air.

Perhaps the most valuable thing I learned some time back (circa 2003) on FlyerTalk was that all AA miles from all sources counted (back then) toward AA lifetime elite status. So I set out trying to earn AA miles any way I could above all else, and half a year before all that ended (in late 2011), I totaled 2 million lifetime AA miles earned in about 8 years and earned lifetime AA Plat status (second level up) as a result..A good fraction of the actual miles I earned from flying were from double and triple RDM miles bonuses on flights (during the economic downturn) that I learned about on FlyerTalk. I pretty much never fly for work, so this is not something I could have ever achieved otherwise.

Yup. Same. Also got many from refinancing, BankDirect, etc. That was an early big FT win for me too.

Buying U.S.Savings bonds on a credit card with no fee.
Switching long distance land line service between three carriers every 6 months.
Buying money orders at Walmart and other places on a debit card that earned miles.
Buying Amazon and other gift cards at office depot for 5X Ultimate Rewards points.
Switching assets between stock and bond brokerage accounts to get miles bonuses from the new accounts. Easy -the new broker did all the work.

25K Delta points for clicking on a link. I think from DL official email but I wouldn't have known if it's not for FT.
$250 NYC - HNL tix on UA.
US bonds.
Redeeming on UA and DL partners (cheaper!)

There were a few good angles with TYP, but my favorite was that 20k points was sufficient to nab a round trip ticket on any route within N. America with no blackout dates. One of the most popular routes among the FT crowd was Atlantic City to Edmonton on Delta. This entailed a fare break in ATL, so it consisted of two expensive tickets patched together, for a total of around $2600 in Delta credit (after cancellation). The reason it, and other similar secrets, didn't make it to the blogs was because we only discussed in person at FT meetups.

ETA: On second thought, I vaguely recall threads about optimal TYP routes, but they were cryptic enough to keep passing bloggers at bay...similar to the early fuel dump threads.

So the angle was to book the 20,000 ticket and then cancel which would provide a $ credit. Interesting and about what I surmised, but the how to do it was unclear. For what it is worth, I recall picking up a sniff of it from the old chat feature. No idea if that still exists, but it was basically a big chat room that anyone could enter and participate in or just observe. Back in my more rambunctious days I'd logon late night if other options didn't pan out :)

That should be in the "before FlyerTalk" thread. I used to do that in the 80s.

Valuemags was HUGE

The Starwood to Qantas transfer netted a few Concord tickets as well (for about $1500 per round trip)

I recall a thread about the “Mexican Hat Dance.” Something about hoping back and forth across the border. Never did it, but it was huge in the early days of FT.

Bangkok-Phuket flights on Thai. They were dirt cheep ($15 one way or something). FTers would fly back and forth for a few days, earning 1K status quickly!

On United, 500 upgrade coupons was “as the crow flies.” One could fly LAX-JFK-SFO for a MR and use one 500 miler to upgrade the whole journey, as it was calculated LAX-SFO.

Pretty sure most were paying local Thais to fly under their names. I believe there was never an ID issue somehow.

Not unusual. In the old days, you didn't even need to carry ID to fly.

This brings back some memories! I remember reading about how the "all miles count toward lifetime status" was going to end eventually, so started ratcheting up anything I could to cross the finish line.

I bought about 100k in dollar coins, tried to make most of my dining out at places that were in AAdvantage Dining, charged everything to my Citi AA card, etc. The icing on the cake was the promo AA ran, I think @ 2009, where they introduced service to 27 new cities, and if you traveled to 10 of them in a three month period, not only was it double miles on each flight, you also got 100k bonus miles at the end. IIRC, six of them were straight turns, (DFW-CYS, DFW-FAY, etc.) The rest I had to overnight, I remember a couple DFW-ORD-AVP and similar. On the ones I had to overnight, i'd burn some points on a cheap Starwood hotel. I never did any of the famous transcons AA was offering triple miles, because the positioning flights and lack of upgrade availability scared me off.

I crossed over 2MM Lifetime about a year before they ended the "all miles count", and I got some nice upgrades and other perks from that LT PLT status. Ironically, now I almost exclusively pay for F domestically, J international, and am now starting to look into B6 for domestic flights. It was a fun hobby at the time, but I've realized, if you pay for F/J, and have a ton of BE points to cash in for AAdmirals Club passes, status doesn't matter. FT, and all it's contributors, taught me all this, and for that I'm really thankful!

Sadly the kinds of deals and opportunities are less often discussed on FT and more in private groups.

Also, FT is getting more "corporate" by implementing rules and restrictions to please their sponsors and advertisers. One example of those rules is the interdiction of naming which competing hotel booking website was used in reports of successful Best Rate Guarantee claim reports

The grand daddy of all - the 1 million miles LatinPass run.

This is function of 2 things:
-FT itself became more mainstream
-bloggers constantly combing FT for deals/tricks so they can tell the world about them

Loose lips sink....

Completely agree.

Until grand daddy passed away. Fortunately, I was able to transfer most of the miles to hotel points.

What about the great OnePass---->Amtrak----->United caper circa 2002? You could double-transfer miles at 1:1 back when those airlines were separate and CO had many more complaints about redemptions. I moved some 275K before they limited and then stopped it, and used the UA miles to fly around the south Pacific on NZ awards. My great masterpiece was a 7-ticket odyssey in summer 2006.

Also, around 2000 when I started there were all these codes bouncing around where you'd call CO and have them appended to your account. Like the HYE0 "Hyatt bonus" that didn't require Hyatt stays. I checked my account and had 40K extra miles (keyed to flight segments) posted one day just because of that.

RDM earning was of course much better then in coach, and so were some of the award sales: CO at 20K RT to DUS and 25K to HKG, and DL at 40K to BKK.

I did a bunch of these.

• $3 Hilton Tokyo and Osaka around 2005.
• Lots of Dollar Coins.
• AA DAL-AUS x 6 for 100k
• And my favorite, $2700 TYP redemptions. Lots of flights to Elko and calls to United telling them, NO I DON'T WANT A REFUND!

What exactly was/were these?

That was quite a while ago so I'm a bit hazy on the details, but I want to say they awarded something crazy like 30 miles per dollar for magazine subscriptions. Many of us bought Economist subscriptions everyone we could think of, local libraries, etc.

Trackitback!

I forgot about Track It Back

Don't forget that Chase had transfers both ways to/from AGR. There were some insidious ways to rack up Amtrak points on short-hop trains since there was a 100-point minimum per segment (which at the time, IIRC, could stack as high as 250 points). One of the biggest loopholes was that, until some idiot blabbed, if you could get the conductor to take all of the tickets they'd all post to your account...so I heard a story of someone handing over a stack of 100 tickets on a short hop out of PHL (I think it might have been PHL-PAO, but it might have been another close-in stop) and getting the resulting 10k points (and thus Select Plus status) in one go.

Then they posted on it and Amtrak both retracted the points and put in a loophole-blocking rule.

Getting Out More with US Air
 

Let us not forget the famous 'Getting Out More' promo from US Air. After 9/11, US Air was offering a double miles (status and regular) promo and sending individual codes to flyers for this. It turned out the codes were stackable and we were sharing them. I was using multiple codes and receiving 6x miles for trips. Flying out of BTV at that time, it was possible to become Chairman's Preferred by flying 3 RT of BTV-PHL-SFO. Total cost of about $700.

I did the US savings bonds, but my funds were limited back then, so it only amounted to some thousands of miles before they stopped it

There was a small bank that offered Visa gift cards for purchase with credit cards for no fee, but I found out about it late and only made about 30,000 miles or so. At that time I could take them directly to my CU and deposit them, which made it pretty easy -- buy online, get them in the mail, take them to the CU and deposit.

I did the coins, but only in a limited way. My CU didn't like it when I brought a lot of dollar coins in, so I took to putting them in the vending machines in the basement at work and then pressing refund and getting four quarters back. I think I made around 50,000 miles on that.

When Microsoft was pushing the Bing search engine, there were word games you could play online and gain points, which you could redeem for airline miles. I made over 100,000 miles on that, but I was cautious -- I only did it a little for quite a while, then later ramped it up with multiple logins, bots to play some of the games automatically and multiple computers ( I had access to a computer training room after hours). They later caught on to people doing this and restricted it, but if I had been bold from the beginning I could have gotten lifetime Platinum easily on AA.

The biggest thing for me was the debit card/money order/deposit cycle that is still ongoing. I could earn over 100,000 miles/points in a month, although it was a lot of work. I still do it a little when I'm back in the US and have a CC bonus to go for, but the amount I did in the three years before I retired got me several years of business/first class tickets back to the US and stays in some nice hotels.

The TYP game of fixed point prices for business-class tickets was a goldmine for me, but all the info I got about that was from here on FT itself and I didn't find it crpytic at all. The miles and points blogosphere wasn't as mainstream and popular back then as it has been the last several years.

What kills the deals more than ever is the increased clout and capabilities of the big players involved in the game -- those big players being substantial governmental and business interests, players who have stacked the game against the consumers more than used to be the case.

Did the CU take the quarters?
Please tell us where this is still ongoing. Thanks.

People are still buying money orders with prepaid debit cards, where the prepaid debit cards are purchased to hit the credit card sign-up bonus spending thresholds. Those prepaid debit cards are being used to purchase money orders that get deposited in regular old current accounts at times.

Have you checked out the MS forum here on FT? It seems to still be active.

Hyatt FFN and SPG Stay2Get1ResortNight were the best hotel promos ever which I leveraged into nights on Maui and Princeville.

Mistake fares were great.

And let's not forget the AA Buy 2 RT get a voucher for a free trip anywhere in our system deal. Stellar!

The best days of this game indeed seem to have been closer to when those kind of things were happening. Finding such extraordinarily valuable deals is a lot tougher than it used to be, and really not worth it as much as it used to be.

And given the changed corporate environment and business practices of travel service providers, I find it improbable that this game is going to be as widely lucrative again for as long as it used to be.

Things always change, but that's ok. If there's anything I'm sure of, it's this: whatever rules the set up, we'll adapt & outsmart them.

That outsmarting thing is not going to happen in the aggregate.

The travel service providers have increasingly stacked the game in their favor, including by way of the government increasingly on their side against the consumers. Of course there will be some exceptions to the rule; but in the aggregate most of the "we" consumers in this game will see a lower return than used to be the case.