This Is How You Should Be Using Frequent Flyer Miles When Traveling With Family

An ideal situation would be to find a reward seat the moment you have enough airline miles in your account. However, the reality can be quite different sometimes, because finding a reward seat on an airline of your choice can sometimes be difficult. Now, just imagine adding in another layer of difficulty by looking for four additional reward seats on the same flight. When you and your family have enough frequent flyer miles to redeem reward seats for the entire family, what do you do when you can’t find seats on the same flight? Travel experts have laid down strategies for using frequent flyer miles when traveling with family.

1. You Need Account Management

Couple and singles can get away with using one simple spreadsheet to manage their frequent flyer miles. When it comes to managing airline miles for the entire family you need to organize and manage their accounts with a good online management tool like Award Wallet, MilePort, or Mileage Manager. Sadly, big names such as American Airlines, Delta and Southwest Airlines have restricted access to these tools. Their loyalty members don’t have the permission or access their accounts via the management tools. A very simple advice to you is to keep all your airline mile accounts in one place because it is the best way to ensure you make the most of your miles when it comes time to use them.

2. Strategies For Award Travel

Some frequent flyers get lucky if they find one or two reward seats on the same flight or itinerary, but as mentioned before it gets harder to find three or more. Here are some amazing strategies that we’re dishing out to our readers. These have always helped us in bagging award seats when traveling with family.

Book In Advance: A lot of the major carriers do not release reward a seat 11 months prior to the actual flight, but it is more than likely that they will release some. This summer, I managed to snag three first class seats to Hawaii on United for next year. Around the time I scored my first class seats airline had just started rolling out their award seats, so there barely any available. This strategy works great with programs that offer one- way booking so that each flight can be booked the day it is available. Since parents know have to think about their children’s school schedule they can use their inflexibility for award seats that work for them.

Book Tickets Individually: Not many people know how airlines price multiple reward and revenue tickets. Airlines tend to release seats in small gaps with a limited number of seats in a fare or reward seat. If you’re browsing for three award seats in the lowest mileage level, and only find two available, the system will show that no mileage tier award seats are there at the moment. What you need to do is search for individual award seats, and then narrow that down by increasing the number of seats on different searches.