Airlines deals:
Calculate the value of a mile to you. Airlines sell miles to their marketing partners for $.01 - $.02 per mile - but this valuation can be deceptive. You can't necessarily trade in miles for money - so don't strictly think of miles as a monetary unit. ( You can sell your miles, but usually pay a transfer fee; you can also use your miles to buy another person a ticket via craigslist or a site that specializes in those transactions such as flyhub.com; however, it will involve overhead of both fees and your your time. Better to plan ahead and get miles you will use yourself. )3Realize that frequent flyer mile cards often have a very high interest rate - so do yourself a favor. Make a list of all the bills that you definitely pay off every week (electric bills, internet, mortgage, or any other bills that you pay in full). Make another list of bills that you usually pay off with credit cards or that you roll over. Now here is the trick - use a frequent flyer mile card to pay off the first list, and then never use that card for any other bills. This way, you accumulate miles for bills you were going to pay anyway, plus you don't get any high interest charges for not paying that credit card bill off.4Remember - while you should have a membership with all the mileage programs, make sure you focus your mileage earning efforts on one airline alliance.
airline deals: The best way to do this is to find the airlines that use the airport near you as a 'hub' - this way, you can focus your energies on earning miles (and thus rewards) on the airline that is most useful to you. Remember, the biggest mistake people do is to earn miles on a whole bunch of programs. 2500 miles in ten programs is of no use to you - 25,000 miles in one program usually is a free domestic US ticket. ( You can swap miles between programs using points.com, flyhub.com, or just meeting people via craigslist, but better to plan ahead and avoid the overhead of those transactions. )
