Excellent article (filled with bad news) -- thank for sharing!
Although I'd add to their advice about using a cash back card that for people who like to travel, the Barclay Arrival card has generous rewards and lots of redemption options.
Airlines have quietly been creating new rules that make it more difficult—sometimes impossible—to bequeath frequent-flier miles to heirs. The airlines argue that these miles are not assets owned by fliers, but rather nontransferable perks that the airline can award or revoke as it chooses.
Fortunately, there is a way around these rules—just don’t tell airlines that the frequent-flier account holder has passed away. As long as heirs know the deceased person’s frequent-flier account user name and password, they can access the account and redeem remaining miles for rewards tickets or other benefits just as the original account owner would have. The tickets can be issued in anyone’s name at the time the miles are redeemed.
This is great advice - my parents have several hundred thousand miles and my dad has said the same thing.
I've been trying to burn through my miles for years. I'm having a hard time doing it, actually. My goal is to get both me and H down to below 200K a person.
Does anyone know if airlines make it possible to easily donate the miles to a charitable organization? For people like sfgal, who have a bunch that are hard to use, it would be great to have that option eventually. Me, I fly about once a month for work and 3x a year for personal travel and still don't have enough miles for status anywhere. I have some random miles at various airlines, so I was planning to investigate this. It's my dream to become silver this year...which is pretty much meaningless anyway...
Does anyone know if airlines make it possible to easily donate the miles to a charitable organization? For people like sfgal, who have a bunch that are hard to use, it would be great to have that option eventually. Me, I fly about once a month for work and 3x a year for personal travel and still don't have enough miles for status anywhere. I have some random miles at various airlines, so I was planning to investigate this. It's my dream to become silver this year...which is pretty much meaningless anyway...
H just donated a bunch of miles to Make A Wish. It was super easy:
Does anyone know if airlines make it possible to easily donate the miles to a charitable organization? For people like sfgal, who have a bunch that are hard to use, it would be great to have that option eventually. Me, I fly about once a month for work and 3x a year for personal travel and still don't have enough miles for status anywhere. I have some random miles at various airlines, so I was planning to investigate this. It's my dream to become silver this year...which is pretty much meaningless anyway...
H just donated a bunch of miles to Make A Wish. It was super easy:
Good luck getting tickets! I have crazy flexibility with my dates and I'm still like, "Oh, you can't fly me into SF? Okay, what about Seattle? No? What about LAX? No on that as well... okay, I see. Oh, wait, you say you can fly me into Bogota three days later than I wanted, and then from there I can connect to Madrid to get back to SF? And I have to fly in the cargo hold? Sounds good."
They're just so incredibly stingy with mileage redemption lately.
I agree. Two years ago, we were able to get business class anytime miles through AA from Chicago to Bangkok without a problem. This year, not so much. We have a lot of flexibility with dates and destinations and there were only about three locations where we could fly business with miles. We did end up getting coach class tickets to Santiago using very low miles (20K each way), so I can't really complain. But, I think the days of the anytime business class tickets are gone. Of course, if I had your miles, then I wouldn't really need anytime miles.
Good luck getting tickets! I have crazy flexibility with my dates and I'm still like, "Oh, you can't fly me into SF? Okay, what about Seattle? No? What about LAX? No on that as well... okay, I see. Oh, wait, you say you can fly me into Bogota three days later than I wanted, and then from there I can connect to Madrid to get back to SF? And I have to fly in the cargo hold? Sounds good."
They're just so incredibly stingy with mileage redemption lately.
I actually loled at this. Back in the day my best friend and I went on two International trips where we sat down and spent a couple hours finding a location where we could both use our miles. It was almost impossible.
I've been trying to burn through my miles for years. I'm having a hard time doing it, actually. My goal is to get both me and H down to below 200K a person.
This may be the ultimate bragplaint
Our flights have tended to be more last minute now than in years past due to my work schedule though and this makes spending miles a lot more difficult.
Post by Wanderista on Aug 21, 2014 11:07:28 GMT -5
I'm sad to see the end of the era of miles being useful. I only have one horde of miles with Virgin Atlantic. Fortunately, the various Virgin Flying Club programs are now mutually recognizing. For a while, they weren't.
Honestly, I guess airlines can become stingier if they want but that also means that I'll be less loyal when booking tickets. The whole point of airline miles was to create an incentive for customers to keep returning to a particular airline. Weakening that just weakens brand loyalty. So I'm saying, "Sure, go ahead and slash your loyalty perks, airlines, and I'll be correspondingly less loyal when deciding which airline to fly." They are missing the wood because of the trees.