edited

The fact that you know how to use the internet means that you can find out the answers yourself. One way to start is to look up the websites of airlines that you may fly.

Essentially, you receive credit (in miles) in a particular airline's program for each trip you make. When you receive enough miles, you can try to get a award ticket (if the airline says it has seats for you).

Flyertalk has posts about other ways to get miles. These include MR (mileage runs, which are pointless trips that don't costs too much but earn miles), bonus miles opportunities, car rentals, credit cards that get miles.

Don't let your miles expires. Some airlines miles expire after 3 years of account inactivity.

Consider the small airlines programs like Midwest, Frontier, Alaska (actually a fairly large airline, though smaller than the likes of American, Delta, etc).

How to Begin
 

Once you understand the basics of frequent flyer miles programs, take a look at the Intro and How to Begin pages of my website, Free Frequent Flyer Miles. Then you can look forward to a lifetime of free travel. Enjoy.

Great site! Hadn't seen it before. Thanks!

kaelogus, I hope you can travel soon. Addictive. You also might want to compare the FF programs, think about possible destinations, and then choose one or two (or the ones that partner) to start increasing your FF miles. But this is all probably covered above and on these threads.

If you've ever had one of those cards from a coffee place where every time you buy a cup they punch it, and when you get ten punches you get a free cup, you know what a frequent flyer program is. You get a reward after some number of purchases in order to convince you to get your coffee (or plane tickets) there rather than from a competitor. The rest is in the implementation details. As noted, airline programs tend to be a bit more complicated than the coffee cards, and they vary from one airline to the next, but the principle is exactly the same.

I wish airline frequent flyer programs were as easy as the coffee programs. Only Southwest is so easy. With Southwest, if they have an empty seat, it's yours for the asking. With other airlines, they can refuse to let you redeem an award for a specific flight even though they have more than one empty seat. It happens all the time. Many of us have had trouble redeeming awards of which probably most of those flights had empty seats.

The downside of this, of course, being that Southwest only services 60 destinations.

The frequent flyer programs of the larger airlines are all members of larger global alliances. For instance, the Star Alliance services over 750 airports in 132 countries and miles earned on a member airline can be redeemed for free travel on any member airline to any destination.

I think you misunderstand. What's easy about Southwest is they only have one kind of award. Most airlines have a few-restrictions award that works similar to Southwest, but they typically cost 50k miles for domestic roundtrip ticket (NW calls them RuleBuster, AA calls them AAnyTime, etc).

You're probably only trying to redeem DISCOUNT award tickets (that only cost 25k), and in fact airline marketing may have made you think that these are "standard" award tickets. But in fact the way the airlines look at it (but don't promote much), it's the 50k awards that are standard, and the 25k awards that most people want that are resticted discount awards.

(Of course, the other thing that's easy about Southwest is that it typically takes way less spending to get a Southwest award ticket than even that discount restricted 25k award at other airlines. For example, a typical hotel stay might earn 500 miles or 1/50 of the restricted 25k award or 1/100 of the unrestricted 50k award with other airliens, but earns 0.5 credit or 1/32 of the unrestricted award with Southwest.)

Well, suppose the coffee shop said "if we're within 5 minutes of having to throw out what's left in an urn, and it's still more than a quarter full, you get a free cup with five punches instead of ten." We'd have people analyzing what times of day this is most likely to happen, complaining that during the morning rush (when they want their java fix) the urn never lasts long enough for the shop to have to throw out good coffee, and discussing which coffee chain throws out the most coffee and is therefore most likely to give you a cup for half the points. And we'd have coffee shops coming up with award schedules like 10 punches for a regular coffee, 15 for espresso and 20 for latte and arranging with the bagel place next door to punch each other's cards...

This isn't likely to happen with coffee, the amounts involved are too small to justify the hassle and the average customer would say "are you guys crazy?" but it would work. Yield management concepts apply anywhere there is a product that loses value if it's not used.