Airline Miles

There was a time in my life that I thought international travel was unattainable. I knew I wanted to travel internationally, but I never felt I had the financial means to make it work. I could not comprehend spending $2,000+ on flights before the vacation even began.

I had previously worked at a job that required pretty regular travel, but it had never occurred to me to try to accumulate miles during this time. Many of my co-workers did and it was not uncommon for them to be "bumped" to first class while I sat in an economy middle row. I had also previously applied for an American Airlines credit card that awarded me 30,000 miles which I used to fly from Wisconsin to visit my family in Arizona. That was about my knowledge of airline mileage useage. Honestly, I am not sure how it all began. (I am certain Mike remembers - he can chime in anytime). But one day Mike and I starting investigating using airline miles for travel. We found out there was a vast world dedicated to churning credit cards to accumulate airline.

First, Mike and I don't churn. We do this casually and only collect miles when we want/need them. We have used miles for domestic trips to visit family or spur of the moment hotel rooms, but mainly we earn toward large flight rewards. Churning can negatively affect your credit score and cause major issues - including being blacklisted from some credit card providers. If you are conservative with your mileage consumption this is an 100% reasonable and feasible (and legal) way to travel for every little cost. For us it is about capitalizing on offers in the market.

Churning is when you apply for credit cards that offer airline/hotel/thank you points. Most of these cards have minimum spending requirements. For instance: spend $3,000 in the first three months and get 30,000 airline miles. When you churn you meet the minimum spend, cash in the points, cancel the card and apply for another card that offers rewards. You continue to do this, churning cards over and over again. Note: there are lots of rules and regulations from each card provider that restrict your ability to churn. I will not go into that though. Check out www.thepointsguy.com or www.millionmilesecrets.com for some of the real details.

It can take several hundred thousand miles to take an international round trip flight so researching the best credit card deals is imperative to making this work. Last year we did purposeful churning to generate enough miles to fly to Bali round trip in business class. This cost about 225,000 miles. Both Mike and I applied for and received a 100,000 mile bonus card from AA Advantage, we also had miles built up from a previous 50,000 AA Advantage reward. American Airlines is a partner airline of both Cathay Pacific (who flies to Bali) and British Airways (who has an awesome search engine). Using the British Airways search engine I found two round trip flights from Tucson to Bali, called American Airlines and was able to book round trip business class flights to Bali on Cathay Pacific! Our previous trip to Bali was purchased with cash. We flew economy, I sat in a middle seat and Mike was on the aisle. Mike is 6'5" and we were both pretty miserable. This trip was light years better, very little jet lag and I mean who can knock champagne upon boarding!?!

After our first trip to Bali (30 hours of flying):

After our second trip to Bali - same flight time, business class seats:

We are going to be using miles to fly to India for The Rickshaw Run. I will detail exactly what we do as soon as the tickets are booked. It looks like we are going to book one of our flights on United (160,000 miles round trip) and one of our flights on ANA - a United partner (136,000 Membership Rewards round trip). We are currently about 30,000 short on United miles and 20,000 short on Membership Rewards but as soon as they are acquired I will post exactly how we got them and how we booked our flights. Since United and ANA are partners we should be able to book the same flight, even though they will be through different programs. I can't wait to share that post with you, mileage booking in so exciting to me! It is like traveling for free - I was going to buy groceries or pay the mortgage anyway, so how awesome is it that that money goes towards sending us to India!