Air miles! If you are a frequent traveler, or even just a once a year vacation type, you love the word bonus miles! Those wonderful miles you earn in various ways to get a Free or discounted trip on various airlines throughout the world.
You can earn these in many ways but one of the most classic is through an airline credit card, especially if you live in the United States. The next most common of course it to travel a lot. Those folks that travel for work can really rack up some good mileage!
Some people devote their lives to the art of grabbing up those points. These people are called Travel Hackers! I am not going to go into serious detail about this since there are so many people out there who are already travel hacking ninjas, but here is where Nomadic Matt, one of my heroes, further explains travel hacking, and adds his process for booking a ticket, here.
But what about some of the lesser known ways to rack up those oh so precious miles? Matt explains a few above and I will add my few as well.
1. Try and put everything you buy and can pay off in the same month on your airline credit card.
I have been shy about doing this as I am scared to death I will forget to pay it all off and hit on some nasty interest charges, and to some extent, I am right! Airline cards are notorious for through the roof interest rates, I think mine is around 26%!
As you will know if you have read my earlier posts I am trying to pay off five thousand dollars worth of debt from the beginning of the year and for about a year before that I was carrying all that on my frequent flier mileage card! That meant that I was throwing money at Chase and United Airlines and let’s be honest, neither one of those companies needs my hard-earned money. I applied for an interest free balance transfer card, which let’s me go interest free for one year on the card, transferred the money over for a fee of $120, around the same I paid in interest for ONE month, and now have saved from January and February, $300 in interest charges. But I digress.
My point was to be careful with putting things on the mileage plus card but do put charges on it that will help you to earn miles. Back in the day I put all my college tuition on my credit card. It took some time since I had the Student Frequent flier card from United but now I have almost 60,000 miles on my card! Do you know what that means? I can go Round trip to London next year for only $130 with the miles I have. The extra money is the various taxes, which you can’t use miles to pay for. This is huge, knocking $2,000 off my total cost for the trip. I am still going to try and save this extra $2,000 however since airlines are notorious for blackout dates, sold out frequent flier seats etc. The motto here is, buy early!
I also caution you to find the frequent flier card that will work best for you. My Mileage Plus Student card from United is nice because it comes with no annual fees. The downside? It takes $2 to earn one mile. Most cards give you a mile per dollar, but they charge you an annual fee. This was great when I was a starving student and couldn’t afford that $99 annual rate, but I was putting a ton of money down every six months on tuition. I am now going to keep my mileage plus card until London but find another one that’s easier to collect miles for my domestic flights scheduled this year.
2. Use the partner offers through your frequent flier mileage programs. I am a member of three frequent flier mileage programs and probably should be part of more, but for now this is what I could handle. I have Spirit’s, Southwest’s, and United. Southwest has a super side deal with all sorts of partners that will earn you bonus mileage, even though I don’t have their card.
For example, if you head to their Rapid Rewards page right now, you will find a bonus offer for 1,000 miles if you file your taxes with Turbo Tax. Now this is something even Accountdad would approve of. Sadly he was so gung-ho about getting the fricken taxes done this year he forgot about filing them with this deal, even though he used…wait for it, Turbo Tax. Oh well, one can’t be faulted for excitement over Taxes…uh yes they can! The point is if you are using the products anyways you might as well get a bonus for it. They have a nice site called Rapid Rewards Mileage shopping, that shows you all the ways you can rack those miles up while you are buying things you already purchase! Find it here.
3. Double or triple dip! What is this? Ice cream and frequent flier miles? Well, not quite but it’s a great little scheme that I love to use to get mucho miles and great deals!
Double dipping= You use the above Mileage Mall, as I like to call it to purchase office supplies. They have a deal, for example, where you will earn 3 miles for every dollar spent at Office Depot. PLUS, here’s where the double dipping comes in, if you use your mileage card to purchase it then you get those miles as well. So if you spend $20 at the store you will earn 80 miles! 3 per $20 spent plus the 20 miles from the $20 put on your card. Sweet!
Triple dipping= I’m at the Mileage Mall right now. I notice on the front page they have a deal at Macy’s for 2 miles per dollar spent. Further more they have free shipping and a free 7 piece Estee Lauder gift set if you spend $35 bucks on Estee Lauder cosmetics. The gift set even comes in a travel bag, how convenient for us mileage hoes. So for $35 dollars you get 105 miles and a free set of cosmetics! Now I’m not saying buy this just to get the miles, but if you needed some fresh makeup for your upcoming trip anyways, might as well get some other bonuses while you are at it!
Here’s one other awesome triple dip idea, gift cards. I look at the Mileage mall and notice they have gift cards available for various places. One is called Magazineline.com. They are giving you 15 points per dollar spent! What!!! so if I buy a $30 gift card for mom’s birthday, where she can go and pick out a magazine, I gift myself 450 points plus the 15 miles I get for purchasing with my mileage card. 465 miles! Or you can keep the gift card for yourself and get a few subscriptions, maybe a subscription to a travel magazine that will show you other great ways to save!
You can also do this with the earlier Office Depot idea. You are at the store, buying for the 2 points per dollar, getting the miles per dollar on the card and you can buy gift cards there for places that don’t offer miles, for example Starbucks, because you stop once a week to buy coffee anyways! Would this be a banana split dip!???
3. Sell your gift cards that you bought with miles, on your mileage plus card for money. Now this is essentially buying miles but if you do it right you end up getting more miles purchased per dollar than you do if you bought the miles out right. This is a great option if you are trying to get those last thousand or so miles for a trip.
Example: you buy a bluefly card for $200 at Southwest’s Mileage Mall. Right now you earn 6 miles per dollar. so that is 1400 miles earned. Then you turn around and sell this at Cardpool. They offer you $180 for the card. You have just bought 1400 miles for $20. It costs $41 to buy 1500 miles at Southwest which means that you saved we will go with 18 bucks! You can see how that would add up quickly.
4. Partner offers that cost nothing to earn miles. This one is a great idea and one I use now to rack up the points. It goes slow but a few minutes every day can add up to a 1,000 a month for no money down. I use e-rewards and e-miles to earn miles for filling out surveys, looking at advertisements etc. You would think it’s not all that great but I’ve already earned 5,000 miles with Southwest, which will get me a one way ticket to Las Vegas. Not bad!
5. Dinning clubs. Once again using Southwest airlines, I use Rapid Rewards Dinning. They have 182 restaurants they use in Denver and for every dollar I spend with them I get 3 miles! So if I use the Southwest credit card at the location, I get 4 miles per dollar. Further more I can earn 10 extra miles for written reviews for the restaurants. (Later on I can take these reviews and use them for possible travel articles, earning me more dough! Mwa ha ha ha!) There are also bonuses for levels earned. It’s really pretty sweet considering one of my favorite things in the world to do is eat and drink out!
Also keep in mind that you can use miles for other things such a hotels, car rentals, even restaurants while you travel. My brother recently went to Costa Rica, business class, and stayed at a super nice hotel, all for free by using miles. He did a sweet hacking tip that I’ll show you some other time. Perhaps I can get him to do a little interview!
Just remember that in the world of travelling, he who has the most miles, wins! So get out there and start collecting your points!
Cheers!
Kim Kennedy
(As usual if these are your pictures, and you want them down, just ask. Found these all on pinterest, here.
Her Holiday 