jgnadler

I have 900,000 miles, mostly on business travel. I have now retired but think that I want to try and make the million mile threshold. What's the best (and most $ efficent) way to make miles?

entropy

congrats on retirement.

If I were you, I'd take advantage of your time and enjoy. Buy discounted premium cabins when you want to, get the club card if you really want club access. And don't worry about MM.

WineCountryUA

Do you care where you go? is this just for getting the lifetime miles? for the minimum cost.

Sounds like mileage run type travel -- suggest checking Mileage Run Forum

100K miles is 200+ hours of air travel

TA

I think I agree, don't worry about making 1MM too much. To get there, you have to suffer through 50k miles of pretty much no benefits anyway, for something whose benefits may be diluted before you even get there. Better just to fly what you want, when you need to, and not chase the name of the status. It's not all that great...

Kacee

Don't know where you're flying from, but it's not hard to pull 15-20K miles for a RT Trans-Pacific (TPAC), which can often be had on sale in Y for $500 or so. So that's 5 or 6 trips and approx $3K. And way more time in an economy seat than I could handle. Much easier as a 1K with GPUs to upgrade those long flights. Or, if you utilize the Premium Fare Deals thread might be able to do it in business class in the $10K range (for example, currently a $1569 fare from PVG-ORD).

mduell

On all the vacations you're going to take anyway!

Mostly longhaul to competitive markets.

porciuscato

You wouldn't be asking if you didn't somehow, deep down, want to do it. Succumb to your inner frequent flyer!

I know there's a separate forum for mileage runs. But I'll give you a starting point:

8 X SFO-EWR-SJU RT in Business First. It will get you over 100K miles and 10 GPUs. It will cost you about $10K. You can spend at least half the time sleeping in lie-flat seats. If you want to be an FT legend, you could do all 8 trips consecutively! I'll bet a few blogs & newspapers would even write about you.

televisor

I don't think that works: only BIS miles count, PQM doesn't.

I'd recommend just keep flying as usual, see what happens. If you're feeling adventurous, plan holidays in destinations that are further away, and do that more regularly, and you'll get there faster. I.e. use the travel as an excuse for the miles, and the miles as an excuse to travel.

porciuscato

Slight error since I entered SJO instead of SJU in calculator. You need to do 12 round trips. Each trip is 8346 BIS and 16,692 PQM. It would cost about $15,000.

mherdeg

Yeah, I keep coming back to these fares.

I'm casually thinking about sprinting to 1000K. East coast tpacs to China are on sale at 3 cpm with wide availability. The fares typically do not allow routing via HNL, so not much chance to break it up along the way, but PVG-SFO and vice versa have some pretty good timings for a weekend trip.

It's also tempting to fit in an upgradeable p.s. transcon and fly to a secondary China market (like XIY) with low load factors and hope for ghetto-lie flat to make the trip survivable.

I ultimately decided for 2017 to just take a bunch of the $400 Europe V fares, which are much worse from a cpm perspective (even BRU-OGG) but at least they're GPUable. The philosophy here is that if you're going to travel for leisure, for heaven's sakes, you might as well see the place you're going!! (This is the way I have gotten to know a lot about Oslo in the past couple of years.)

EmailKid

Something you should have asked when you were still flying for business, but that's water under the bridge ....

Since your profile is incomplete, telling us where you are based would be great help @:-)

At any rate, the cheapest would probably be 5X to Asia, probably about $5K.

Is lifetime Gold worth it to you? Sitting in coach

SFO-SSA

It's worth it. I'm retired and made Million Miler a few months ago. I rest easy now knowing I'm lifetime Gold without ever doing a year-end mileage run again in my life, that I have lifetime access to Economy Plus seats, that I can name a companion to share the benefits and that I get the occasional upgrade (my companion and I were just upgraded outbound and return on a trip to Mexico). Go for it.

keisari

Lifetime in United lexicon means sometimes when we feel like it for as long as we feel like it.

sinoflyer

An error by one letter actually led to an underestimation of the costs by 50% . But I think I agree with your point, that even at 12RT/$15K, it might be worthwhile to top off lifetime BIS past the 1MM threshold. Kacee also pointed out upthread that this could be done with 5-6 transpac RTs in the $3-5K range in Y, but that would be brutal and I hesitate to recommend that. The $10K estimate for discounted J is possible, but not probable? One has to be fortunate to spot the sales every time they happen, or be able to pull the trigger with enough $ and time to plan for multiple, if not all, trips at once. I would say that even $15K is lowballing it, especially from the West Coast, since the 100,000 additional BIS would require 6+ RTs.

With UA, the only way to earn BIS towards 1MM is to actually fly the miles. At this point, OP should pursue it at a more leisurely pace. Get Premier Access for E+ and a UC membership (or the Club CC) for lounge access. Visit destinations that you haven't been to before, and stay for a day or two rather than doubling right back. You might as well start with the same traveling lifestyle now as the one that you plan to have after reaching 1MM. The nicest benefit worthy of pursuing 1MM, however, is that your *G status can then be shared with your +1. Good luck.

BTW, welcome to FT jgnadler!

lhrsfo

Choose your flights wisely and you can do longhaul in Y in considerable comfort. In January and February it's common to get, for example LHR-LAX with an entire row in E+ to yourself. That's 11,000 miles (nearly) with great space and a nice time in London. You could then do it again the following month, but have (eg Copenhagen) as your destination, flying through London. And so on and so forth.

Don't assume you'll get it in one year, but in two it's feasible and in three it should be easy. Take advantage of having no constraints on when, where or how long you go.