A L S O +T O D A Y Are you more tempted to have a romantic fling while traveling? Bare all in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk Informed Sources Online ticketing vs. travel agents: Which is better? (01/12/98) Tip of the Week Hong Kong's new electronic travel card (01/12/98) R E C E N T L Y In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great By Michael Wood Tracking Alexander the Great through the Hindu Kush (01/08/98) The Inuit Olympics By Mary Roach Inuit Games: Head Pulls, Knuckle Hops and other madness (01/07/98) Mayan dreaming By Douglas Cruickshank Mind-bending visions in the Yucatan (01/06/98) History and hallucination By Jan Morris Gdánsk stands as a symbol of enduring truth -- and stirring resurrection (01/05/98) Wires and buyers and scares -- oh my! By Don George Some questions about the year in travel (12/24/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Road warrior archives		Road Warrior+|+P A G E+2+O F +2 Is earning frequent flier miles without even traveling a big trend? Could you conceivably earn lots of miles without ever taking a trip? One of the fastest growing segment of today's frequent flier programs is not frequent fliers but infrequent fliers, who travel, at the most, one time a year. Those are people who are learning that by getting a credit card or switching to MCI or dining at their favorite restaurant, they can earn miles. The message is that you can earn free travel without ever really leaving your desktop or changing your personal lifestyle. Statistically, 42 percent of all miles earned in frequent flier programs come from these non-travel miles -- dining at restaurants, credit cards, telephones, car rentals, hotel stays. Seven years ago, it was only 3 or 4 percent. If you can't take a trip, what are some other things you can do with your miles? With frequent flier miles you can get free car rentals, hotel stays, exercise equipment and stereos. Two of the other growing trends of the industry are auctions and lifestyle awards where you can bid your miles or cash in your miles to go to the Super Bowl or go to the MTV Music Awards. Airlines seem to be setting tighter and tighter windows -- if you don't use them, you'll lose them. Is this a trend we'll see continuing through 1998? The big trend toward expiring miles happened back in 1988 and since then, there have been no additional airlines really jumping at that. There are three major programs that have expiring miles: American, United and Northwest airlines. Those three airlines expire their miles three years after the year in which you started earning them. I often suggest, if you are not really a frequent flier, and you don't spend $10,000 a month on a credit card and you don't talk $500 worth of long distance calls a month, you may want to consider programs like USAir, TWA, Continental or Delta. With these programs, it can take you as long as you want to earn that free award because you don't have to worry about what I call the "treadmill of expiring miles," and that is, as soon as you get close to that award, the miles you earned three years ago start to expire and now you're caught in the middle. Is there anything you can do if you're in a situation where you're so close to getting an award and your miles are about to expire? The first thing you can do is learn about the program you belong to. For example, in Continental's program they allow you to purchase up to 20 percent of the miles necessary for an award. So if an award you want is 25,000 and you have almost 20,000 but it just seems like you're never going to get to 25,000, you can buy the other 5,000 miles if you want to. Also, I think you want to remember that there are a lot of great offers out there; check your e-mail or your mailbox, you're going to be inundated with offers. For instance, if I were to call MCI today and transfer any of my personal phone bills to MCI, they would give me 5,000 frequent flier miles with almost any airline I chose. That's a big chunk of miles. Also, with certain credit cards, you can get a 2,500 mile bonus. One of the problems of the industry is that people don't read all the mail that the airlines send them. There are some great offers in there where you can bite off big chunks of miles -- 2,500 miles here, 5,000 miles there just for making a decision. And remember that these programs were designed to change your behavior. That is, if you are an AT&T guy, they want to make you go to MCI; if you're an American guy, they want to make you think about flying Continental; if you're a Holiday Inn guy, make you think about staying at Best Western. If you can't use your miles, is it possible to give them to a friend? That's actually easy. In the early days of frequent flier programs, transferring awards to anybody was strictly taboo, but for the last six or seven years now all major programs allow you to give your miles to anyone you choose -- to charity, to relatives, to business associates, anybody you want. You can do anything you want with your miles except for pooling them, i.e., combining one person's 8,000 miles with another person's 18,000 miles to get a free award. You can't pool miles except in a couple of programs: British Airways has a family program where spouses and kids can combine their miles for redemption. In most major programs, you cannot add miles from one person's account to another's. Basically, three things are illegal: You can't sell your award, buy somebody else's award and you can't barter (for example, exchanging a free award for dental repair). The airlines have their own mileage police and every day hundreds of people get busted at airports on what are called "brokered miles." Have all these passengers flying for free created any hostility with the passengers who actually pay for their seats? There's a growing uneasiness about the number of free seats available, and the haves and the have nots among the miles. It's kind of an unofficial caste system. A typical scenario is two guys sitting next to each other: One guy has paid $278 for a coach ticket and gotten an upgrade, and there's some other individual in first class who paid $2,000 to be up front. And it's like, "What are you doing here, this is first class, you're really not a first-class passenger." And that's really the pinnacle of the uneasiness between the two crowds -- it's the uneasiness of how certain people get to certain places in a plane. The hostility may also arise when someone calls up to get a free award. The airlines will say there're no free tickets available and then they'll go on to say, "however, we've got a lot of seats available that you can buy for $800 or $900." And the little frequent flier guy is looking at that situation and thinking: You tell me there's no seats, but you're willing to sell me one, how can that be? Tell me something about frequent flier programs that the airlines don't want us to know. The chairman of American Airlines was quoted years ago as saying the success of frequent flier miles is that people can only aspire to travel for free. What he said is true -- in reality they can't all travel for free. That's why I often advise people to become more educated: If you do know blackout dates and know that airlines' inventories change, you can get what you want out of these programs. So in a way it's still too good to be true? Yes. However, I still rank it as one of the ultimate ways to get something for nothing because when I use an affinity credit card to buy something at a gas station or a supermarket, I'm not paying more because of the type of credit card I'm using, yet I'm earning miles. When I buy an airlines ticket and earn frequent flier miles, the airlines don't say to me, "Gee, if you want to earn miles it's $414 dollars; if you don't want miles, it's $350." What's the most outrageous thing you've heard about someone trying to accumulate frequent flier miles? A man once rented a car seven times in the same day in order to earn the car rental bonus. The car rental company had a weekend special for $19. So he rented a car, drove it around the circumference of the airport, returned it, rented another one, returned it, seven times in one day just to get the various mileage bonuses. At the time, the car rental company was giving a 2,000-mile bonus for each car rental and the guy figured it out: It was a lot more than if he ever flew those distances. SALON | Jan. 12, 1998 Do you have a favorite frequent flyer strategy or program? Share your secrets in Table Talk. + + + + + + + + + + + + + INFORMED SOURCES Online ticketing vs. travel agents: Which is better? TIP OF THE WEEK Hong Kong's new electronic travel card