Any Ideas?
 

Little question for you experienced ones out there (everyone). My company just recently stopped making us book our own flights. Great news right?? No hassle of getting on there, getting online, waiting to find a suitable flight. Wrong... not only do we not get to decide our arrival/departure time... we don't even get to decide our airline. My airport is literally filled with every single airline and I travel about 4 different airlines a month. I tried to find a way to consolidate points, of course points.com/ wont let you consolidate nearly the selection I need. I mean, I travel at least 3 weeks out of a month, and this nickle and dime business from different airlines to different airlines is really slowing my point gain WAYYYY down. Any ideas or sites that will let me combine points? Any clues? I already try to pool them together as much as possible... i.e.: United goes with Useless Air, Delta and Continental... blah blah blah. Well, let me know

Thanks!

The first thing I would do is contact whoever is in charge of your travel. Find out if they will let you pick one airline and stick to it.

If that doesn't work, then there's no way of pooling all the points together into one program without a significant loss of miles.

For the majors, here are the combinations where you won't lose any miles.

American
Continental/Delta/Northwest
United/US Airways

If you're being booked on LCCs, I doubt there is a way to pool those miles/credits. Alaska flights can be credited to American, Continental, or Northwest.

Good luck on getting your travel arranger to change their ways.

one more thing
 

I'm assuming by the way you arranged it, that not all those airlines are interchangable.. you mean, that American is on its own... delta and cont. go together.. and so on, right?

Thanks again

Ooooooooooh, how convenient!
 

Cassius19, since I don't know the exact get it done details of your office, I'll just tell you what we do in our office.

We also do not make the actual flight arraingments, we have a travel coordinator for that now.
But we do have the ability to research potential flights and request that departure/arrival be at certain times. Why? Well, you know... because our customers choose the mtg times and we have to follow the whim of the customer! :D
We can't help it if the customer requests a 8am meeting so we have to arrive the day before. And we also want to arrive early enough the day before to be able to get to our hotel and have dinner and relax (or prepare for the mtg) so we are not stressed out.
Or maybe you like to not leave your home (family or cat or plants) until the last minute, so you are not away from them any more then you have to be.

For example, I need to be in BOS on July 15th sometime for a meeting on the 16th in the morning. I just let the travel coordinator know the exact time I need to leave on the 15th, like 2:30pm. Oh, what... a NW flight happens to be leaving at 2:30pm, how convenient since my carrier of choice is NW.
Granted, the price needs to be reasonably close to any other flights around that time. (It helps that DTW is a NW hub as well).

The Travel coordinator also has us fill out a "traveller profile" with our carrier and hotel preferences, FF info, etc. Maybe you could suggest that for your business as a helpful solution to help whoever is now making the travel arraingments.

Good luck and I hope you figure out a way to keep earning the miles you need!

Not to speak for tekelberry, but to give you your answer... yes, that is correct.

American is on its own, DL, CO and NW go together, etc.

This won't help you accumulate status miles, but you can consolidate almost all of your airline mileage earning into a United account.

See http://www.webflyer.com/blog/comment.php?entry=951

In addition, American, Continental and Northwest flights can all be credited to Alaska, giving you lots of flexibility to dump miles into one account. American and Northwest miles and segments count towards elite on Alaska, Continental miles don't.