Frequent flier miles?

[Danda]

Hey all,

I will be going abroad this fall. I was wondering if or how people accrue frequent flier miles for their travel to and from their teaching positions. The school i will be teaching at pays for annual flights and so i will not be purchasing any tickets (other than vacation travel) while teaching abroad. HOw can i use these miles (purchased by the school) towards a frequent flier program and score some free flights?

Any info. would be greatly appreciated.

Later.

[interteach]

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[Danda]

Interteach,

Do you try to encourage your school to purchase from a certain airline? or do you just accrue miles through different airlines?

I have always had a problem with accruing miles because businesses tend to buy the cheapest flight, which isn't always an airline i have a program with. So, i end up having little bits of miles with a bunch of programs and never get any bonuses. Do you just belong to a bunch of different flier programs?

If i can manage to get the flight to post and back on one program and then a few short vacation flights, i should be able to score a free ticket per year. How long do you have to build up miles? If you don't use them, do you lose them?

Thanks.

[JISAlum]

We were given the cost of a full fare round trip to our place of origin. We then charged the actual ticket cost to our rewards credit card and racked up mileage that way. Our American Airlines miles (as long as you continue to use it) haven't expired. Although I'm always afraid they'll declare bankruptcy and all our 300,000 miles will go away.

I'm hording ours to use for a ticket to Search's Bangkok fair next year.

[interteach]

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[ichiro]

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[priscilla747]

Some programs I belong to have expiry dates on points but most don't. The ones that have expiry dates are easy enough to prolong by staying at a hotel or paying for some other service that is affiliated with the program.