Me Too!!!!

It has been my experience that most upper level executives are over rated and over paid. The Airline Industry does not have a monopoly on this!

When you share your strategies with reporter, copy your email to this forum so the rest of us can benefit, too.
Here's mine:
Hi
My name is doug ##### and I'm a prosecutor in a small town in california.
Most of my travelling is on a tight budget since I'm not very well paid, and is for leisure , not business.
I tend to take my family of 4 to timeshare properties to save on lodging expenses and try to take the time to book cheap filghts. With 4 seats to purchase, the savings add up quickly.
My strategies include:
1) booking well in advance, since my timeshare exchanges are booked more than a year in advance
2) searching the well known internet sites, then checking the website of the airline with the best fare. Usually I find a cheaper fare there. expedia\priceline, etc are essentially a free search tool to see which airline is cheapest
3) book with low cost carriers ontheir websites such as southwest . american west
4) use my credit card for everything including savings bonds, new car purchase and everyday stuff
5) enroll in every credit card promotion, those double miles add up fast!

This summer we're using 360,000 delta skymiles for a 4 free first class tickets from SFO to madrid with a layover in Paris.

The single best rule I've found for getting to use my miles is to be creative and to keep calling until you get an agent who is willing to help check multiple alternatives. If you get an unhelpful agent who hates their job and just says "nothing available" (this is very common), thank them politely, hang up, and try again, until you succeed. In my case, I was booking summer vacations for my entire family, when I needed multiple international award tickets on the same flight and wanted to travel in business class.

For example, two years ago, Delta had no awards to Paris or Lisbon. So we got to Lisbon by flying on an award ticket to Brussels and then Paris to Lisbon, leaving the Brussels to Paris segment open -- I did my research and discovered there is a very fast train from Brussels straight to CDG airport. A bit inconvenient, but we did it and the train (the Thalys) was quite nice.

On United to Tokyo last summer, we went to Osaka and then had a domestic flight to Tokyo -- except on the day of departure, I convinced the ticket agents to switch us to the Tokyo non-stop at no charge!

Be creative, do your homework, keep trying until you get a helpful agent: that's what has worked for me.

Jean - YGM from me too, I'm happy to share what I've learned - a great deal of which was picked on this site by the way (just a little reminder for all you naysayers that may not have learned to share as children )

Amen to that. I try to do as much as possible online, but if you want to book trips with a lot of wow power you've got to maximize stopovers and open jaws, which forces you to book over the phone. My favorite stopover (which I get about 50% of the time) is Hawaii on a U.S.-Asia award trip, but it often takes finagling (like last-flight-in, first-flight-out on the west coast) to get it if it's to be gotten. I get as much information as possible before talking to a person so that I can suggest very specific things to try.

Would also single out United for a dishonorable mention for agents being paralyzed with fear-of-getting-fired-if-they-make-a-Star-Alliance-booking-other-than-a-simple-roundtrip. I can't tell you how many times I've been stuck on hold while agents ask their supervisor something that I know to be do-able by the published rules. Have not seen the same non-empowerment problem to the same degree elsewhere (in other places it's simple lack of training, motivation, or both, but at least the fear part isn't involved as much). UA also has some of the weakest online support for award bookings but went ahead with the $15 fee across-the-board anyway.

The reason I put up with it is to get an Air New Zealand RT like the one upcoming Perth-Rarotonga-Christchurch-Perth at only 20K miles.

Would also advise pulling out a route map, studying up on the partners and dreaming big. Have taken three 2-stop trips in Micronesia out of Manila on CO that were all memorable at 25K each. Paid tickets would have been pretty exorbitant. It's a great way to see places like Pohnpei, Kosrae and Yap that the high airfares and general obscurity prevent most people from seeing.

Me three.

Anyone else willing to cop?

I would guess free business class tickets over the atlantic, as DL unfortunately ditched their F-cabin some years ago. Or, did you manage to snatch 4 F-class seats on Air France @ 90K miles ea.?

My method, and I'm not going to upset any ft fellow hoarders here by mentioning details &tricks learnt in accumulating miles- is simply aim for the top - the higher you aim, the more you'll be surprised no-one else thought of it. Had I been old enough 20 yrs ago I'd have tried to get on that Concorde for free ferrying Phil Collins & the Live Aid people across the Atlantic have no doubt.If I could look 20 years forward would be thinking bout saving the miles for a VirginGalactic type orbital trip. But as it's 2004, guess I'll have to settle for hoping to lie down next to a famous actress in 1st.

Of course I only started collecting miles this year, so
I'll probably find I'm full of s***.

You guessed it!
outbound sfo\atl\cdg\madrid (am working on snagging a nonstop )
1 week in spain, then madrid\cdg w\10 day Paris layover and cdg\sfo, nonstop
all on airfrance, all first class for business class mileage contribution since AF doesn't have 1st

AND
I personally called AF to confirm seat assignments, even though Delta provided them, and the CSR asked me if we wanted the "skydeck" or something similar, which she described as sort of a premium 1st class upstairs seating area. Of course I agreed!!

Air France does have first class (l'Espace Premere) and it is 100k per ticket, booked in the "A" bucket. Their business class (l'Espace Affaires) is 90k per ticket and is booked in the "O" bucket. The 744 upstairs is business class, the 12 first class seats are in the nose.

I think you will find "upstairs" on Air France is Business Class.