Anatomy of a Frequent Flyer Award

If you haven’t noticed, lately I’ve been a little obsessed with travel. I’m taking a few big risks this year and going on some pretty big adventures. Part of that process has been figuring out how pay for the thousands and thousands of dollars worth of air travel that it would cost to buy these tickets to faraway places.

After reading Chris Guillebeau’s Frequent Flyer Master and getting a sneak peak of the new Travel Hacking Cartel (now open for registration), I’m pretty confident that the best answer is frequent flyer miles. In fact, I’ve already booked about $10,000 worth of travel this year for little more than the cost of taxes.

The problem I ran into when I was getting started was that I knew what frequent flyer miles were and how they’re supposed to work, but I had no idea how to get them or how to use them. There’s so much information out there that even the most specific Google search can leave you feeling totally overwhelmed.

Well, now that I’ve put in my dues and have a grasp of how frequent flyer miles work, I thought it would be nice to make a very simple, illustrated guide that explains, from start to finish how to take a trip using them. If frequent flyer miles are something you’re interested in, but you’re in the same place I was not long ago, feeling a bit confused and overwhelmed, I hope this guide helps you get started. It sure definitely fun to make.

The first and most important thing you can do is decide where you actually want to go. It’s hard to be very strategic when you don’t know what your goal is.

Have you ever tried to save more money but didn’t know what you were going to do with it? It’s a lot like that. Pick a few destinations and you’ll progress a lot faster because you’ll have a target that you can measure and visualize. Give yourself a reason to pursue frequent flyer miles.

Using tools like the ANA flight search engine or Award Nexus (you have to login to use either) to find out which airlines are most likely to have award seats available for your trip.

Pay attention to each airline’s partners and what alliance they’re in. This is going to determine which frequent flyer program you focus your miles earning on. If, say, Lufthansa flies where you want to go, but it’s not easy to earn miles with them, you can focus your earnings on one of their Star Alliance partners like U.S. Airways.

Once you know which airline you should focus on, it’s time to actually earn some miles. Most people think you have to fly a lot to earn enough miles for a trip, but actually you can earn a lot more right from your own home. In fact, over the last 6 moths, I’ve earned about 335,000 miles,enough for 13 domestic flights, without ever stepping on an airplane.

Sign up for your airline of choice’s frequent flyer program (it’s free) so that you can participate in their regular mileage earning activities and start shopping in their “mileage mall” for things you already buy anyway.

Optional: Sign up for the airline’s credit card during special promotions when they offer big sign-up bonuses (these usually occur 1-2 times per year). Meet the spending requirements for the sign-up bonus by purchasing $1 coins from the U.S. Mint with free shipping or gift cards to places you regularly spend a lot of money like the grocery store or gas station.

In case credit cards aren’t for you – yes, you can still earn lots of miles without signing up for a bunch of new ones, it’ll just take more time.

Once you have enough miles for your award ticket, you can try to book online, but for most awards you’ll need to call the airline’s award redemption number to book your flight.

Airline customer service is extremely hit or miss, and agents regularly apply rules differently depending on who you’re talking to, likely because the rules are too complex even for them to understand. If you call once and don’t get the answer you’re looking for, politely ending the call and dialing back  is likely to get you the “right” answer after a few tries.

Once your ticket is booked, make sure you ask for a confirmation number. You did a lot of work to get that ticket so don’t let it disappear because your CSR forgot to hit the final “submit” button in their ticketing system.

Enjoy your trip!

And, if you’re interested, check out the new Travel Hacking Cartel. It’s a messaging and notification system to keep you updated about the best frequent flyer award opportunities so that you don’t have to constantly scour the internet to stay updated. With four free tickets guaranteed every year, it looks like it’ll be a pretty useful service.

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