Advice for a miles newbie
 

Long time lurker and finally really getting into the world of miles/points collecting. If anyone can help me with just a few simple questions, I'd really appreciate it. Apologies if these are dumb questions.

Trying to accumulate as many miles as I can over the next year to help pay for me and my fiance's honeymoon. I have a decent number of miles already accumulated with Continentals' OnePass program.

- Am I better off getting a Continental Mastercard (includes 25,000 miles for signing up but has a yearly fee) OR a Capital One No Hassle Miles Reward Card (no bonus for sign-up but no fee). Its not the fee that I'm concerned about but essentially which will be more conducive to getting the best deal (ie: should I limit myself to Continental, black-out dates, etc)

- If I get a Continental Mastercard and my fiance does as well, can we easily consolidate both of our 25,000 miles bonuses?

Again, sorry if this is remedial stuff but I'm just looking to start this all off on the right foot. Any other obvious advice for a newb is also appreciated.Thanks in advance!

Hi, and welcome to FT. As I assume you like to have your honeymoon somewhere far away, and fly there in F (or C), you'll need a lot of miles, I guess 200.000+

This won't be reachable within a year or two (When assuming you won't spend 50k$+/year per person) - even including a one-time bonus.

I don't know how much miles you're still missing (I know people who won't say decent unless they get 1 million) but in your case, unless it's something under 40k miles or so (So you would reach it with the bonus+year expenses), go for a card with the maximum signup bonus for yourself and one for your fiancée, return them at the earliest date possible, get new cards and continue. Or do some cards at the same time, with different banks. Just pick those with the maximum of bonus miles when signing up.

About putting both miles into one account, why not keep seperate accounts for yourself and your soon-to-be wife? This would make administration much easier, and booking of awards can be done right from both accounts, without the need/time to shuffle miles around.

Frequent flyer programs are for individuals. Generally speaking, airlines don't allow individuals to consolidate their miles, bonuses or not. Fewer FFPs have the family/joint account system. BA is one of those. However, I am not aware of such system in CO.

If you want to transfer miles from one account to another, it's costly and savvy FTers usually don't recommend it.

If CO is the airline of your choice, you probably should look for more promotions and rack up your miles before your big day. You should visit our CO Forum to check out the good finds.

You should also look into this Chase/CO deal, if you haven't taken advantage of it.

Congrats and welcome to FT!

Chase and Amex have not historically allowed repeated sign up bonuses.

To the OP,

Welcome to Flyertalk! You'll find a wealth of information in the various forums and from various members of the community. Are you a blog reader? If not, check out some of our member's blogs via boardingarea.com

What is your goal for your honeymoon? Are you looking to fly in Economy, Business, or First class? What kinds of hotels are you looking to stay in? Where are you wanting to go?

Give us a little more information about your goals and we can probably help you out more.

Welcome to FT!
Halothane

A note of warning about cards like the Capital One card: cards that promise travel benefits but are not affiliated with an established FFP (i.e. the CO card) typically don't give very good returns. While they promise tickets on any carrier with no blackout dates, you're typically given a dollar amount limit of the ticket--in effect, Capital One is going to buy you a ticket, but it has to be under a certain price. I've heard the number $600 bantered around before (for a domestic ticket), and assuming it takes 25,000 Capital One "miles" to redeem for that $600 ticket, you're looking at a maximum return of about 2.4 cents per mile.

On the other hand, you can get a MUCH better value on international redemptions, especially in premium classes. For example, I redeemed 150,000 Alaska Airlines miles for a First Class ticket on British Airways. Such a ticket will run you about $27,000 if you want to plunk cash down for it (and it's worth every penny), but using the miles meant that I was earning a return of about 18 cpm--that's 7.5 times the value of a Capital One "mile."

While that's on the complete other end of the spectrum (I'm not sure there's another award out there that beats mine, which, sadly, AS discontinued last year), there's a lot of good business-class redemptions available to exotic destinations to be had, and these are not accessible to the fake "mileage" cards like the Capital One card you were looking at.

Of course, even with generous sign-up bonuses, it's hard to get enough miles to redeem for a fancy seat to an exotic destination, so a card like the CO card works in conjunction with you making sure to earn CO miles on your existing flights. Make sure whenver you fly anywhere you do so on a CO flight or CO partner and credit your miles to the CO program. You'll see your balance of miles increasing in no time!

Do people really pay $27k for F on BA?

No, but they would if they routed like I did: LAX-LHR-SIN-SYD and back! ;)

Few do, but the existence of such fares lets people who don't understand economics post here about the fantastic value per FF mile that they got. :D

Hey, if I win a $2,000 Tempur-Pedic mattress from my local mattress store instead of a $200 off-brand spring mattress, I still won $2,000 worth of mattress! Just because I didn't pay for it doesn't cheapen the value of the mattress! :p

Thanks everyone for all of your advice. I think we will each just get the card w/ Continental and patiently rack up points. Sounds like we may not be able to accumulate enough in a year but might as well get started now anyway and possibly have a nice 1 year anniversary trip : )


Since you asked, we are hoping to fly to either Italy or Croatia. Economy class is just fine. Getting there is the goal for the honeymoon; everything else is just gravy : )

Thanks again!

Unless you spent time in London and Singapore, I just don't see the point. Otherwise you can get LAX-SYN return in F for $10K. Plus BA first is no where near the best of all the airlines (and definitely not worth every penny as you claim).

Since you already have some continental miles getting the Continental MC seems like the best option. Stay away from Capital One, its the worst deal for most people (a lot of cashback cards are much better if one wants no-hassle). Also, note that the 25K miles are awarded only when you add an authorized user for the card (otherwise its 20K).

One disadvantage with Continental is that their saver-award availability sucks. Hopefully that will change when they officially join *A.

Not that this is the place to get into a debate like this, but yes, I spent time in LHR (a day) and SIN (a month), and yes, I know that CX, SQ, and others far exceed BA. And as far as being worth every penny, a little bit of hyperbole is allowed on occasion, is it not? ;)

Of course a bit hyperbole is allowed. Thats how it works on these forums. Someone comes and brags about their wonderful award (I have done that too) and others come and shoot it down. I was just doing my part :-).