Is It Worth Flying One Airline for the Points?

Can You Really Accumulate Enough Points On One Airline?

About 25 years ago, I had something like 80,0000 frequent flyer miles with Delta Airlines. I’d spent years accumulating them during flights back and forth across the country. I went to college on one side of the country, and my parents lived on the other side, so I flew long distances and racked up miles pretty easily over those years.

I always intended to use those miles for a first-class international trip, but I never quite got the chance. Finances got the best of me after I graduated from college, and I ended up chipping away at that big balance, using the miles for shorter trips to visit my family. I almost reached 100,000 miles at one point, but after a few years of flying domestically, I only had about 15,000 left, which was well under the amount needed to travel across the globe.

After that point, I never really focused on flying a single airline for points. And it was just as well because the frequent flyer landscape changed enough over time that it almost became a hassle to stick to one airline just for the sake of miles. It was less expensive to pick and choose the airline with the least expensive flight than it was to pay for a more expensive flight just to get some additional frequent flyer miles for a future trip.

In today’s frequent flyer clubs, you can sometimes fly a few thousand miles but only get a few hundred miles banked on your frequent flyer balance. Why is that the case? Why is it so much harder to accumulate miles these days than it once was in the past? There have been some unfortunate changes to have come about in the past decade that have made frequent flyer memberships much less valuable.

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At Least It Usually Doesn’t Cost Anything to Accumulate Miles

The one good thing about frequent flyer miles is that they don’t usually cost anything to accumulate other than the price of the actual ticket. You don’t usually have to pay an extra fee for some sort of membership just to get access to the frequent flyer miles that would otherwise accompany your flight. As long as you sign up for a frequent flyer account, you’ll accumulate miles whenever you fly or buy things with the airline.

There are some ways that the airline might charge you money to access miles, but it’s usually in the form of purchases made while in-flight for things like internet access, premium movies, food & beverages, or purchases from their in-flight catalogs. If you’re going to buy something anyway, these purchases aren’t a completely bad deal, but they’re definitely not purchases you should make just to get miles.

If you’re flying with an airline you’ve never flown with before, you should always try to sign up with their frequent flyer club. It doesn’t matter if you think you’ll never fly the airline again. You never know when the 2,000 miles you accumulate on Somewhere Airlines will come in handy at some point. Maybe you’ll be able to get $10 or $20 off a future flight or get a discount on something else related to flying.

However, just make it a practice to never purchase any sort of memberships to get access to frequent flyer miles. This usually includes credit cards unless you spend enough on the credit card that your rewards outstrip the cost of the yearly fee (airline-branded cards virtually always have a yearly fee). Accumulating frequent flyer miles should always be something that happens for free alongside the tickets you buy anyway.

Frequent Flyer Miles Don’t Always Accumulate Based on Actual Mileage

You might assume that flying from Los Angeles to Heathrow will net you around 5,400 frequent flyer miles because that’s the rough amount of miles you’ll fly from Los Angeles International Airport to London, but you might be surprised by some frequent flyer mile clubs that actually base your miles on the money you spend rather than the miles you fly.

One of the reasons I was able to rack up so many miles when I flew across the country with Delta all those years ago was because I was getting thousands of miles each way every time I flew. Now, with some frequent flyer mile memberships, you get miles based on the amount of your ticket. So if you buy a budget-friendly ticket for $200 from LAX to Logan Airport in Boston, you’ll get a whopping 200 frequent flyer miles rather than the 2,600 you flew.

Now, does this mean that it’s just not worth it to even care about the frequent flyer miles? Well, if you almost never fly and you really only take flights once a decade, you might be forgiven for just forgetting about the whole sign-up process, but as long as it’s free to sign up, there’s really no reason you shouldn’t get those miles, even if it’s just a few hundred.

You never know when you’ll have the opportunity to translate those miles into another type of currency. Maybe you’ll be able to switch your miles over to another frequent flyer account at some point, or perhaps you’ll be able to use those miles for purchases other than flights. Every so often, airlines do run promotions that allow you to use your flight miles for various things, so you may find having them useful, especially since you don’t need to pay extra for them.

Sign Up With Every Airline You Fly

One mistake I made recently when I flew to Puerto Vallarta was that I used my American Airlines frequent flyer mile number on an Alaska Airlines flight because those two airlines were part of the same flight alliance. Those alliances generally let you accumulate flight miles with your preferred frequent flyer number even if you fly another airline.

Even though the flight distance from LAX to Puerto Vallarta was more than 1,500 miles, I only banked about 100 miles on my American Airlines frequent flyer account because the airline only counted the base cost of the ticket for the mileage. They didn’t even count all the taxes for the ticket. Sure, the “fare” was “only” $115, but with all the taxes and crap added to the ticket, I paid close to $400.

So, not only did I not actually get the 1,500 miles I flew down to Puerto Vallarta, but I also didn’t get the actual miles for the amount of money I paid. It was a complete rip-off as far as mileage accumulations go, and it’s a mistake I’ll never make again. Although it might take you a little extra time before you pay for your flights, it’s always really valuable to understand how frequent flyer miles are accumulated with the airline you’re flying with.

If I had it to do over again, I would have signed up for an Alaska Airlines frequent flyer number (I might already have one, who knows . . . ) instead of using the American Airlines number for the flights. I mean, if you’re gonna try to get some frequent flyer miles with your flight purchase, you might as well try to get as many miles as possible, right?

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