Today's NY Times has an article on how airline travel is going to be very difficult this summer.
One of the woes that caught my eye is frequent flyer miles. A quote from the article: 'Free rides are increasingly hard to come by. "Using frequent-flier mileage is virtually impossible today,' said Julius Maldutis, an industry consultant."
Part of me feels like, tell me something I don't know. I find with the frequent flyer miles, you need to be as flexible as possible. I also think the airlines should stop kidding everyone, those cheap mile seats practically don't exist. Be honest, it's roughly 50,000 now for free domestic and 100,000 - 200,000 for free European, using the no restriction tickets. They might as well just remove the limited issue tickets - it's like advertising cars for really cheap and in the fine print listing only one such model at most on the lot.
Flying now to me means getting there as safely as close to on-time as possible. More than that, I do not ask.
Interesting. Even as this article was published, Air Canada announced that in the future the entire planes will be open to booking by frequent travellers with air miles, while presently this is limited to no more than 15% of the plane's passenger capacity.
I doubt if you could get last minute FF seats in the summer, but we were thrilled to get seats on Air France (with Delta miles) a couple of weeks ago at the last minute - called Monday night, and they got us on a Tuesday night flight to La Belle France! Happy travels- Anne
Anne, they've told me sometimes you have a better chance at the last minute b/c if a flight isn't full, they might as well give a seat to a frequent flyer than let it go empty. Which reminds me I want to keep checking my Paris flight to see if cheaper seats open up.
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