Want To Win An All Expenses Paid Trip To Australia? ENTER HERE!
A few weeks ago Boarding Area & Hilton Hotels allowed the Boarding Area bloggers to each give away a free night any Hilton in the United States. Well apparently that was so much fun, Boarding Area has now teamed up with American Express to give away something even better…
…what could be better than a free night in a hotel? How about an all expenses paid trip for two from the United States to Australia’s Gold Coast for eight days and seven nights.
Is that not good enough for you? What if Boarding Area and American Express were covering not only your airfare and hotel, but also your transportation, your meals, some activities … and also just for the hell of it, covering all of your taxes (since most contests like this require the winner to pay the taxes).
For the mileage run geeks, there is an added bonus … you’ll get full mileage credit and hotel stay points for your journey. If you’re flying from New York, that’s roughly 19,272 frequent flyer miles!
How could this get any better? You can enter 20 times!
Well you can only enter once on Flying With Fish, but you can enter once on each of the participating Boarding Area blogs.
Musings of The Global Traveler
I hate fine print, but American Express requires some fine print be added. This fine print includes entrants must be legal residents of the 50 United States and be aged 18 or older. One winner will be selected from each blog to be entered in the final drawing. From those 20 eligible entrants, one winner will be selected at random. Yadda yadda yadda yadda. For complete rules of entry and eligibility click HERE.
To enter simply leave a comment below detailing your top tip for earning or using airline or hotel loyalty points.
Remember you must enter with your real name and an email address you can be contacted at if you win.
I’m pulling for one of my readers to win for two reasons. One, I like my readers – Two, the blog with the selected winner takes home a new Apple iPad.
All entries must be received by the 28th of March … so what are you waiting for … ENTER!
Happy Flying!
I have one AMEX for earning airline miles (Delta) and one for hotel points (Hilton). Use them for EVERY purchase and make sure you pay them off. Watch for bonus earnings opportunities!
Plan ahead of time and grab the deal before figuring out what it is! Stay tuned and be loyal.
Use the dining for miles web sites and when you need to spend a certain amount of $$$$ by a certain time to get a bonus, buy a gift card from a participating restaurant
If you have a family mileage account, make sure that your dad doesn’t dip into your balance and steal miles for his business class upgrades
Pick your primary plans carefully and don’t forget the expiration policies.
Be sure to check to see if you airline has an online shopping mall before doing any online shopping. Many of the big name merchants offer from 1-25 points per $ spent, as long as you start from the airline’s shopping malls.
Note that the points per mile vary by airline, so if you’re making a particularly large purchase, you may want to check a few of your favorite airlines.
(Amazon is an exception and afaik doesn’t participate in any of these.)
For someone just starting out, figure out which airlines you would be flying most. Then choose one that has the most flights and most partner airlines available for your desired routes. No matter which partner airline you fly, make sure to always credit your miles to the one frequent flyer program that you signed up with. Eventually you will have enough miles for your first award, whatever that may be.
Don’t let anyone tell you how you should use your miles. In my opinion, your miles are worth whatever they are worth to YOU. Use them to fly coach, to fly premium, for upgrades, for merchandise, or for magazines. Redeem them however you wish, and enjoy your hard-earned work!
Get a Starwood Amex with a bonus sign up and then get one for your significant other in your household for another sign up bonus. Then call later to combine them so you don’t have to pay the annual fee twice.
Use a SPG card!
flyertalk is the source of all knowledge! just use google search before asking your question…
I can only speak for Air loyalty programs, but my best advice is to pick one carrier and aim for Elite status. Once you travel as a top tier elite, you will never want to go back.
If you are elite in multiple airlines, make sure they are in seperate alliances so that all of your bases are covered for trips that your one carrier may not fly to. Eg… Oneworld and Skyteam.
Burn as you earn…
Sign up for multiple hotel/airline Credit Cards and get the sign-up bonuses!
use a mile-earning credit card for everything you buy!
Use your Delta AMEX earn lots of miles!
Actually be loyal – within monetary, time, and location constraints, shift your spending to concentrate on a small number of brands. This also allows you to read up on promotions that are specific to your brands and learn the ins and outs of redeeming from that brand, instead of spreading yourself thin to the point where you never have enough points in a single program to redeem anything, nor any idea what the good values are and how to get them.
Choose your airline based on what you want to get from status. United allows for even their silver members (Premier) to use their economy plus cabin.
I wish I had a good tip. I won 1 million AA miles and have 300k left. I’ve been trying to get to Kenya for a year and a half on them. Be aware that exotic destinations are much harder to get to with miles.
Use your hotel or airline AMEX card for everything! (and then pay it off). I rack up tons of hotel points this way.
This trip would be perfect for my honeymoon! Pick me!! Pick me!!
sign me up i am ready to go back and enjoy
get hotel rewards credit cards and basically double your points
Do your homework. Read as many travel blogs as possible and register for as many promotions as possible, those points will add up!
Smile. That’s it. Simply smile. It gets you more in this world than anything else.
I use the American Express Starwood Card to earn points. I also have a mileage card from an airline, which I rarely use, because the rules and restrictions to actually earn a flight have taken a turn for the worst.
Key benefits of the American Express Card through Starwood:
1. Unless I am mistaken, you’re automatically upgraded to Gold Status if you spend xx amount of dollars per year. I’ve received a ton of room upgrades, even governor suites, simply by being a Gold Preferred member with Starwood using the Starwood Amex. The bonus is that I have always been offered a free upgrade & haven’t had to ask. If I don’t get one, that’s fine…I’ve received more than enough.
2. I earn even more points when I stay at a Starwood property.
3. Starwood has multiple redemption options (cash + points, or just points).
I spend a great deal of time in Southeast Asia, which means I can get some rooms for as little as 2000 points per night. If I want to stay at a great 4-5 star resort as an option, I can generally stay for $45-60 USD per night if I use some of my points towards the rate (this can drop the price from 100 USD + per night up). I also tend to get special offers from the hotels/resorts simply be being a member.
You can also earn extra points by shopping on the American Express site and/or earn additional discounts:)
Read up, look out for bonues, consolidate into the best alliance for your travel needs!
Make sure that you are receiving notifications from the airlines rewards service. Too many people lose their points before they get a chance to use them, because eligibility rules change and points unexpectedly expire.
Don’t let points or miles expire unused! You can easily credit a car rental that you’re already going to make to extend the life of miles in most programs, or use many programs’ online shopping malls to buy a giftcard or something as small as a single iTunes song.
I recommend using miles to upgrade the domestic longer flights instead of a free ticket.
I try to actually read those rewards pamphlets they send when you sign up and use the affiliated vendors.
Stick to your favorite companies (airline, car rental, hotel) to really rack up the miles! Sometimes they will offer their most loyal customers really great bonus mile options.
Keep an eye out for bonus promotions from airline credit cards or frequent flier programs sent in email or snail mail. Don’t forget to register for the promotion. Once I bought a $2 cookie on a flight with the airline’s credit card and received 1000 miles.
I got enough miles for Lifetime Gold mostly by directing purchases thru an affinity card religiously.
My tip. If the offer seems too good to be true, consider the source. If you trust it , act fast. It may not last.
My tip is to have the credit card with the program you are in. This will be most efficient in earning points per spending. For instance, if you are platinum, Marriott credit card allows you to earn 20 points / $1 spent at Marriott (10 base pts + 5 Plat pts + 5 credit card pts); Amex Starwood allows you to earn 5 points / $1 spent (2 base pts + 1 Plat pts + 2 credit card pts), etc…
My tip on spending is to be flexible and make use of the benefits offer by each program, such as staying 4 nights and get 1 night free, pointsaver stay. Plan and make reservation early since more options are available and the reservation can be cancelled should your plan changes.
Always consider an airline’s partners when trying to book award travel. More likely than not, this will open up new possibilities to redeem at the lower mileage levels.
Stay organized and document every promotion you enter/sign-up for.
Sometimes all that is required to earn miles is a single purchase (e.g., 750 miles from deluxe.com through e-miles.com). While the cheapest items on the website may be hard do find, our friend Google will allow you to search on a single domain. Try searching for terms like “$1.”, “1.”, “$2.”, etc. to find cheap items. With this method, I earned 750 US miles for buying a $3 check cover shipped free. .4cpm!
Be loyal to one of the global airline teams (which has the many flights from your point of origin) and try to have all of your miles credit to one Frequent Flyer account. Also, try finding different credit cards/ programs that give you non-flying miles/points bonuses on that account This will ensure that your miles are always dumped to one account, making it easy to accumulate enough miles/points to redeem anytime and anywhere.
Concentrate your winnings on one Alliance and exploit it for all its worth: car rental, dining, flying, purchasing toilet paper from drugstore.com… 🙂 Be sure you also sign up for all the bonus mileage offers that your airline of choice offers, even if you aren’t planning to fly the route immediately. You never know where IRROPS will take you…
My tip is to use tools like itasoftware.com to add additional miles & segments to flights you may have to take for business.
My personal best was from ALB-BWI. ALB-ORD-BWI was about $300 whereas ALB-ORD-SEA-SFO-ORD-BWI was $325. >:)
So my manager thought I was nuts and it took an entire day. I earned enough to keep 1P!
Accumulating miles takes a bit of work, much like making money. So continue doing your homework & overtime you will be successful as I continue to be.
Some promos from banks like Citibank can look like junk mail. Don’t overlook these!
Don’t be afraid to use airline/hotel credit cards to accumulate points in order to prevent older points from expiring. Sending a bouquet of flowers to someone can be an easy way to prevent thousands of points from disappearing.
Use your BA miles to Buenos Aires with a stopover on Easter Island for 80K BA miles in Business or 40K in Economy on LAN. Best use of BA miles IMHO.
do not spend your award ticket on a domestic leisure trip.
Use your points-accumulating credit card(s) for every possible purchase including household bills and the entire meal bill with friends (hopefully they’ll pay you back in cash or by check!).
SPG…The best points program ever! Earn points through American Express and then use them for a lot of different programs. I use mine to get discounted hotel rooms, for example, I’m staying using a few points and only $60 bucks to stay a night in Hawaii! And they convert to a lot of airlines miles programs. I gave 20K SPG points to Hawaiian Air and got 25K miles!
If you have miles that are about to expire, it’s usually pretty easy to extend them my purchasing something small (preferably something you would have purchased anyway) in the airline’s online mall.
What’s your top tip for travelers who want to earn and use their loyalty points?
I would recommend utilizing a point tracker service like tripit.com! It’s great with tracking itineraries too!