Freq Flyer card advice please
 

<BR>I am about to get my 1st FF card. I live in NYC & fly within US & to Italy & France. <BR>I rarely can order more than a few mos in advance for tickets. Which to go with? <BR>AA, Continental, Delta etc? <BR>Thank you.

My personal favorites are Delta and American..but why not get them all. They're free and it is a lot more convenient to already have your FF number when you book a trip. <BR> <BR>-Dave- <BR>www.CrazyAboutTravel.com

Before selecting a FF card, I would get ahold of the airline schedules and see which one(s) have the most destinations from your airport(s) that you would want to travel to! <BR>One word of caution/warning: You say you can't book travel until a few months in advance. That means that you're going to have a tough time redeeming your miles for overseas travel. The allocation of FF seats for European travel is usually gone many months in advance. For example, we booked our FF tickets to Italy in January, 1999 for a November trip. When I called back in February, 1999 to finalize, the agent said that I was smart in booking when I did, as everything was already gone for November! And that was off season!

FF - don't start me on it!! We'll ok here goes!!! We booked with KLM a return flight Australian-Amsterdam-London-Milan-Australia fare 22,000klm round trip. KLM are partners with Northwest Airlines and so we were eligable for the World Perks FF Card ("The most generous FF program of all!!!!")We were excited to find that this Worldperks system works on color codes for their Award Chart rather than a scaling number of points to each individual destination. Australia was coded color yellow in the Asia/Micronesia section of the Awards Chart World. This specified that for 20,000points (1point earned per Klm flown - so we have 22,000 points) you can be fly anywhere within the yellow section. If you wanted to go from yellow (Asia/Micronesia) to say America - different color, than the points jumped to 60,000. So hurrah, looks like we've scored a good one you might say.??? EXCEPT THAT...AFTER we booked and AFTER we departed for our European holiday, Northwest decided to add another color to their award chart which threw Australia, NZ and Tahiti off into "Pacific Ocean" color (?) ok I say this does not look good, but hey, we'll just have to settle for something closer to home. So I check the new Award Chart and what do you know with a return trip Australia/Europe 22,000klm we are eligable for zip, zap, zilch, nought, nothing!!! To allow us to gain a reward flight to our old yellow area we now need 50,000 points, which means even if we go all that way again (to Europe)(44,000klms) we still get nothing, not even a domestic ticket!!!! Needless to say the emails are spinning at the moment, and I have pointed out that this is a public relations disaster for them,and also discriminatory to us "DOWN UNDER" as they have removed rewards incentives that they have used as a marketing tool to gain our business, but are still looking after the rest of their consumers ie...all you USA fodorites. I am now considering taking it to our local consumer body for consideration, hey it's worth a shot, I've now got nothing to lose, 'cos they're giving us nothing. Any comments all similar experiences? I'd love to hear...Thanks for letting me get my load off!!! - Gayle

Speaking of frequent flyer cards. There's a promo for those flying out of the US to some European countries for double miles for your trip this summer. I saw the posting on the webflyer site, and signed up. From Denver to Milan, and back-double miles equals almost a free US trip ticket!