Status or Points - The Mileage Run

Today's Secret Blog has a little to do with the secrets in airport routing and price of fares. All flights that have a source and destination get booked into fare classes, then those fare classes are given routings. What I mean by this is if you are going from Austin to Seattle, the common choice is to fly to direct. But for those who are looking for a higher level of status or want to increase their points, flying indirectly may not cost them any more, yet net them a ton more points for a little time investment. If I were short on Status points, I may choose to fly AUS-DFW-BOS-SEA, where I fly from Dallas to Boston to Seattle for the same price as flying directly to Seattle.

Why would anyone in their right mind do this? Well, as we remember, most EXP status members get to sit in first class on upgrades all year long, right? So if you were 3000 miles short of the 100,000 it took to qualify for EXP the following year, it may be worth investing a single day of travel (if already EXP and requalifying, this would be one day in First Class) to re-up to EXP for the following YEAR.

Now... I understand WHY I would book this way, but HOW do I book this way. The easiest method is to call a travel agent. He/She can find the correct fare codes to do this, although you may have to mail them this blog to show them why... The second is to use Orbitz Dream Maps. If you are a frequent traveler, you may also want to invest a little money in Expert Flyer's site, which is a for-pay site but has the info on how to get these done.

One of my regular readers, Erick, is currently sitting at 35,000 miles away from reaching EXP. He has to fly from Texas to Toronto for work. Conceivably, I could help him get there with a weekend of fun. He could fly AUS-DFW-LAX-HKG-BKK-LHR-YYZ-DFW-AUS for his round trip and garner over 20,000 BIS miles, putting him very close to the limit. But then he would have to have the proper visas to visit Hong Kong, Bangkok, London, and Toronto. To each his own!