Frequent Flier Miles- Don’t Save Them for long!
In a previous blog post (shown below) I wrote about spending your frequent flier miles due to devaluation and other issues. Now airlines are in a much worse financial shape than ever due to record high fuel costs. Many airlines are reducing the number of flights they have which also affects how many award seats are available. Domestic awards are now more scare or may show up as a larger cost per ticket using the miles. It still makes sense to burn through the miles for upgrades and future trips. It makes great sense to use many of the international partners. Flying in general is becoming more expensive, yet I still found some deals using my miles over buyign the same ticket. You make find that the $250.00 airfare may now be $400.00 or more but the airline will only charge you the same 25K miles for that ticket. In this case you have a higher value use to spend the miles for the trip. If fuel continues to remail ast these high levels it may have severe consequences to the industry.
The airlines are continuing to devalue the airline frequent flier points. Basically they are doing anything possible to clear them off the books. Recently I checked a plane which was mostly empty on US Airways. they wanted 100,000 miles for a domestic first class ticket. This should be about 50K miles. Many domestic coach tickets that you think will be 25,000 miles can be shown by the airlines at 50,000. The idea is to clean you out. Since the wards chan. ge so frequently I suggest not holding a million miles and cleaning/using them ASAP. Use them on partner airlines on expensive overseas tickets and domestic or international upgrades. Don’t use 50,000 miles for a domestic ticket. Airline miles are like $100.00 in your wallet today but I tell you in 6 months you have $50.00. It has become that tough. Airlines are very stingly in the tickets they offer. Especially on weekend type leisure flights.
Tags: frequent flier, frequent flier miles, Travel
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.