Frequent Flier Follies

You read earlier about the fun and games in finding an affordable ground transportation option. Booking air travel is also fun, especially when you're traveling to and returning from different cities. And double fun when you're doing it all with frequent flier miles.

Growing up in the 50s and 60s, and in the NYC area, I had this illusion that every airline flew non-strop between every two cities. This illusion was caused by two phenomena. In that era of heavy airline regulation, many airlines did fly between lots of cities, and often non-stop. Fares were regulated and high, and you could run a plane profitably with a low occupancy rate. The second is that I was in NYC, and you could fly to many places non-stop from there. I'm sure that even then flying between, say Hartford and Topeka non-stop was probably not possible.

Near the North Pole, 6:15 am EDT, May 2007 - the shortest route between Hartford and Topeka

Today, of course, the airlines use sophisticated software to keep their occupancy rates as close to 100% as possible. I can't remember the last time I was on a domestic US flight where the attendants didn't announce that they expected the flight to be full (see also: "Sir, we'll have to check that bag as all the overheads are full"). And they've all switched to hub-based routing, so you can get to their hub from where you are, but not any non-hub cities without a change. Of course, NYC is still the center of the universe, so we can fly to a lot of places from here.

BUT … if you're flying out of NYC to one city, and back from another, you are highly likely to find that you will need different airlines if you also want to meet two other criteria: travel non-stop, and use frequent flier miles. And so it was for our trip: NYC to Denver on the way out, San Francisco to NYC on the way back. Frequent Flier miles both ways.

As it turns out, we found a pretty good set of choices that achieved these goals, but we had to give on scheduling (our flight out leaves in the early evening, which means we get there very late at night). The fun part was getting all the frequent flier miles to the right places. You see, our plan is to fly JetBlue from NYC to Denver, and American from San Francisco back to NYC. We have plenty of miles with American Airlines; in fact, I'm a lifetime Platinum member based on all the travel I used to do for business. We have next to none JetBlue miles. But it turns out that the American Express award system lets you buy miles on JetBlue using the AmEx award points, and we do have lots of points there. The trick is that you have to fund the JetBlue frequent flier account before you can actually book the flight, and the AmEx web site says this could take a day or two. During which time your chosen flight could fill up, forcing you to book a different flight or perhaps day, thus requiring a change to the flight at the other end of the schedule since we have a pretty fixed number of days to accommodate our planned stops.

The good news is that we were able to make all the requisite transactions happen on time, and all the flights and ground reservations are now aligned.