How do you find mileage runs?
 

I was wondering how fellow FTers track down mileage runs. I know there are the weekly webfares, and some special e-mails on special fares (US seems to do a lot of these).

Is there a website(s) that list good deals. Also, how rare or frequent are fares that do not require an overnight, essentially a day trip to nowhere?

What is good value for a mileage run? I'm talking elite status only, so only the actual miles or 500 minimum...that's all I care about.

thanks

They is no exact science going on here. For me its trail and error sometimes, listening to flyertalk on others.

A good place to find them is at http://www.bestfares.com Click on Newsdesk and look for the Snooze Alarms.

I identify candidate trips from a few websites and react quickly to one that makes sense to me considering requirements, timing, budget, etc.

Travelocity's Dream Map both gives me ideas for RTs from my home but also from cities that I can get to by car or by cheap flight. For example, it might cost over $450 to go from WAS to SFO but thru the Dream Map I can build a trip with double the miles for the same price by combining two round trips and still meeting the requirement for a Sat night stay away from home. Some people caution about "nesting" excursion tickets.

Bestfares, as mentioned, has the Snooz or Lose feature that sometimes identifies a good candidate. Lately it seems to be pretty worthless and late. Air-fare.com updates at 9am ET M-F and the "Big Cuts" sometimes has some ridiculous fares. It only tracks certain domestic cities though. If I spot a run and fare I like I use Expedia to read a part of the fare rules apparently not available elsewhere: the permitted connection cities, allowing construction of a valid routing at the same fare for more miles.

Also, the Travelocity opening page is especially conducive to quick periodic checking the current low fare for a particular city pair and then going onto something else.

No Saturday night stays gets harder, but there have been same day runs of $120RT BWI-IAD-BDL-IAD-BWI and $87RT DCA-ORD-CVG-ORD-DCA runs recently that were found through Travelocity and Air-fare.com. Another possibility for a weekend run is from the east coast to europe and back Sat and Sun.

Someone defined a mileage run as being less than 8 or 12 hours at your destination. Anything else is a vacation, he said.

Thanks for info exspecially the expedia.com.. I used it long time ago but discontinued for its low ability to find low fares. But the rule is really detail.

it also cleared my question about longer routing from DTW-LHR!

For your advice:

I find success:
DTW-ORD-BWI-JFK-LHR
1600domestic miles before the actual fly!
Anymore transfer I can add?

I watch for international seat sales.

I could do a long weekend NYC-HKG or NYC-SIN for about $1000 USD or less, which worked out to a cool $0.05 per mile.

If you are paying anthing more than a dime a mile, you have to seriously question the value of the run.

Would you mind tell me where you watch those sale?

It will be cool to have cheap fare to asia especially to HKG, so I can suddenly ring the doorbell of my family to give them surprise!!

Also, for the $.1/miles suggestion, any opinion if it is all Q-miles?

Based strictly on status miles, I think about 6.5 cents per mile is a good average. Anything above 10 cents per mile is bad. Anything below 5 cents is a real deal IMO.

Look for bizarre routing too. For example, I could price EWR-TPA-IAH-LAX-IAH-TPA-EWR for the same price as a plain EWR-LAX-EWR. Quite a few more miles, but, if one of the flights are delayed....

Forgot to mention, I happened upon a thread in the CO section titled "Good mileage run from EWR," where I found the above information about good values.

Anyone who wants to see the whole thread, check out CO.

Thanks for your help guys.

I have found many mileage runs through dream maps that end up less than .03 a mile. Any more than that and it isn't worth it to me.