Your friend is coming from another country. He has no interst in FF miles. He can fly on a small foreign carrier which has no ff program for $1000. He can also fly on a US carrier for $1200. The trip will accumulate exactly 25K miles. Your friend wants to take the cheaper carrier but you tell your friend you'll pay the extra $200 now for the US carrier, and he will issue you the award whenever you want it.

[This message has been edited by hindukid (edited 05-21-2003).]

Did the miles (ticket) get bartered or sold?

I think you have your answer.

I see no issue with this. He is your friend and the airlines will never know. I use tickets for family and friends all the time. True, I earn the miles legitimately and don't charge my friends and family for the tickets, but I do issue for other people all the time.

Go for it

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http://www.benjaminwagner.com
Great music!

That's a dark shade of grey. If you were to ask the airlines, I'm confident they would say it's not allowed.

In practice, however, it wouldn't be a problem.

It's probably against the airline rules. Would the airline with the $1200 ticket want you to do it anyway so that they could have the revenue? In these tough times I'm guessing the answer might be yes.

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"A day without Points/Miles is like a day without SUNSHINE"

As a sidenote, thats one heck of a trip your friend is doing.

As he has "no interest in FF miles" I assume he is not elite on any programm which means he is looking at 25.000 base miles i.e. all butt in seat without any applicable bonusses.

Where is he flying from ?

He will be elite after this trip or pretty dam close to it.

I'm actually helping my parents buy tix for my grandparents. They will come from DEL and need to go straight to IAH or stop at BOS then go to IAH. After IAH attend my brother's wedding in ALB, then drive to BOS stay with my uncle and then leave for DEL. I priced out DEL-ZRH-DFW-IAH, then IAH-DFW-EWR, then drive with my brother from NYC to ALB for wedding, then hitch a ride to BOS with my uncle, then BOS-ZRH-DEL. With some rather ingenious ticketing on my part I have knocked the whole thing down to $1090 from aa.com.

However my uncle is a professor and will be driving down to IAH for the summer. They can fly on Royal Jordanian from DEL-NYC for only $900. He offered to drive to NYC from BOS to pick them up, take them back to BOS for a week, then drive from BOS to IAH, then Drive back to BOS, then drive to wedding in ALB and back to BOS for a week, then drop them off in NYC.

To me it seems crazy to do all this driving for $190 X 2 tix. Granted my uncle will be doing the BOS-IAH rt anyways, but my grandparents are probably 80 and I don't really think driving 2000 miles each way sounds fun or practical. Also BOS-NYC for 2 RT's is not exactly nothing.

My parents offered to buy their tickets, but grandparents won't let it happen. However they seem to feel that all this driving is worth the $190 fare difference. I probably have no understanding of how tight money is to people in India. But I'd gladly pay the extra money, enroll them in FF accounts and use the miles for myself. I'm sure my parents would have no problem doing that either. Just have to convince the grandparents that this isn't actually charity but something we want.

It's not exactly 25K but close enough. About 19K miles + 1K Online booking. If I sign them up for gold challenge, it seems they could net another 2300 or so. I'd top off the account with Kelloggs miles.

By the way, this is actually a pretty good mileage run. Get's even cheaper by replacing BOS with ORD. You could probably get some more miles by adding short segments and maybe could go even further out of the way then IAH. It is pricing as DEL-EWR outbound, BOS-DEL return.

Also how does ticketing for AA.com work. I went all the way up to the screen where you put in CC number but ticketing options are after that. I know this requires paper tix. I don't think they can send tix to India. Is there a fee to mail within US. How long will it take? Can it be fedexed for a charge. I think that I may have to allow for a 2 week turnaround including fedexing tix to DEL once I receive them.

I bought $20K US savings bonds for my brother withmy Starwoods card. I later got my niece a FF ticket from YYZ to SAN to partake in a family function. Didn't give this a second thought. I got 25K towards my lifetime platinum, my niece got to go and my brother got bonds. Go for it.

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Ms.DtG

The answer to your question is yes

It the question is would the airline find out, that is likely no.

If you morality meet the test offered by some of the responders (it is okay to do it if you will not get caught), then go for it.

Why not buy the tickets with your ff card, and have them reimburse you. That would yeild even more points!

I've decided that this really isn't buying at all. I'm giving them the extra money. The free ticket is theirs and they could use it if they want to. They never will of course (only because they live in India and never fly except rare visit to US), and I'm sure if I ask to use it they will agree. As long as it is their choice and not an obligation, then it is not buying.

It's not really any different than my parents paying for my tickets for the last twenty years. If they need a FF ticket, I will certainly give it to them although I am under no legal obligation.

This is not an abusive violation of the rules or possibly not even a violation at all. The friend is willing to give you the award. That's ok. The fact that you try to convince him to fly a certain big name airline (the small name carrier has no FF program) and even helped pay for part of the ticket doesn't matter.

How about parents who pay for their college kids' airplane tickets. Sometime in the future, the child is generous and says "Thanks Mom and Dad for supporting me throughout college, here's a ticket to Hawaii". That's legal and not at all abusive even though the parents paid for many tickets.

While it might be possible to find someone at the airline who would judge it a violation, I believe that -- at least unofficially -- the airlines will not frown on this sort of thing within a family.

It's really no different from a parent enrolling a child in a FF program, paying for the child's tickets, and then using the child's mileage for free tickets -- except perhaps in this case there is consent that a child make not be capable of.

This is a win-win-win and in my opinion there is no moral delimna. If it is against AA rules, you're still doing them a favor by pulling this off.

1. The airline (AA) gets $1200 cash that they would not otherwise receive.
2. Your grandparents get where they need to go in a timely manner.
3. You get an award.

Is it against the rules? Maybe, but probably not. But even if it were, let's look at the difference between this and "traditional" reward sales.

In a traditional sale, you give someone, say $900 for enough miles for an AA ticket that would otherwise cost $1200. AA losses $1200 (since it's likely that if they needed to go that badly, they would have paid up), and the owner of the miles pockets $300.

In your example, the owner of the miles (your grandparents) pockets nothing, the airline gains $1200 (since that cash would otherwise have been spent on the other airline) and the airline incurrs the same cost of the miles being burned as in the "traditional" sale.

Now that I look at my analysis of your example, I'm not sure I see how this could be interpreted as against the rules... All of the money you contribute will be going to AA, not your grandparents. As you will not be paying your grandparents any consideration for the miles, I'm not sure how it could be characterized as a barter or sale.