The Frequent Flyer Miles Blog

Our Frequent Flyer Program Award Mileage Comparison table has been updated to reflect a few minor changes to award requirements so far this year. Happy flying!

It appears as though at least a couple of airlines have changed their policies regarding bonus miles for booking your itinerary from their website. Delta used to advertise on their homepage that you would get 500 bonus miles for flying on tickets purchased at delta.com. However, this text no longer appears on their home page, and I have been unable to find evidence of any such bonus elsewhere on their site.

Likewise, US Airways used to advertise 500 bonus miles for flying on tickets purchased at usairways.com, and I can no longer find that bonus being advertised on their site either. Our Frequent Flyer Programs page has been updated to reflect these apparent changes.

Continental Airlines has announced changes to their OnePass Frequent Flyer program. Beginning February 1st of next year, the number of miles required for a first class round-trip ticket within the continental U.S. will increase from 45,000 to 50,000 miles. In addition, the number of miles required for several EasyPass rewards (those without capacity controls or blackout dates) will increase. Standard, economy class rewards do not appear to be affected by this change.

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United Airlines has temporarily reduced the number of miles required for award travel on certain shorter flights. From now until December 14th, 2007, only 15,000 miles are required to purchase an award ticket between “qualifying markets”.

View the details of this promotion here.

American Airlines recently launched a promotion to waive the transaction fee for purchases of miles through their buy AA miles program. For those who are thinking about this alternative to acquiring miles, we’ve put together a comparison chart of the costs associated with buying miles from each of the major frequent flyer programs.

Several major frequent flyer programs have recently modified their miles expiration policies, shortening the amount of account inactivity before your miles are purged or account is closed.

• American Airlines AAdvantage miles now expire after only 18 months of inactivity, instead of 36 months.
• Delta Skymiles miles now expire after 24 months of inactivity, instead of 36 months.
• Starting on December 31st 2007, United miles will expire after 18 months of inactivity instead of 36.

It looks like airlines are doing everything they can to keep people from sitting on their banked miles. Don’t get caught by the new rules. If you’ve got enough miles for a trip, put them to use. Remember, all it takes is a simple policy change by the airline to wipe them out.

The table comparing expiration dates on our Frequent Flyer Programs page has been updated to reflect these latest changes.

There have been a few recent changes to several of the major frequent flyer programs. American Airlines AAdvantage and United Mileage Plus have both reduced their bonuses for booking tickets online. In addition, United Mileage Plus has increased the required miles for most of their round-trip award tickets. We’ve updated our comparison charts to reflect these changes.