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Wednesday, November 2, 2016 A Guest Post by John @laptoptravel
Let’s just admit the fact; we are all natural procrastinators. It is not that anyone plans to NOT get things done on time…it’s just that life gets in the way. Every person has work, family and personal demands on their lives. Then sometimes unforeseen events simply take the best laid plans and throw everything into a kilter.
For all elites in the major airline programs there is an annual requirement to meet a specific segment or elite mileage qualification requirement to renew those statuses or to reach a new level. The end of each year, therefore, becomes a mad rush for many seeking to reach or renew an elite status with an airline (or any loyalty-based) program.
Every flyer should know that Mileage Runs are not dead!
A good start…you should read what I believe is the first article I ever wrote for RenesPoints blog more than a year ago: Are Mileage Runs Still Worth It?
In fact, they are often cheaper than buying MQM’s from Delta, as René wrote a few weeks back:
“For the past four years Delta has, in November or December, offered the option for most elites to buy MQMs. While the prices have at times fluctuated depending on whom you are or how many points you had the max prices each year were:
$ 995 for 10,000 MQMs in 2012 or ~10 cent each
$1995 for 10,000 MQMs in 2013 or ~20 cents each
$2095 for 10,000 MQMs in 2014 or ~21 cents each
$2995 for 10,000 MQMs in 2015 or ~30 cents each
You can see a scary pattern going on here and one that I would think will continue this year, that is, 2016. While I have no confirmation that Delta will again sell MQMs, if they do, expect the price to go up yet again. How high can it really go and people still buy points I ask? My guess is this year will see a “modest” jump to $3095 for 10,000 MQMs (still a completely insane number).”
Mileage Runs are occasionally posted on the internet, and Elite Mileage Runs and my own blog laptoptravel are great places to follow. For quicker service, follow @EliteMileageRun as well as @laptoptravel on Twitter for immediate alerts!
However, I find it necessary near the end of each year to post less of those as our team is working full-time finding Mileage Runs for clients and so we cannot ‘split the baby’ during these times.
As a professional mileage run and award travel booker (I currently work on staff at JuicyMiles) I always start off the new year by reaching out to our previous year’s clients reminding them to get started early with their status goals. Personally, I do take my own advice. In fact I renewed my Delta Diamond Medallion status in June of this year and now am able to ‘cherry pick’ the best deals out there and just earn extra Medallion Qualification Miles (MQM’s) for rollover. By the middle of December this year I will be almost ready to rollover enough MQM’s for Diamond status in 2018 (good through February 2019.)
To my point of this post; perhaps you should consider using the services (and resources) of a Mileage Run service like Juicy Miles. The advantages are we have the experience, resources and commitment to find the best deals most efficiently.
We work all hours of the day, often while you are sleeping…. we are searching for amazing deals to reward you with cheap elite qualification miles to meet your targets. We do it for every airline; every program. In fact, I have just begun to share my own tips and techniques in travel seminars (like the Chicago Seminars, and hopefully soon Frequent Traveler University sessions.)
Here is an example of my own personal commitment to your needs:
This past week, our internet service became unstable and practically useless as a result of continued rains. It seems that squirrels had spent some of their time during the warmer, dryer summer days nibbling on Century Links’s transmission wires. After a few days of prolonged rain the water seeped into these lines and rendered the system worthless.
Sure I spent a few extra hours at Starbucks and other sites for Wi-Fi service to continue working for clients and their Mileage Run requests. Over the weekend, however that became an impossible solution. With more than fifteen requests in my hand I relocated to a Doubletree (by Hilton) with premium internet service to handle my clients’ needs.
It was not all wonderful, though. In the middle of the first night (around 2am) we were evacuated from the hotel due to a false fire alarm and had to walk down ten flights of stairs…and I still kept working on client Mileage Runs upon my return to the room after the ‘all clear’ was sounded.
It is that type of dedication and relentless effort that you get when you hire Juicy Miles. That is just one benefit. You get people who specialize in the special nuances of finding amazing deals, understand the fare classes, partner rules, upgrade potentials as well as award ticket options to make your next booking the best possible experience for you with the minimal amount of input and time.
Recently I tweeted out the above
This is actually three tickets that cost a total of about $390 (plus a use of SkyMiles to re-position twice.) The payoff is more than 32,000 MQM’s, that’s less than 1.2 Cents Per Mile (CPM.) Now this is a rare exception, so it is no promise of future results, but it illustrates the point; Professionals do perform better, on average, in finding you the best Mileage Run deals.
When it comes to award ticket bookings; well each one is a story within itself as well as a formidable job in most cases. Having someone who knows the rules and inner-workings between mileage programs and partners are priceless resources when you want to take that aspirational trip, to take that special someone…to take the family!
So two things to do now:
First, take an inventory of where you currently are in your airline program(s) and contact a Juicy Miles professional today to help you meet your goals. My suggestion? Do not delay! Do it today as the window of time (and opportunities) dwindles ever so quickly as the holiday travel season is upon us! Secondly, make a commitment to start out the New Year by getting a mileage run booker working for you when there is no time-crunch like you might be facing today!
If you like the idea of letting a professional do the work for you…try JuicyMiles and see what they can do for you. There’s no risk; you give them the parameters- the time frames, the airports and if they do not find anything that works there is no fee to you!
Thank you for reading the blog and I hope to see you at a seminar, or reader meet-up (Coming Soon) or always in the sky in the near future! — John (@laptoptravel)
PS – Don’t forget about the AMAZING 70k SkyMiles plus 10K MQMs Delta AMEX card offer ending soon!
Advertiser Disclosure: Eye of the Flyer, a division of Chatterbox Entertainment, Inc., is part of an affiliate sales network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites, such as CreditCards.com. Some or all of the card offers that appear on the website are from advertisers. Compensation may impact how and where card products appear on the site. This site does not include all card companies or all available card offers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by any of these entities. Some of the links on this page are affiliate or referral links. We may receive a commission or referral bonus for purchases or successful applications made during shopping sessions or signups initiated from clicking those links.
Responses are not provided or commissioned by the bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.
Just an update! I just arrived in Europe and had hoped to work and try out the new Panasonic Wi-Fi broadband service offered by Aeromexico’s Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Alas, neither of my two aircraft had the system installed.
Met about a dozen people doing this Mileage Run with me that I posted back in May!
It’s great to meet others who have benefited from my Mileage Runs!
Anyway I hope to get back to work immediately for everyone’s requests as soon as I get settledin Europe!
Thank you and René for allowing us to provide these special services to you!
I hope that when you were working at Starbucks & the Doubletree you were using a VPN.
Agreed for award tickets. For mileage runs where one is trying to get the cheapest MQMs and EQMs possible, how do the numbers look after the fees? Thanks!
@jediwho – Use my benchmark ie around net 4CPM in coach and around 8CPM in 1st. But hubs and weekends add 1cpm to those.
@Mark R – Always using a VPN, just like right now from Europe as I post this at 11:00pm (my time.) <>
@jediwho – Two things to consider:
First, how much is your time worth? A client is purchasing a ‘turn-key’ Mileage Run, when often you just pay & click (we do all the hard work of finding the runs and creating special booking links (in most cases) to make it simple and easy to execute.
Secondly, with the experience of the team great deals are found that make any fee added back into a fare a really good deal. Just tonight (for example) I have found three First Class Mileage Runs for clients (who sent in requests while I was flying at 41,000 feet) so they not only got a great fare but no stress over upgrades!
And yes, I am up working late in Europe for our clients…
And of course, I will agree with you that award tickets are worth the service fees ten times over because the airlines do not make that easy and that is some of the heaviest lifting that the team does on a given day.
Had a go at this service and was very happy with what John was able to find for me. I gave broad requirements for a miles run as well as several lower priorities and he pretty much met them all although it did take about a week (totally expected, if it didn’t, I wouldn’t think he was trying very hard!). John was also very responsive to my messages, I got the feeling that doing this was more of a fun puzzle challenge for him. The trip he found for me was a business class trip for roughly the same Delta MQM and slightly higher CPM as a vanilla destination economy class run I was considering on my own but he also managed to throw in a couple fun destinations as well. A win win in my book!