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Get more mileage out of your miles: upgrade

by Tom Johansmeyer (RSS feed) on Dec 23rd 2008 at 12:00PM

Before you book your next award ticket, think about what you're giving the airline. Yeah, you read that correctly; think about what you are giving them. In the Wall Street Journal, that font of all things financial, the secret to screwing the airlines a little harder is revealed: upgrade.

Apparently, the most common use of miles is the bland, vanilla domestic coach ticket. That's it. While you delight in your free ticket and lament the absence of a meal, the airline truly gives you as little as possible. You get a whopping 1.2 center per mile for the basic domestic coach flight. At 30,000 miles (the average price of an upgrade in miles), which is usually the price of admission, that translates to around $360. Depending on where you want to go (and when), your $300 in "free" travel could be more expensive than just buying the ticket.

According to "experts" cited by WSJ, you can get four times as much bang for your virtual buck by upgrading instead of just cashing in. shell out the cash for the coach ticket, the Journal advises, and use those miles for the upgrade. You could pick up a few thousand dollars in value ... and that's just on the domestic side. Fly overseas, and you could shaft the airlines to the tune of almost 8 cents per mile!

Of course, the party isn't going to last forever. Airlines are beginning to add "co-pay" fees to upgrade awards. United is planning to pull the trigger on this starting July 1, 2009. You already take it on the chin with American, which can slam you for $700 to upgrade a discount coach seat on a flight to Europe. On Continental, it can reach $1,000. Nonetheless, upgrading still delivers the most value per mile.

And, there's one more factor that tips in your favor. If you haven't noticed, we're in the midst of a nasty economic climate. All those large, faceless corporations are forcing more of their employees – even those more accustomed to having a bit more legroom – to ride with the proletarians. That means more seats will be open up front, and you can cash in.

Filed under: Airlines, Budget Travel

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Chris Dec 24th 2008 9:06PM

Ub here in Canada there's a program called "Air Miles", but you don't earn them by flying, well not directly at least. Heck, we use the Metric system up here, of course we're not going to earn miles by flying, we'd earn kilometers. Anyway, earn Miles by shopping at participating retailers that honour the Air Miles program. The purpose of the program is for you to cash in your Miles for actual miles on an airplane, although it's not one-to-one. You can also redeem them for all sorts of merchandise from the airmiles.com website. I once put together a spreadsheet which tracked the dollar and Mile value per item, and once you tacked on the taxes and fuel surcharges, flights were actually the worst thing to do with your Miles. The best value for your Mile was to spend them on gift cards, places like The Gap, Shell, iTunes. I did this analysis a few years back so it's no longer current, but anyone else collecting Air Miles should take this into account.