How to get cheaper flights by flying

The cheapest way to fly to Africa, Australia or anywhere more expensive to reach, is to fly to Europe a couple of times for the miles. Yes, I believe you can get your dream flight for free by flying somewhere just for the miles at a much cheaper price. I’ll explain how to do it and just how “worth it” this can be.

American Airlines is currently the best airline for collecting miles (from flying). If you didn’t hear already, American Airlines has filed chapter 11 and therefore is strapped for cash. Unlike stock investors, this is a good thing for miles harvesters. If you fly often, consider booking all your flights this year with AA. If you don’t fly often but want to travel later, consider making some flights now to get cheaper tickets later. I seriously think that a few flights to Europe now will be cheaper than buying one flight to Australia later.

First off, they’ve been generous when it comes to giving out miles for flights but now they are offering double and even triple miles for flights. However, if you can route your flight to be as long as possible you will pay the typical point A to point B price but with the milage benefit of all the places you flew with your crazy routing. If you can route a flight connecting one of their hubs, ORD or DFW to LAX or SFO you can get double miles (even EQM).

If you wanted to fly to Shanghai or Bejing there is currently a promotion where you earn a 100% bonus on all flights between their hubs and those to locations.

http://www.aa.com/viewPromotionDetails.do?fN=ChinaUS.xml&_locale=en_US

More importantly, for those of you who aren’t going after executive platinum status (though you may find it worth it) but just want miles, there is a big Europe promotion.

Fly roundtrip to europe and get 25,000 bonus miles the first time, 35,000 the second and 45,000 every time after. Hurry though, this ends March 15th.

http://www.aa.com/i18n/urls/AAdvantageBoost.jsp

Both the China and Europe promotion I’m guessing can be combined with the first double miles promotion. Say you were to fly from your home to ORD to LAX and then Shanghai, you would receive the double miles for ORD to LAX and double miles for LAX to Shanghai.

Flights to Europe can cost about $600 if you can find a good coupon or code. So let’s say you fly there and back 3 times for $1,800 and 145,000 miles (105,000 in bonuses). Maybe that’s more money than you would drop originally, and you don’t have to do 4 trips but this is just to calculate. Let’s say you have a trip to Africa or Australia (or anywhere in the South Pacific), each trip costs 75,000 miles round trip. You would now have enough for 2 trips when one roundtrip would have cost more than $1,800 originally. Flights in peak season or to a harder to reach place, like Tahiti, Seychelles or Mauritius can cost much more. Or if you wanted to go to India or the Middle East, in miles the trip would cost you 90,000.

For the same price as a ticket to harder to reach Africa or the South Pacific you could be flying to Europe three times, your originally desired destination twice (or for two people) and if you do it right you could have enough miles left over for a trip to Easter Island. (Also note that if you did reach executive platinum you could use your upgrades to do your vacations in first class. Suddenly the value of your flight more than doubles).

If you’re trying to save up money for your dream flight, you might as well enjoy the rest of the world for the same price. American Airlines has plenty of availability and very minimal fees, which is why they are my favorite.