You can get a round trip flight from Boston to Dublin for 25k miles (so a 100k point card would get you 4 RT tickets) and only $150ish in taxes per ticket on partner Aer Lingus.

I just booked two RT tickets from JFK to DUS (Germany) for 80k points and $206 total (40k and $103 each), on partner Air Berlin.

Chase is buying miles from BA hoping to attract cutomers for their credit cards. The details are kept secret, but in the end it’s somewhere between $100 and $1000 that Chase has to pay for 100,000 miles.

The second part is that price and cost of flights differ a lot. BA is not paying thousands for a flight. For the same economy ticket you can pay between $500 and $5000. It’s cheap when you book months in advance with no flexibility and expensive booking same day with full flexibility. The actual cost is fixed, though, and likely to be somewhere between $400 and $700 for an economy seat, mostly taxes, fuel, fees, aircraft and wages. This happens to be more or less the combined amount that you pay taxes and fuel charges and what Chase pays for the miles.

Street price $1890 PHL to London
With 2 “free” tickets 100,000 points PLUS $1,100 in Fees, LOL

SCAM.

unless you want a 40 percent off coupon, AVOID!

SSSSSSSSS
CCCCCCCCC
AAAAAAAAA
MMMMMMMMM

Most of us aren’t that wealthy, but want to travel for cheaper. Even if you end up paying the fee for the year, if you get $500+ tickets for them, it’s a good deal for the consumer…if you can handle c/c.

And JD, I would love to see a “how blogs make money” post. Soon, I hope?

In order for a couple to get 200K, each one needs to apply for the card separately.

Nguyen above is correct about household accounts- it’s a unique feature of British Airways that’s not found at any other airline that I know of.

Thanks.

Therefore, I assume you could do it twice. But I’m not sure if you could “pool” the miles together and get 200k in one account. Also, you would need to spend 5000 instead of 2500 in the first 3 months. And that “companion ticket” you get with 30k dollars spend in one calendar year would be hard to get if 2 people use separate cards.

February 2011 – Applied for Continental Chase credit card, earned 50K miles after the first purchase of any amount.

March 2011 – Applied for AA card. Earned 50K after sign up then another 25K with purchase of $2500 within 6 months.

Will be using AA miles this summer with my husband who also has 50K AA miles.

Slight hit on my credit score but not a big deal at this time.

I have done many more in the past but don’t recall all the details.

Both AA and Continental have online booking. Very useful. You can see real-time availability.

The CONS: You must read the fine print. Some holidays you need more miles. Be careful not to overspend to get the miles. While I was able to book non-stop domestic flights, most international flights have 2-3 stops.

Once you learn the ropes, you can go directly to flyertalk.com (free) for the latest deals. For beginners, Chris G’s travelhacking.org is helpful.

If applicable, Chase cardmembers who currently have or have had a Chase credit card in any Rewards Program associated with this offer or have received a similar bonus offer, may not be eligible for a second Chase credit card in the same Rewards Program, or for any bonus offer.

Hmmmm. I have a Chase/United Airlines card that had a sign-up bonus (not nearly as good as this, but the first year fee was waived). Does anyone know if having one airline card with Chase already will disqualify me from getting this bonus? I’d rather not pay $95 to find out!

There are NUMEROUS sites online which offer the same info for free. To pay $300+ per year for it is silly

One way to keep the additional taxes and fees down is to book with one of British Airways’ airline partners. I booked my flights on LAN, which is a South American airline. Availability on them was very open and I had little difficulty in booking this somewhat complex itinerary.

In January I called to book my end-of-June trip to Greece. Even though I was flexible on my travel dates, I got the very last mileage seat available to/from London in a weeklong window. And they told me they could not get me to Athens, period. Fortunately I have a good fried who’s a travel geek, and HE told me what routing to request. So now I’m going:
USA-London-Frankfurt-Prague-Athens, and my return is Athens-Madrid-overnight in London-USA. Not exactly convenient.

The GOOD part is I’m flying first class; the bad part is it cost me $700 in fees & taxes & fuel charges.

So my “free” ticket is about 2/3 the price an economy ticket would have been, but the routing is not convenient or flexible, I had to book way in advance, and it cost 125k miles. Still, I’m pretty stoked to travel first class on British Air. I hear you get pajamas!!!

So anyway, I hope this works well for you, but be advised it’s not all sunshine and roses.