Mama

I doubt UA is this smart.

RNE

I'm seeing nothing even at twice that cost from CLE or CAK.

Air Houston

IAH is even worse. I have booked exactly ONE ticket this year at less than 10 cpm. Even my personal trips are usually 20-25 cpm as a Houston based flyer.

PDXPremier

IAH had some good 4cpmish fares to IST and DXB earlier this year...

mgcsinc

Are you buying these as one-ways, or r/t's?

mre5765

Yes because this is the first thread ever that talks about how people score elite status spending a few hundred dollars.

Just because you can't imagine it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Flyertalk exists for the this reason. Boardingarea.com and other blog sites are stocked will people who fly to get status so that they can get more miles, so that they can fly in F or J on long hauls.


Well you've asserted many times that no GS pays for GS status, and yet here you are claiming you made 1K on your one dime. Wow.

rankourabu

How are those two things equal???? One is mileage based, and the other purely revenue based

I can make 1K easily by flying partner airlines (irrelevant for GS qualification), and by just flying 100,000 miles. Thats not so hard out of pocket. A few overseas vacations a year will do. And this year has been especially generous with one RGN fare, and one other NH F TPAC mistake fare, so 1K was reached faster than usual.

I cannot get GS no matter how many miles I fly. Its revenue based. I am not about to go spending money on United full fare Y tickets and premium flights.... Why would anyone spend actual money on United premium cabins when they have a choice????

And yes, I will assert, very few, if any, GS's pay for their status with leisure travel. It is almost always somehow business or work related. Respect to those who are self-employed or run their own business and make GS and the money spent on GS is theirs.

That is not doing MRs for the sake of MRs - that is doing them with a purpose in mind. A very reasonable purpose at that. The only thing I dont understand is doing domestic MRs, just to do more domestic MRs, no actual trips, no purpose.

bldr1k

Do readers here think there are enough people doing cheap MRs and getting to 1K to bother United? It seems hard to believe.

I have 5 million BIS miles (multiple airlines unfortunately) and have been traveling for 32 years and I never even heard the term mileage run until I looked at this site a few years ago.

I would guess there are a few thousand people in the world doing this and it has no effect on airlines.

I suspect what is having an effect on airlines is that most large companies have travel policies where employees need to purchase the cheapest coach fare regardless of distance.

mre5765

To many people it is hard out of pocket.

False. Fly 4MM BIS: GS for life.

Doing MRs to do more MRs is useful because UA grants higher RDM bonuses for higher levels of elite. This is useful for the person who flies enough on business to reach elite status X, but instead wants those flights for business to earn benefits at elite status X+1 or X+2. If any thing, the post acquisition M+ program encourages more domestic MRs (or segment padding) because of the wide gulf between gold RDM bonus and 1K RDM bonus. And if one is doing MRs, one wants to be in a higher elite status to get higher on the upgrade list, or the the event of those irrops that pay a 50% PQM bonus, standby for the alternative flight. Flying coast to coast watching direcTV in F is not much different than spending the same time in ones living room watching direcTV, except that someone is bringing you the snacks and beer.

I'm not a MRer; my job requires travel, so I make 1K on someone else's dime. But I appreciate the logic of the MRer who seeks a life of leisure without actually being in the leisure class.

kmfdm91

Cheers - you appreciate my logic, and luckily, so does Mrs. Kmfdm91! ^

To circle back to the OPs question - I fly MRs and other leisure trips exclusively to get 1K status, and have for the past ~two years. Prior to that, I had a good amount of business travel which helped significantly, but nowadays, I'm taking cheap MRs and fun weekend trips plus the occasional 'real' vacation in order to get 1K and my wife make at least Gold...

It's worked out great so far, been fairly cheap and we get to travel around in premium cabins on a good percentage of our flights.

Now that we have Baby Kmfdm91, it's even more critical that we get in nicer seats every so often...so i'm shooting for 1K this year and hopefully next year too :-)

There have been some great deals from WAS (and BWI) and i've luckily gotten in on most of them: SEA (x2) , SAN (x2) , PDX (x4) and ANC (x2)...

-jeremy

rankourabu

If I had to fly 4MM miles on UA metal = shoot me.
besides that would have required me doing 125k+ miles every year of my life since birth until now.

You still dont understand, doing MRs to top up status, to get to the next level, to get upgrades for future work trips/vacations, I can understand.

Doing MR's just to get status, just to do more MRs - and never actually going anywhere - that I dont understand.

InTheShed

The way UA goes now, at the time of your retirement, your 1MM may be redeemed for an one-way ticket LAX-FAT at saver's rate, subject to YQ.

xliioper

Fortunately, DL let's you bypass the MQD requirement via $25K annual spend on one the DL branded AMEX cards. So it's not quite the end of road for MR'ers on DL (as long as they have decent credit card spend).

rankourabu

and MQD is not a requirement for anyone outside the USA ^

Phoenixtinct

I just did my first MR last month and then a few more over the past week. When you see a $60+ fare for a transcon flight, I think you should jump on it. The problem was - they all had different origin. The one in May was from FLL to SJU and since I had to fly out from CHI, it required 2 positioning flights. The fare was quite delicious (around 2cpm), so I couldn't pass it up. I had used up all my AirTran/Southwest credits for such flights. But last week was a challenge. Starting out in Phoenix, arriving in Albany, then had to get to Baltimore for the next set - flew to SFO and back, then on to FLL from BWI to head to LAX and from there back to CHI. This presented numerous challenges when one has to factor in additional time for delays and travel is spread around 4 airlines - US, UA, FL and WN with different SDC/standby policies. What I was really thrilled about that even on the cheapest N/G fares I got upgraded on red-eye flights as a Gold. It really helped to get some decent sleep. The last one I did started out in Vegas where I ended up 2 days later after visiting Buffalo and Phoenix on the way. My justification for this is that I was planning to be there anyway and cut my trip a bit short to gain a lot of extra miles and get closer to Platinum - not sure I want to hit 1K or will be able to - with the money I was gonna spend on hotels anyway. Out of the close to 70,000 miles flown so far this year, around 25,000 of those were MRs. That's one Premier level. The rest was necessary travel and not quite cheap either. I flew Turkish in Premium Economy and upgraded to Business on the return with Miles but only got 100% miles on UA for it with no bonuses as opposed to other partners like LH, US, etc. who do. So, for me, taking advantage of some lower fares every so often levels the field a bit with all those 8-10 cpm fares I have to pay quite often. I used my miles for a Business reward from Europe to New Zealand last year for 75,000, so it's nice to be able to afford those every once in a while. And in my opinion, MP award redemption is excellent, so definitely doesn't hurt to have UA miles. Overall, however, I'm not sure I'll keep on MRing - it's very stressful if it's back-to-back and from different cities. Ultimately, if UA adopts a revenue component it will be a non-issue and then I'll just earn my *G status on other alliance members.