American Airlines Frequent Flier Miles

I signed up for frequent flier miles. I somehow imagined I would be flying a lot more than I used to (which is true, to an extent) and would be able to get in some free air time as well. I could just see myself jetting off to Aspen for the weekend on AA's tab, enjoying skiing and snowboarding in snow, not ice, then jetting back in time to be at work on Monday morning. But it turns out that's not exactly how it works.

First of all, it's roughly 480 miles between here and North Carolina. I have flown down three times already since I moved up here with the idea of flying down again at Christmas time. So when you add up all the time I spend going back and forth between here and New York, I've already topped 2000 miles. Well, two thousand miles is practically enough to get me across the country. But will I be traveling out west? I don't think so. The reason? You have to fly enough miles annually to qualify for certain benefits. Well, I thought, there can't be that many miles involved. Because people who are a part of this only fly a certain amount per year, even with certain career choices that involve more miles than other. My boss, for instance, probably flies 40,000 miles a year, easy. He seems to be jetting all over the place for various meetings. When I was in high school I really wanted to travel for work, but watching him, I wonder if I really would like to spend that much time away from home. Maybe I'm less of a jet-setter than I imagined myself.

The second comes from being a part of this minimum mileage. It turns out that to truly benefit from frequent flier miles, you need to be hitting roughly 30k+ a year in the air on a particular airline. The difficulty with this comes if you're looking short term or long term. Short term, it's easier and less expensive to hunt around for the lowest fare. Sometimes that's American, sometimes it's not. The last two times I've flown, I've used one airline on the way down and another on the way up. I have now hit all the airlines that go between NC and NYC. Delta, US Air, American, United. I've done them all. The only one I probably haven't flown is JetBlue, but I'm not even sure if that goes to North Carolina, and after watching the Saturday Night Live satire of JetBlue, it makes me a little nervous to think about 35 cable channels but not such qualified pilots. Not that Amy Poehler knows EVERYTHING.

So at the rate I'm going now, it's going to be about 20 years before I qualify for the use of my frequent flier miles. This fascinates me endlessy. in Katherine world, the airlines would match the miles you physcially flew and let you start redeeming them whenever you wanted. But from a business perspective it would mean a lot of people flying for free, and with gas prices at an all time high (in the Americas) that makes no sense, either. But what it does mean is compromise, and I'm compromising by trying to be patient, and hoping that maybe someone else will pay for my plane ticket somewhere. Somehow. Even if it's just to Connecticutt.