FlyerTalk Forums - Your most extreme mileage earner?

I bought chocolate pudding, gift certificates, and other various things for a few hundred thousand miles, but I always like the flight bonuses the most. My wife and I earned over 300,000 miles with the 1999 Oneworld 100,000 mile promotion and I earned 1,014,000 miles with LatinPass. I learned from these promotions.

Some people might consider this extreme, but I think of it as more like a well-planned mileage run trip. My extreme trip was the Star Alliance 5th anniversary promotion in spring/summer 2002. The offer was 55,555 frequent flyer miles for flying 5 Star Alliance member airlines. The interesting feature of the promotion was that each member airline’s specific frequent flyer program designated eligible qualifying fares for the promotion. United Airlines was more restrictive in the promotion terms than most Star Alliance member airlines.

My wife and I booked five tickets, each ticket with four flight segments. We did not include any frequent flyer number on our ticket records. The plan was to hold all boarding passes and submit one airline flight segment boarding pass from each four flight segment ticket to four different loyalty programs. The promotional flights included a 10-segment weekend getaway trip in June 2002 on United and Air Canada from our home in Monterey, California to Victoria, British Columbia. In July, we redeemed First Class award tickets to Amsterdam and from there flew bmi Airlines to Belfast for one night, and then from Amsterdam to Budapest for two nights during the last week of the promotion.

I selected Air Canada, ANA, Lufthansa, and Mexicana as the frequent flyer programs with the least restrictive fare code eligibility. The real challenge was getting the airline loyalty programs to properly credit the flights. Air Canada was the only airline that correctly posted our miles and the bonus without intervention from me. ANA responded that the Air Canada flight I submitted was ineligible for mileage accrual under their rules because it was operated by Air Canada Jazz. I researched the issue and sent them a reply stating I felt they were in error and they agreed and stated my letter prompted a change in their frequent flyer flight eligibility terms for Air Canada Jazz flights. Mexicana took quite a while to sort out also. Lufthansa was the most problematic and my letters finally resulted in getting the bonus in December 2002, five months after the Star Alliance promotion ended.

Star Alliance 5th Anniversary 55,555 miles bonus, May-July 2002
Ticket #1 Monterey -San Francisco-Seattle-Portland-Los Angeles-Monterey, United Airlines $199.50 x 2 = $399
(We received two domestic free tickets for an outbound voluntary bump in San Francisco and $600 x 2 denied boarding compensation for an inbound bump in Portland, Oregon. We actually got home within an hour of our original schedule by flying to San Francisco rather than Los Angeles.)

Ticket #2 Seattle-Vancouver-Victoria, Air Canada, $210.76

Ticket #3 Amsterdam-London,UK-Belfast,UK, bmi, $223.60

Ticket #4 Amsterdam-Frankfurt-Munich, Lufthansa, $307.74 (Actually only paid $38.20 for two tickets as we used a 600 Euro voluntary denied boarding compensation from an earlier 2002 flight delay.)

Ticket #5 Munich-Vienna-Budapest, Austrian Airlines, $282.05

Total cost was $199.50 + $210.76 + $223.60 + $19.10 + $282.05 = $935.01 for which we each received a free domestic ticket, an United Airlines $600 credit voucher, and 251,530 frequent flyer miles.

Air Canada Aeroplan = 58,555 miles x 2 (Ms. Satori and I both earned the bonus miles)
ANA Mileage Club = 56,753 x 2
Lufthansa = 71,555 x 2
Mexicana = 64,667 x 2

We redeemed miles for a First Class ticket to New Zealand (ANA), three business class tickets to Europe (LH, AC), and we still have 265,000 miles with Air Canada and Mexicana left to spend after building up these accounts over the years with spare frequent flyer miles here and there.