How Savvy Fliers Make the Most of Their Airline Miles

I’m blogging about this topic for two reasons. One, I know a lot of my readers have credit cards that generate a lot of frequent-flier miles. And, two, I’m hoping that my readers (who are likely savvy fliers) have their own tips to pass along. In the meantime, The Middle Seat, a Wall Street Journal column, has some tips on how to maximize those airline miles you’ve been racking up. Most consumers redeem their frequent-flier miles for those cheapy, coach-seat tickets. However, it makes a lot more sense to apply those miles to the most expensive flights instead. From the column:For a New York-San Diego trip next month, for example, you can find a coach ticket as low as $319 on AMR Corp.’s American Airlines, and the cheapest first-class ticket is $2,029. Use miles to upgrade instead of buying first-class tickets and, even after paying $100 in fees, you get more than five cents for each mile.International upgrades pay off even more. For a Chicago-Frankfurt trip next month on UAL Corp.’s United Airlines, you can buy a coach ticket as low as $697 or a business-class ticket for $5,624. Instead of paying nearly $5,000 more for the business-class seat, you can spend 60,000 miles for a round-trip upgrade. The cheapest coach fare eligible for that upgrade is $1,001, so you have to spend $304 more on the ticket. But even after factoring that in, the savings you get through miles work out to nearly eight cents per mile.If you’ve got strategies that you would like to share here at CreditMattersBlog.com, I’d appreciate them. I have a slew of miles that I still haven’t used. I imagine my readers have a ton of unexpired miles sitting around as well.