Frequent flyer miles and points are "affinity" or "loyalty" programs meant to encourage you to limit your flying to certain airlines, and/or to use merchants or affiliated companies (such as credit cards) who have agreements with the airline to cross-promote each other using miles/points as incentives.

You can earn "spendable" miles by flying or by using credit cards affiliated with the airline, by buying from merchants who award miles with your purchase (such as rental car companies) or even by buying them straight from the airlines.

There are two aims one can have by accumulating miles:

1. "Free" flights or upgrades to business or first class from cheaper tickets.

2. Acquisition of "elite" status with an airline, which will convey various perks depending on the elite level you attain and the airline's particular frequent flyer (FF) program.

Generally you need to fly quite a lot in a given year to earn elite status, typically at least 25,000 miles for the first "elite" tier, often going up to 100,000 miles annually for top elite status. With elite status comes various perks, such as preferred seat selection, free baggage allowances, easy or free upgrades, maybe lounge access, expedited check-in, and so on.

Accumulating miles for trips is more common than going for elite status, and if that's your aim then you need to know the differences between the various airline programs. You need to limit the number of airlines on which you collect miles - sometimes just one or two at most, since doing otherwise will leave you with several account balances, none of which are large enough to do you any good.

It's important to remember that you can redeem miles not just with the airline you choose, but also on any of their partner airlines, so the choice you make should be done with some knowledge of the various airline alliances and who's partners with who.

Start here: http://www.webflyer.com/ and look at the various airline programs, then when you've picked one, go look at the various sign-up or bonus offers out there.

It can be confusing, but there's real value in it if you make the effort to do your homework.

If you don't fly a lot and don't already have a credit card, you'll waste time and money trying to accumulate miles. Youre better off just looking fir a sale and buying your tickets.

All airlines have restrictions on which flights you can use them for so its hard to use them for popular destinations.

If you are planning to start flying, do sign up for the program of whichever airline you're flying. They are free and there's no harm accumulating the miles if you are flying anyway.

If you are planning 'quite a few big trips' in future, it's almost inevitable that you will need a credit card to book the tickets and / or hotels for the journeys.

Make the card work for you. If you decide to go with AA and oneWorld airlines, apply for a card that will earn AAdvantage Miles for all purchases; some may give double Miles for booking flights with the airline. As gardyloo said, you can aim for status within the airline program or look to maximise Miles - if the latter then ensure you read and understand the details of the airline's program.

'Free' flights will always have surcharges to some extent, taxes or fees to be paid along with the Miles used. Depending on the airline booked and the rules for award seats, using Miles for seats in Economy may be a poor use of those Miles, with a better option to use them to upgrade purchased tickets. Assign a value to the Miles and do the maths before (eg) booking a short haul Economy seat for 20,000 Miles and $US120 in taxes and fees.

"If you don't fly a lot and don't already have a credit card, you'll waste time and money trying to accumulate miles. Youre better off just looking fir a sale and buying your tickets."

I agree.

"If you don't have a credit card and don't want one then to get one simply to accumulate miles makes no sense."

I don't fly that much anymore, but I do earn 25K-30K+ miles a year using my AA credit card. But if you don't want one, then that is one option closed.

If you are going to be doing some big trips in the future not only will a credit card be of great use, in some areas of travel it will be close to vital. Car rental without a credit card is problematic, many hotels require a credit card to hold a resèrvation,which doesn't work with debit cards, and its also very useful in case of fraud.

If you have a debit card which is compromised, then the money that is stolen goes immediately out of your bank account. This is problematic for two reasons, one, its your money and its gone and you have to get it back, two, it tends to affect other things, such as mortgage payments and the like.

In contrast, if you have the same with a credit card , no money has left your bank account, and the charges can be wiped off without any money leaving your account.

If you are abroad somewhere perhaps with contact back to your bank difficult, the last thing you want is a wiped out bank account. With a card, your bank account is "insulated" from fraudulent activity.

Chosen carefully, there is no downside to gettinga card associated with an airline, and neither is there any downside, even if you don't go out of your way to get tickets that collect them, to join the frequent flyer schemes, its cost free.

BTW, one thing that many people don't understand, they are frequent >>flyer<< schemes, notwithstanding the fact you can get miles for credit card purchases and so on, you only get miles ina scheme fir flying, not for just purchasing the tickets. The miles the fire come into use after you've flown. So, it might be for example, that after a few long distance big trips, you'd have enough miles for something like, for example, free flights to Europe or Hawaii or ten Caribbean.

If you have several trips planned you and your husband should simply sign up for frequent flyer accounts and use them when you buy tickets. You should do the same for hotel chains since you can often convert hotel points to miles or earn miles on stays. I never bothered because I felt I didn't travel a lot but now I see that I should have - a trip from the east coast to Hawaii earns over 10K miles and free flights start at 25K or sometimes even less. They don't cost anything so just keep an eye on your miles and hopefully soon you will have enough to redeem for a flight or some other reward.

What is "quite a few trips" and "the future" in terms of number of trips, miles flown and timeframe? Four flights is a lot for some people in a year, but only a week or two to others.

Unless you are flying monthly, or want to play some major games with churning cards, I don't think airline miles are the way to go. You can get similar value from cash back or points based cards that let you redeem for gift cards to places you already shop. These you can redeem for as little as $25, vs waiting years to build up enough miles to hopefully get a limited availability seat.

Credit cards are great and profitable tools if used wisely.

I agree 100% with tev9999. Unless you fly a lot, if you need a credit card, you are better off signing up for a cash back rewards card. Then you can use it for whatever you want whenever you want instead of saving up miles and then trying to find an available flight to use them. Airline credit cards that give you miles tend to have annual fees as well. You can easily get cash reward back cards that do not.

This is a whole topic in and of itself, but I really think unless you're doing a lot of flying and always on the same airline, you're better off using a cash rewards card than a mileage rewards card.

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