This column is always looking for smart ways to save, make or earn you a dollar. And with airline tickets skyrocketing due to fuel costs, I looked into frequent flyer schemes and bonus plans for an angle.This one seems hard to beat.
The skinny: Use a credit card to pay $750 worth of your bills, and you can get enough frequent flyer miles to save about $400 or more on a plane ticket.
I know, I know. It sounds crazy.
A few caveats. Credit cards generally only make sense if you pay off the balance each month. They are a terrible source of debt because the interest rates are so high. If you open too many new credit lines, it can negatively affect your credit score. That might not be helpful if you are hoping to take out, say, a big mortgage anytime soon.
Still, assuming you were going to spend $750 in the next four months on bills, gas, and other necessities anyway, a $400 plane ticket is some reward.
The cards: The Citi Select AAdvantage American Express Card or the Citi Platinum Select AAdvantage World MasterCard. The deadline for new applications is June 30.
If you sign up for a new card and spend $750 within the first four months, you will collect 25,000 American Airlines AAdvantage bonus miles. This deal only applies to those specific cards; lesser cards in the same program will earn you fewer miles. This bonus is a one-off for new customers. You can't spend another $750 and get 25,000 more bonus miles.
But 25,000 miles is enough to fly round-trip between New York and Los Angeles – even in July. As always with frequent flyer miles, you may need to be flexible about times and dates. It's best to try to book well in advance.
Nonetheless I am looking at the American Airlines rewards website as I write this, and if I were so minded I could use 25,000 miles to take a 9:15am non-stop flight from Newark to Los Angeles on July 16 and then, say, a 3pm flight back to New York on August 6. (By the time you read this, of course, these will presumably have been booked.)
Those are pretty reasonable times to travel. It's not a flight that leaves at 4 am and involves a three day layover in Gaudalajara.
A glance at Sidestep.com, a travel website, reveals that if I were paying cash, the cheapest round-trip between New York and LA on those dates would be aboard Virgin American and would cost $399. With American Airlines the cheapest would be $499.
The card also earns you one frequent flyer mile for each dollar you spend, so if you were a program member and wanted to top up your account, buying another 25,000 miles would cost you $625.
The Citi/AAdvantage cards charge no annual fee for the first twelve months. After that they will cost $85 a year. Whether you want to cancel the card before that arises is up to you. Credit card companies, of course, may not like it.
from Yahoo News: One Credit Card Deal That's Hard to Beat
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