Reduce Family Travel Expenses through Mileage Points

Many airlines are offering their respective frequent flyer program to their regular patrons. This is one of the marketing strategies employed by most service-oriented companies to encourage frequent use. It is essentially a modification of the usual special fares offered to regular customers.

This program is basically a loyalty program. It seeks to reward frequent customers by providing benefits using their accumulated miles. These benefits could come in the form of free travel, upgrade in travel class, booking priority, access to areas reserved for VIP customers, or lowered fares. Customer loyalty is measured by the number of points accumulated.

   

Earning of points are premised on flying with the associated airline. Business travelers are the people who are more likely to accumulate more points and gain advantage from these programs by the very nature of their jobs. Frequent traveling employees enjoy the additional perk of earning the points in their name instead of the company they work for. Some travelers manage to end up in the elite status by the sheer number of points they rack up. This allows them to redeem their mileage points for their own use or even for family travel.

Family travelers who wish to take advantage of the benefits offered by frequent flyer programs can do so with careful planning. This is very important since the cost of travel for a family of five can be quite considerable. Families gain more advantage from their earned mileage points because everybody benefits. Possible benefits that can be obtained by families include free accommodation, reduced air fare, or free car rental while on travel.

The first thing to do to ensure that earning of mileage points is maximized is to enrol the family including the kids in one loyalty program. This will make it easier and faster to accumulate mileage points since all transactions of each family member that can be converted into points go to a single program. It goes without saying that there will be some programs where children cannot participate in, thus the need to qualify.

The primary way of earning points is obviously through travel. However, this is not the only way. Some airlines hold online promos where customers get to earn points by signing up for online applications and bonuses. One of the fastest ways of earning mileage points without actually traveling is to choose a frequent flyer program that is tied up with a notable credit card. Purchases are immediately credited to the program. Families just need to keep track of expiration dates so as not to waste accumulated points.