Keys to winning The Miles Game
China, Mongolia, Britain, Italy, Mali, Bali: These are some of the places that I’ve traveled on frequent flier miles.
Yes, despite the limited number of seats, it can be done. But don’t expect to snag the well-timed direct flight on a high-season Friday or Sunday.
Using your miles for that trip of your dreams takes perseverance and flexibility – and, sometimes, a little detective work.
First, you need to decide how to use your miles. Some of our friends save their miles for upgrades to business class, but my husband and I long ago decided we’d sacrifice comfort for frequency. So it’s the back-of-the-bus for us, which means we’re competing with every other travel junkie out there.
Still, more often than not, we win at The Miles Game. Here’s our advice for how you can, too:
• Concentrate your mileage. We stick with two programs, both with partners that go to the exotic locations we long to visit. My husband, who travels to Atlanta on business, takes Delta, and uses a credit card that earns miles on many airlines, including Delta. My company uses American, so I stick with it and its mileage partners, and have a personal credit card that also earns American miles.
• Book early. Our trip this past Christmas to Bali was booked in June – later than we should have reserved, but workable due to a recently announced routing that began later in the year. If our plans tanked, we figured we’d just pay the fee to redeposit the miles in our account – a reasonable risk to us, since it was much cheaper than buying the tickets.
• Call the airline. American now charges a $15 fee if you book an award ticket on the phone rather than booking online. But landing tickets is tricky business, and if you can’t find one online, you often can get a helpful agent who will find the magic route.
• Call again. If the first agent isn’t so savvy, or there’s just nothing available, call back on a regular basis. We moved our Christmas tickets from one date to the next by simply calling every day for a few weeks until something opened up.
• Research. Obscure or new routes are often the key to finding a free ticket. Before calling the airline to try to snag seats, I go online and try to figure out every possible routing on my airline. I also find out which of its partners go to my destination.
When the agent says she doesn’t see anything, I’ll helpfully add, “Is there anything through Chicago to Nagoya? How about from Dallas through Narita? Does Cathay-Pacific have anything through Hong Kong?”
• Have patience. Even when you get a great agent, this process can take time. For us, it’s worth an hour or so on the phone in trade for two free tickets to Asia or Africa – valued at several thousand dollars each.
• Be realistic. Don’t expect convenience, direct flights or seats on those busy travel days of Friday and Sunday. Free has its own price – it’s called time.
• Be flexible. If you can give a bit on dates, it helps. So does flexibility on the routing. On a recent trip to Tunisia, we had to fly through Chicago and overnight in London on the outgoing and return parts of the trip. That added $135 per night in hotel bills for two nights, plus transportation from two airports to London (one flight was into Gatwick, the other to Heathrow), at a cost of about $65 per person, for a total extra cost of $200 each – still a bucket-load cheaper than buying the air tickets. What’s more, we got two nights in London to catch up with friends.
• Be adventurous. Play the game right, and you can end up seeing a new place for free. Our Indonesia trip included a 10-hour stopover in Osaka. We took the commuter train into town and spent the afternoon at the Osaka Castle, learning about Japan’s medieval era and hanging out with locals in the park. We even tried grilled octopus fritters from a local stand – not my favorite food, but certainly an experience.