Earning & Burning

Earning is the easy part:

• Sign-up bonuses
• Minimum spend
• Manufactured spend
• Checking account bonuses
• Flights/hotel stays
• Everyday spend

Burning, and burning effectively, is what’s truly challenging. Here are some tips:

1. Be flexible! Often times redeeming miles/points for award tickets is hard because airlines only release so many award tickets, which are then quickly snapped up by savvy travel hackers and churners. If you can be flexible with your departure and return dates/times, airports, airline, and routing then you will have a much easier time finding tickets.
   1. Example: finding tickets from the US to Australia around Christmas is notoriously difficult. It’s not only recommended you book these 8+ months in advance, but also that you be open to various dates and routing. For example we just booked LAX-SFO-AKL, AKL-SYD, SYD-BKK-HKG, HKG-SFO because we couldn’t find availability in all of December and January on LAX-AKL-LAX/SFO or LAX-SYD-LAX/SFO.
2. Break your trip/itinerary down into individual segments. It’s often really hard if not impossible to find multi-city award fares so it’s best to split this type of itinerary up into its discrete parts, e.g. LAX-LHR-DOH-CPT becomes LAX-LHR, LHR-DOH, DOH-CPT. Be sure to pay attention to arrival and departure dates so that all connections work.
3. Piece it together. Can’t find AA award space from LIH to SFO on your round-trip SFO-LIH itinerary? Try using miles or points for other airlines like United (UA), Alaska (AS) or Virgin America (VX). You can always fly on one airline to LIH and back to SFO on another.
4. Don’t be afraid to call to book. In fact, this is usually the preferred option, if not the only option, when it comes to booking multi-city or complicated itineraries. Make sure you write down the dates, flight numbers, airports, and seats you’d like (if available) before calling in that way you don’t make any mistakes. Always be courteous and respectful to the CSRs, it’s not easy being the messenger day in and day out.
5. Ask yourself whether or not you think you are getting a good value out of your redemption. Value is a subjective quality so don’t let what others say dissuade you from burning miles or points if you feel it’s of meaningful value to you. Most people like to calculate the cost/mile or point to evaluate whether or not a redemption is of good value (dollar cost divided by points or miles used, which equates to cents per mile, e.g. $10,000 ticket / 50,000 miles = $0.20/mile). Many bloggers and churners ascribe minimum cents/mile values to different point and mile programs but a general rule of thumb is that you should be getting at the very minimum $0.01/mile or point or more for your redemption. I’ve seen as high as $0.30/mile or point, which usually happens on business or first class redemptions.