Airline Frequent Flying

I know you like pictures in your posts, but today I wanted to mention some non-picturesque stuff! Triggered by organizing for my upcoming work trip to Istanbul, I discovered that I am actually enrolled in five frequent flier programs. I decided to look at what's going on all of them. Flight search and purchase engines like Orbitz will store all your frequent flier numbers and automatically apply them to purchases you make on their sites, but they won't show the balances for these accounts. One of my friends turned me on to Points.com, which will pull all the balances into one place for you.

I also logged in individually to each of the programs, to make sure I could track down all the passwords. I found out that some of my miles on U.S. Airways were expiring in the next few months. I had to fly them for work a few years back, and I figured that I might as well sign up for the program, but I flew a lot of short flights, so I didn't have that many miles there. Irritatingly, even though they are in the same alliance as United, which I have flown more frequently, it is impossible to just "merge" the two accounts. Instead of abandon those U.S. Airways miles entirely, I decided to exchange them using Points.com. There's actually a standard procedure for exchanging miles between most airline programs, it's just that the exchange rates truly suck and it's a pain. While using the Points.com tool doesn't make the exchange rate better, it does make it easier. Better to have a few points I will actually use than a lot that will expire.

That said, as far as I know that was the only overlapping points program with significant rewards I was involved in, so hopefully that's a lesson learned I won't revisit. Otherwise I have four different airlines programs. One airline each in the Oneworld, Star, and SkyTeam alliances, and stand-alone JetBlue. (None of my credit cards has an exclusive miles points program.) Since I have been flying all the gosh darn time in the last couple years, I actually have enough points to book some tickets, so I should pay attention to that for my winter visit home.

I got to thinking about redeeming, so I decided to look at points charts. I found these blog posts on point charts that have most of the US airlines collected. The links all worked when I clicked, but they may not stay up to date!

Anyway, I will be back to photos and vacations tomorrow!