How Do I Earn Airline Miles?

Written by

Alex Achille

in

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If you are just getting acquainted with the world of airline loyalty programs your first question will probably be: how do I earn airline miles? Well lucky for you, you stumbled upon this post and I’ll give you the basic rundown of what your options are.

First Things First – The Basics of Airline Miles

Before committing to building up miles for any frequent flyer airline loyalty program you’ll need to figure out with airline to focus on. This is the single most important choice to make. Depending on the airline you’ll be able to redeem reward flights on their partners and allies. Therefore choosing one airline rather than the other will allow you to earn and redeem on different carriers.

Cathay Airways planes parked at gate at HKIA at night. CX also allows multiple ways to build up airline miles.

What Are The Options To Earn Airline Miles?

Mainly there are three ways you can build up and earn airline miles. Let take a quick look before diving in deeper:

  • Flying
  • Credit Card
  • Other Expenses

So flying is the most intuitive of the 3 options. You can earn airlines miles by flying (of course!). Just sign up for a loyalty program and then log in when you are making your reservation and once you have travelled on the booked flight you will be credited your miles.

You also get miles by flying with partner airlines or airlines of the same alliance. However in this case accrual rules may be different.

Credit Cards are another fantastic way to earn airline miles. You can either decide to go for a co-branded card that gives you a certain amount of airline miles on your expenses or alternatively choose a card that earns points that can later be converted into miles. The latter is the more flexible option, but also often doesn’t have the highest yield.

Other expenses also allow to earn airline miles. Many airlines have referral systems in place that allow to build miles on select retailers. However another expense that allows to build miles is hotel reservations. In many cases you can link hotel and airline loyalty programs to build up jointly points. Or you can earn hefty amounts of points by making your reservations within the airline’s frequent flyer profile.

This is just a quick overview of your options. For more in depth analyses make sure to follow me and sign up to my newsletter.

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Alex Achille

Ex Emirates Cabin Crew and long time aviation enthusiast. I can remember loving aviation and planes since I was a very little boy. I have developed my passion into a deep knowledge of the sector and industry to offer on my sites in depth and precise analyses of what is going on. I also completed cabin crew training with Ryanair, however, I never worked for the company (more on that another time). Finally I also have taken flying lessons completing my first solo flights.