Air Miles Revisited

Flying and credit cards and just buying them, oh my!

I’m in London, working in a ‘creative space’. Very digital nomad of me.

I had to fly over at short notice, and when I checked flights for the dates I wanted I was seeing fares of more than 250,000 yen in economy. Ouch.

So once again air miles came to the rescue, and I ended up booking ANA flights in business for about 30,000 yen and a bunch of air miles (150,000 United miles, to be precise).

We’ve written about air miles before on the site, but many people have been asking for more information this week, so here’s a quick review of the process.

First though, let’s look at previous posts on the subject:

• This post on travel hacking includes the two major strategies, as well as a link to my Kindle ebook.
• This post on flying more comfortably includes a few tips on how to make flights much more enjoyable.
• This post on travel hacking for emergencies talks about the last time we had to book flights at short notice. The savings were even better that time.
• This post on travel hacking to Europe talks about a pretty epic trip I took a couple of years ago.
• This guide to credit cards in Japan talks about how to get a credit card and what to use it for.

A brief primer on travel hacking

Travel hacking is using knowledge of airline and hotel ticketing rules, mileage programs, mistake fares, etc. to travel cheaply or better. There are two basic aims: to travel for free or extremely cheaply, or to travel in more comfort for a similar amount of money.

Travel hacking follows the Pareto principle (the 80-20 rule): 20% of the knowledge will give you 80% of the benefits. There is a huge amount of information available, but you probably don’t need most of it (unless you catch the bug and become a mile and point geek).

The easiest way to get started with air miles and hotel points is to join some loyalty programs that you think will be useful. There are two main ways you can benefit: from perks given to members (especially elite members) and from free nights/flights bought with points.

Hotels are generally easier to understand and less lucrative. Unless you are travelling for business fairly regularly they might not be worth bothering with. The main benefits for elite members are room upgrades, late checkouts, and free nights from points.

Airlines on the other hand, particularly for people who might have to travel overseas at short notice, can be much more useful.

The basics

Many airlines are part of an alliance. The three main ones are Star Alliance, oneworld, and Sky Team. The most important thing to remember about alliances is that you can fly on one airline and earn points in a different loyalty program.

For example, you can fly on ANA and earn miles in the United mileage program, or fly on JAL and earn miles in the American Airlines mileage program.

This is important because air miles in the ANA and JAL programs expire after two years, it can sometimes be difficult to book flights with them using miles, and their fuel surcharges and taxes can be higher than the US airlines.

All of these can be avoided by crediting your miles to the United or AA mileage programs. Personally I don’t want to fly on US airlines, but their mileage programs can be more user-friendly than the Japanese ones, particularly for casual flyers. And of course, you can use those miles to fly on different airlines within the same alliance.

You can accumulate air miles and hotel points by using credit cards. In Japan, the United credit cards can be fairly generous, and allow you to fly on ANA, Lufthansa, Thai, and other Star Alliance airlines.

If you are a US citizen and have access to US credit cards then you can take advantage of the much more generous sign up bonuses offered in the US. This site provides a lot of information.

Having mid-tier status with an airline can give you access to lounges, allow you to use the business check in counters, and let you check in more luggage. Both JAL and ANA have special credit cards that let you keep your status for as long as you have the card, so you only have to earn it once. If you travel regularly this can be a great way of making things more comfortable.

You can also straight up buy air miles. Some airlines (like United) have air mile sales from time to time, where you can buy miles for cheaper than usual. Buying miles like this allows you to buy enough miles to book a business class flight for about the price of economy, so it might be worth it if you want to travel in more comfort.

Other benefits of miles is that, unlike buying tickets normally, prices don’t change much during peak periods or if you are booking at short notice, and you can often buy one-way tickets or put together complex itineraries without having to spend more miles (one way tickets can be very expensive to buy normally).

How to get started

If you are interested in starting to use air miles, here are some things you can do:

• Get my Kindle book 🙂
• Join some mileage programs
• Get a credit card that earns miles (just make sure you don’t increase your spending just to get miles -this tends not to be a good idea)
• Check out some mile and point sites: this is one of the biggest, you can search for others

And of course if you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments or in the forum.