First time here? Check out the site's "greatest hits" or read a random post from the archives. Feel free to ask a question, and consider subscribing to the latest posts via RSS or e-mail. Thanks for visiting!

Yesterday, the good folks at the Consumerist posted a helpful list of tips on actually cashing in your frequent flyer miles. (Yours truly was consulted and quoted.)

A few extra bonus-round suggestions, caveats, and clarifications for people looking to maximize their odds of using their miles:

1) Use miles for expensive tickets
Don’t waste your miles on tickets you can buy for dirt cheap. Check the cash fare first. Flying from Boston to LaGuardia? Chicago to Philadelphia? Cash should be fine. Flying from Charlotte to Perth, Australia? Salt Lake City to Ushuaia, Argentina? Now you’re talkin’. Use your miles for something really worthwhile, that you might not spend the money on otherwise. International filghts, ideally in business or first class, for example. If you can’t swing that, then still try to get the most value out of the miles. See Miles or Buy for a tutorial on maxing out your mileage value.

2) Another upside to the phone: Holding seats
The airlines’ award ticket web pages let you book seats, sure, but they generally don’t let you put them on hold. If you call, you can have the seats held for you while you look into hotels, etc., so you can tinker with your plans a little. The hold usually lasts 72 hours.

3) Persistence pays off: Keep calling
While the 331st day and four week rules of award ticket availability are excellent guideposts, seat availability is dynamic, and you never know when seats might open up. If they don’t have seats when you call on Monday, they may have them on Thursday — say, a person who cancelled seats, or whose hold expired. Call back every few days.

4) Downside of the 331 day rule
Let’s say you call 11 months before your desired departure day, and you snag seats for the outbound. Unless you’re coming back the same day, your return ticket won’t be available for booking yet. Again, this is where the hold function is useful.

5) Downside of the four-week rule
Last-minute seats can pop up, but much like #4, you might find outbound flights but no returns, because the return isn’t last-minute enough. Plus, some airlines (notably American, though United is joining them soon) charge last-minute redemption fees, which are a pure, unadulterated way to screw the consumer.

6) Not all airlines suck equally
Some airlines (cough, Continental, cough) are notorious for making it hard to redeem your miles. Others are better (American generally gets good marks). So if you have a hard time cashing in miles on one airline, you might want to rethink your loyalty, if you have any.

7) Not all airline websites suck equally
Some airline websites will tell you that your desired date is sold out, but they’ll show you availability within a couple days. Continental and United come to mind. Others, such as Air Canada, include some (if not all) partner airline options online, but this is still not as reliable as picking up the phone.

8 ) ITA: Best engine for timetable searches
If you want to know who’s flying where, it’s hard to beat ITA Software’s beta public website. (Click “login as guest.”) ITA most famously powers Orbitz, but Orbitz strips out a lot of the cool functions. Once you’ve run the search, you can build an itinerary segment-by-segment (click “choose flights” at the top of the results page).

And good luck…

tags: travel | frequent flyer miles