Flying the Sometimes-Friendly Skies

Well, in about a month we'll be in Santiago, but we're not planning to walk.  Instead, we booked tickets on American Airlines using rewards points.  People often ask how we're planning and paying for all this.  The answer?  We're not paying very much, but we're planning very carefully.  If you work it right, airlines will give you free tickets, and you can buy the rest for very little money.  Learn how after the jump... 

Myth: around-the-world ticket are a good deal.  Fact: they are a rip-off.  By being flexible on specific days, using low-mileage award tickets, and buying select cheap advance fares, we've been able to book Miami-Santiago-Melbourne-Tasmania-Melbourne-Christchurch-Cairns-Perth-Malaysia-Mongolia-Beijing-Osaka for about $1,500 and 200,000 frequent flyer miles.  We earned many of those miles by taking advantage of credit card offers, double-mile promotions, and other deals. It's amazing how quickly they add up.  If you're planning any sort of trip, we recommend getting 2-3 new airline credit cards each year (with a 20,000-50,000 mile sign-up bonus), banking the miles, and using the cards selectively to "top-off" award accounts to useful levels (look at the airline award charts to figure those out).

Some airlines have awesome frequent flyer programs.  On United Airlines, you can book reward tickets that are (i) one-way, (ii) contain a layover up to one year, and (iii) are open-jaw.  You can use this to your great advantage by, say, flying from Bangkok to Tokyo via Mongolia (which counts as a stopover, so stay a month if you like), then back to Bangkok from Sapporo, Japan.  That's considered one round-trip ticket, and goes for 30,000 miles.  A great deal when you consider it's something like a $2,000 itinerary at normal prices.  And you can book straight from United's website.  Genius. American Airlines doesn't have quite the same flexibility, but they have a great partner network.  For example, you can book Quantas flights directly from American's website for pretty low mileage levels: we got flights from New Zealand to Cairns, on the Great Barrier Reef, in high season, for 10,000 miles each and $20 in taxes.  It's worth some time and effort to figure out which airlines (and their partners) go where you want to go, and how to maximize reward miles. They can stretch a very long way.

If you want more, check out The Points Guy.  More than you ever wanted to know about frequent flyer programs and how to make them work for you.