Amazing But True - Seats from Frequent Flyer Miles!
April 26th, 2007 Posted in General, Travel industry
After scoring three frequent flier tickets to Guatemala for the family this summer, at the lowest mileage level, I’ve managed to make lightning strike twice in one year. This week I got all three of us on a round-trip flight to Mexico in October using mileage. Two for two!
It wasn’t easy in either case, of course, and required plenty of patience and flexibility. You feel like a rat trying to find your way through the maze to get a piece of cheese on the other end to redeem your mileage for flights, but it can be done. The first round was on Continental, this round was on Delta.
I had enough miles to use Continental again, but they’re known as some of the stingiest bastards around when it comes to opening up seats for frequent flyers. As usual, they had a grand total of two days open in the whole month of October for where we wanted to go. For the Guatemala trip we just said, “Okay, those are our dates” and grabbed them. But this other trip is around a school vacation, so dates are not so open.
It seems that with Continental, you either need to get really lucky with their very few dates, fly somewhere really obscure, or use your miles for upgrades. Otherwise, they’re obviously not out to make their frequent fliers happy.
Delta is far more accommodating when it comes to open dates. We could have flown on pretty much any day using only 30,000 miles each. The flight times are odd, but you can get there anyway. We had to make some strange arrangements - I’m going down earlier and coming back a day earlier via Guadalajara, with a night’s stopover. Considering it cost us only miles and taxes though ($66 each), I’m willing to put up with some inconvenience.
Alas, when my wife booked hers a message came up on the screen telling her she had to phone in with the confirmation number. She ended up spending an hour on and off hold with a guy in India who could barely understand her, she had to argue to get the $10 “phone service” waived, and they charged her credit card twice for the taxes. Is there something about airline company executives that makes them set up their systems to piss customers off as much as possible? Sigh…
[image from Hormel]
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2 Responses to “Amazing But True - Seats from Frequent Flyer Miles!”
By Steve on Jun 7, 2007
Tim - give it to me straight - if I typically use orbitz or kayak to fly internationally, or southwest/jetblue to fly domestically, should I just not even think about frequent flyer miles?
By tim on Jun 13, 2007
If you just automatically grab the cheapest fare with no thought as to which airline or alliance you are using, then it will be tough for you to build up much of a bank of miles. If you try to use one alliance though for the international trips, a few long ones can add up fast. Combine that with their online mall and a credit card that earns you miles and it’s a different story.
For domestic trips, keep using JetBlue. It’s more comfortable and the savings are real money. You have to fly a LOT of domestic legs on a legacy airline to earn a free trip and it is seldom worth it in my opinion. The only people making out doing that are frequent business travelers. If you earn enough on JetBlue over time, great. If not, no big loss.