Why elite status works

by Grant Martin on

I suppose I’ve been a little spoiled over the last few years, flying almost exclusively on one airline and all. After reaching a certain threshold of miles, I’ve been upgraded to first class on 90% of my domestic flights, while the other 10% I’ve spent in either a bulkhead or an exit row seat. It was a novelty at first, but after a dozen or so legs I’ve sort of become used to it.

In that light, I suppose its also good that I’m reminded of my benefits once in a while. On last minute work out in Orange County, I suddenly had to book a flight from New York City to Los Angeles leaving next Monday, the 17th. With such short notice, I wasn’t able to book a competitive flight on my preferred carrier and was forced to book on another, less optimum airline. My seat on the way to Los Angeles? 44B. Back of the plane, center seat. No free alcohol, meals or goodies for me this time.

And this is why people have allegiances to airlines. Many will gladly pay an extra twenty or a hundred bucks to fly on their preferred carrier because they know how they’re going to be treated, where they’re going to sit and what they’re going to get. It’s a crafty marketing strategy created by the travel industry that ropes poor bastards like myself in — and keeps us there.

If you’re interested in subscribing to elite status this year, be sure to check out Gadling’s Guide to Mileage Running.

Time to start burning those Northwest Airlines miles

by Grant Martin on

All of the buzz in the underground is that Delta and Northwest Airlines are seconds away from a merger. As speculation swirls around who’s going to come out on top, who’s going to be laid off and whose aircraft are going to be rebadged, an interesting conversation about frequent flyer miles has emerged.

What happens to the frequent flyer programs when two airlines merge? The worst case scenario is that the airline on top squishes the smaller carrier and that those miles turn to zero. In this case, that would be Delta usurping Northwest’s program. And that’s got passengers scared pink about the future of their accounts. Some have been hoarding miles for years in a 401k nest-egg type of fashion, thinking they’ll travel the globe for free as they hit their golden years. What will they do if their balance turns to dust?

The notion of total-loss to many frequent flyers has them scrambling to put the miles to use. Since award tickets are refundable, many are booking tickets far into the future that they may refund after the merger. Others are buying tickets for friends, family and strangers, while expunging the remaining balance on piles of magazine subscriptions.

What am I going to do with mine? I’m currently sitting on top of enough miles to book a ticket to Europe. Part of me wants to sponsor a contest on Gadling for a free ticket, while another part wants to just book a ticket to Munich for Oktoberfest. Either way, I’m not hopeful about the future of Northwest’s Worldperks program.

Gadling’s guide to mileage running — maximizing miles and segments page 2

by Grant Martin on

Something else to bear in mind is that for each segment you fly, something could potentially go wrong. I mean this in the best possible way; any one of your flights could be overbooked and you could take a 300$ voucher to take the next trip home. Weather could cause delays, resulting in a reroute through another city and additional miles. It’s important to remember that once you book an itinerary its the airlines’ responsibility to fulfill those flights. If your trip gets disrupted due to weather, mechanical or (their) logistical problems, they need to help you get home. Just be flexible in your options on your routing and you should be in good shape.

Finally, try to keep an open mind and be friendly when you’re mileage running; you don’t realize how long of a day your crew is working until you run into them twice in the same day. Last time I flew into Phoenix on a job I ran into the city, had two beers with a friend, turned around came back. Once I grabbed my same seat in the same plane returning back to Detroit, I looked around to find another four people from my flight out. We all had a chuckle, shared a couple of stories and promptly fell asleep for the long redeye home.

If you’ve done everything right, you’ll hate yourself for a few hours once you get back home to your bed. You should be tired of travel, dealing with airlines, turbulence and sitting upright. You should miss your significant other, your 450 thread count sheets and walking barefoot through the kitchen. But once your miles post, your status is upgraded and you start to earn enough miles to take the family out on vacation next spring, you’ll think about the time you put into earning these rewards. And then you’ll know that your investment was worthwhile.

Gadling’s guide to mileage running — maximizing miles and segments

by Grant Martin on

Now that you’ve got a fare or a city-pair picked out, you need to book your ticket. Another tip is that ticketing rules often dictate that you can add extra segments (stopovers) to your itinerary. For example, if I have a flight from DTW-LAX, I might read the fine print and see that I can book up to two stopovers for that fare. So I can price out a DTW-MEM-MSP-LAX flight for the same price as the nonstop, except I earn extra miles from flying north-south so much more.

Often, you can find your fare rules by booking your ticket halfway through, pricing it out and either reading the fine print or clicking the rules link. If you can’t get the airlines’ search engines to automatically book those stopovers, try using the multi-city search to force it to keep those segments in place.

Additionally, you can always use ITAsoftware to investigate optimal fare routings and rules. While the software doesn’t have the capability to purchase tickets, it’s a great resource to learn about all of the ridiculous possibilities for your routings. I will warn you right now though that the software is pretty complex. You need to be (you guessed it) patient and diligent to find the best bookable routing.

Usually, crazy routings are only really bookable from non-hub cities. Airlines take precautions to make sure that those in hub-markets can’t screw with the system too much and book crazy itineraries. But if you’re in a non-hub city and have a little bit of creative mojo, it’s frequently possible to find multi-leg itineraries around the continent all completable in a single day.

Continue reading to Maximizing miles and segments, page 2 >>

Gadling’s guide to mileage running — how to find a mileage run

by Grant Martin on

The first thing you need to determine before you make your run is exactly how many miles or segments that you need. Depending on the severity of the your requirements, you may want to break up the run into several smaller runs or do one long transoceanic job.

Next, you want to find the best bang for your buck. Many seasoned mileage runners book their itineraries off of mistake and sale fares. Over the course of the year they keep their ears to the ground, waiting for dirt cheap flights to Rome or error tickets to New Zealand pop up on the radar. You can do this in a number of ways:

  • Subscribe to a few different active newsletters. Travelzoo and Airfarewatchdog are two great resources that publish daily fare deals and tips online. Usually if they find good tickets they pass on the savings the same day. This is particularly handy because often times sale and mistake fares sell out or are canceled in a few hours.
  • Flyertalk is an online community of flyers dedicated to all things airline. There is a specific forum dedicated to mileage running, where you can peruse any variety of fares that people have found interesting over the past year or so. You have to be patient, however, because fares only pop up once in a while. Try subscribing to the RSS feed or reloading the page a few times a day.
  • If you haven’t got the patience for the best deal to come to you, it’s always possible to find the second best deal – or the best PPM on the current market. I’ve learned that the best tool for this is Farecompare (FC). You can either go to the destination maps, plug in your home airport and find the place that’s furthest from you for the cheapest price, or you can use this nifty tool that FC created (plug in your home airport). This makes it easy to sort the list of fares by PPM; if you don’t find a fare or carrier that suits your needs, just scroll down and find somewhere that sounds appetizing.

Feel free to shop around and find less-than-ideal candidates that might serve your needs better. It may be 0.032$/mile for you to go to Omaha on Saturday afternoon, but you can go see cousin Jeremy in rehab the following weekend in Minneapolis for 0.04$ a mile. It also partially justifies the wasted fuel, money and carbon.

Consider it a miniature vacation; I’ve been to Puerto Rico, Las Vegas, DC, San Francisco and Phoenix this year for under 48 hours each and enjoyed myself every time.

Continue reading to Maximizing miles and segments