Death By A Thousand Cuts

The airlines and credit card companies would have you believe that the wonderful world of luxurious travel is yours for the having if you will just concentrate your flying and purchasing on their airline or their credit card (that gives you points toward free travel).  What they don't tell you is how each airline makes in incredibly difficult to actually make use of those miles (or points) for anything that is really desirable like:

• Free travel during peak periods
• Upgraded travel to attractive locations
• Free travel in style to attractive locations

Over the years I've seen how the requirements for free and upgraded travel have gotten more and more difficult while at the same time the promotions that you can get all this wonderful stuff get more and more.  Actually years ago, I figured that the real benefit of be a high level frequent flyer has to do with the better seats, early boarding, occasional upgrade, and priority on crisis (weather, aircraft problems) rebooking - not the award program.

That being said, with a lot of effort, over the years I've managed to get us some nice trips.  We did our trip to New Zealand in Business/First for miles (a minor miracle involving changing the trip dates and going more out of season...see 2009 blog posts about constant rain in New Zealand).  This year we have a trip to Europe planned in September/October.  I had hoped to use the upgrade method where you buy an economy ticket and use miles and money to upgrade to business.  But none of those are available or have been available. Part of the airline game is holding off on making those upgrades available at the last possible moment until they are sure they can't sell the seats.  Not good if you need to make your travel plans in advance.  Of course they also don't make available early any of the saver awards for business class travel.  Those are awards that are at a discount amount of miles.  

And Wife and I didn't have enough miles for the full award package for both of us.  There is an option where you can buy the miles.  The price we'd pay for buying miles was not a whole lot more than the upgrade option.  But there are limits as to the number of miles you can buy.  And you have to have enough miles in each separate account.  You can transfer miles to someone else (like me to Wife).  But they charge you for that too.  And they limit the number you can transfer.  Wife found a new credit card that offered a 55 thousand point bonus (transferable to our airline).  That helped.  And she was offered a promotion for 20% off the purchase of miles.  That helped.  I wasn't offered the promotion (it was only aimed at folks with low balances so they can't accumulate enough to really get the expensive flights).  But I whined and they gave it to me anyway.

All this took a crap load of time.  It really doesn't make you feel loyal to your airline at all.