Questions and Answers

Hey Ben! I’ve been following you for a while and I’m fascinated by how you’re able to do all this. My family and I are currently planning a trip to Australia, Fiji, and other places around there, and although we do have sufficient miles with AA & Iberia, I just wanted to ask how you’re able to amass so many miles. We have Iberia Credit Cards, so we get miles for all our purchases, as well as AA credit cards in the US. We’ve got frequent flyer profiles with both, as well as with Delta and Swiss, and yet we never seem to be overflowing with enough miles to organise this sort of trip more often. Do you have any suggestions or advice? I try to gather up every last mile I can from hotels, shopping, car rental, etc., and we still only have less than 750K miles between the 4 of us. Thanks for your help!

In January Lucky wrote a post about how he earned his miles in 2014. Probably very similar for 2015.

[URL]http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2015/01/21/earned-miles-2014/[/URL]

Simple advice for a noob with a bit of cash:

1. Get BA gold. Spend £1,200 or so (difficult, but achievable with a bit of help)
2. Once qualified, get around-the-world ticket, preferably in Business or Economy. From the top of my head £1,5-£2K for economy and £4k for Business. This will get you probably up to 200-250K points (avios). Enough for quite a few flights. Example: 25K avios will get you a Business Class flight from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur, which is quite a nice flight with Malaysian.