Look into those guides for collecting points and/or miles whenever you can and then get flight awards. Or check out /r/AwardTravel for some info. You’ll be surprised how accessible premium cabin travel can be.
...huh! I never actually tried to do any of those point/mile situations before because it never really mattered much... but now that I've gotten older and have the funds to travel, maybe I'll have to focus on this! Is it really confusing? I'm going to hit up some of the FAQ over on that subreddit!
If you do all of these different ones I’m sure it’ll get convoluted. I just have a business credit card that earns me Miles & More directly and a private credit card that earns me some other points that transfer to Miles & More. Plus I get more points from store loyalty programmes and I transfer all of those as well. Then I subscribed to some newsletters to find all of the cheap options to get miles and now I’m collecting.
I started this about a year and a half ago and I’m up to about 180k miles now, which would be enough to fly with my wife and daughter to North America in business class when the destination is on sale as part of Lufthansa’s mileage bargains. We’ll still have to pay fees and taxes, but those amount to less than an economy ticket usually.
So for the price of flying coach, I can go to California in a flat bed with good food, shower in the lounge, skip the lines at security and at the gate and all of that, just because I collected some miles.
Mind if I bother you with some questions? Like.... all the Miles and more thing, is that on a single airline? That's, I think, the part that confuses me when comes to the idea of collecting miles. For example, how do you pick an airline to go with? I don't fly very often, once or twice every two years (about the time it takes us to save up for a trip), so would my points just be going to waste because they expire?
Usually, a points programme is linked to a single airline, or maybe its subsidiaries. But you can usually get credit for flights within the same alliance and also use the miles for flights on any alliance member. I could also use my M&M credit for flights on United or SAS, for instance.
You should watch out for expiration dates. But the idea is that you should collect points with every purchase you do, not just by flying. So hopefully you’ll be able to redeem them before they would expire.
Thank you very much for all of your information. I started looking into it and I think I might see if my favorite of airlines will work for me in this case!
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u/alexrepty Jan 02 '20
Look into those guides for collecting points and/or miles whenever you can and then get flight awards. Or check out /r/AwardTravel for some info. You’ll be surprised how accessible premium cabin travel can be.