More miles - 3 free tips

Sorry it has been a while since I last blogged here. It has been a busy travel month even by my standards as I have passed through 18 countries on 5 continents. When I travel I have more time to ponder and notice things - look for a few upcoming posts on this.

1) I got an email recently from AAdvantage offering miles to subscribe to some of their email offerings. These are the same offerings which I subscribed to last year (and got bonus miles for then), so it is worthwhile unsubscribing to stuff you don't need. The only catch is to unsubscribe after the promo period (in this case I've diarised for the 3 months subscription that is required to earn the miles). For a minute effort I will get a modest bonus, and the price sure is right.

2) Normally I stay in the same hotel chain where it is available because I struggle to maintain high (meaningful) hotel stay program status given my schedule (lots of overnight flights and same-day return trips) and the locations I visit (lots of places with no or few chain hotels). However, lately I've been staying in a few different chains due to location, cost and availability issues. So, what I have done is use these odd stays to credit to various lesser used frequent flyer programs (FFPs) as an easy way to extend the mileage expiry out several more months. For some of these frequent flyer programs I am yet to set foot on one of their aircraft but have almost enough for a basic award, again with just a bit of effort here and there to credit some hotel stays or pick up the odd promotion (such as surveys).

3) I have a lot of flights of many different airlines and so it can be hard keeping track of the frequent flyer miles, hotel points and status earnt. I spent an hour or so the other day reviewing 5 of my accounts which I had credited recently. The result - I found several uncredited flights (which will net me about 70,000 miles when they eventually post), some more flights were I was given too few miles (an extra 3000 miles have already been credited), a couple of flights were the miles credited seems too low (still being investigated by the frequent flyer program), 3 missed hotel stays (2 have credited already which requalifies my status in that hotel program), and another where they forgot to give me points for incidental spend. Not a bad return for an hour of my time (plus maybe some more chasing up). Although ideally these would all credit correctly in the first place. One account took me more time than the others to go through, because they had reversed and re-credited many transactions, and not always at the same rate which then meant more reversals and re-credits.

I'm still looking for an easier way to reconcile my accounts than the spreadsheet I currently keep. If anyone knows of software please let me know.