collecting airline miles | worth it?

Do you collect credit cards to collect airline miles? Or, to put the question another way, why am I still bothering with airline miles?

I remember the good old days, back in the 1980's. I believe American Airlines began the trend with its AAdvantage mileage program. You earned one airline mile per mile spent. Once you earned enough miles, you could trade them in on a free flight. Later on, the airlines issued branded credit cards, giving you one mile per $1 spent on that card. Of course, the bank paid the airline for those miles, the purchase price being a fraction of the 3% merchants fee that was paid to the credit card company.

Living in Northern New Jersey at the time, I mostly flew out of Newark, and Continental was my airline of choice. I had one of the earliest Continental frequent flyer accounts (my account number begins with "AB") and a Continental MasterCard. I put all my charges on the MasterCard and ended up with a decent number of miles. I could go to my travel agent, book the lowest coach fare on any Continental flight I wanted, and use 5,000 miles to upgrade to First Class. Roundtrip. Every time!

No more! Miles have become hard to use. The airlines only make a few seats available for free tickets or upgrades on a select few flights. You can possibly be successful in scoring free seats by checking as soon as availability for those flights is loaded onto the airline's website, typically 330 days before.

Example: you want to fly non-stop in First Class from San Francisco to Atlanta on Delta on May 27, 2018. Here's what's available:

6:30 a.m. flight — two saver seats (30,000 miles each way)
8:15 a.m. flight — seats are 70,000 miles each way
11:30 a.m. flight — seats are 70,000 miles each way
1:45 p.m. flight — three seats at 59,000 miles each way
3 p.m. flight — saver seats available (30,000 miles each way)
11:15 p.m. flight — saver seats available (35,000 miles each way)

Mileage "hobbyists" take advantage of the fact that you can sometimes find very last-minute availability on odd flights. I follow the award-flight adventures of my friend Ben Schlappig on his blog, One Mile at a Time. Ben collects tens of thousands of miles through credit card sign-up bonuses and spends them on seemingly random flights, whatever the award-seat gods make available last minute. His travels are based on what happens to become available, not on where he actually wants to go. For Ben, the journey is indeed the destination.

Like most of us whose travels are based on a bucket lists (or business travel), and timed around practical niceties such as when I can take time off of work, I'm finding my collection of miles to be virtually useless. The airline mileage industry is like a ponzi scheme whose usefulness has run out. There are just too many miles out there chasing too few seats. With that in mind, here's my advice on what to look for:

(1) Discounted premium class fares. The airlines have come to the realization that it's more lucrative to sell a business class seat at a discount than give it away as an upgrade. I've found that fares have become more reasonable.

(2) Tour packages that bundle discounted "bulk" fares with another component of your trip. For example, I recently saved a client thousands of dollars per business class seat by combining a bulk fare with a cheap "throw-away" hotel room. You can even find a hotel room you'd actually want to stay in.

(3) Credit cards that offer "cash back" or "flexible points" that you can use towards airline seats. Some cards even have a multiplier effect for some categories of spending and/or when points are used toward flights booked by the credit card company's travel agency partner.

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