Did I really just successfully book a non-stop frequent flier ticket for 25,000 on Northwest? In August. Flying back to Minneapolis the weekend of the RNC?

Somebody pinch me. In recent years, I’ve had zero success booking frequent flier tickets. It’s been several years since I could afford one because we aren’t frequent fliers and I rarely could find a ticket for as little as 25,000 miles.

Most of the time, I’d log on and find that a ticket would cost me 50,000 or more.

I still have a no-fee Worldperks Visa card (but I only earn 1 mile for every $2 spent). But I never use it. Getting gift cards that I know I can use is a much better perk in my book.

But today, I happened to log on and see if there was a ticket to Hartford, CT in August so my husband could fly to the wedding of a childhood friend. The wedding is a must attend and I’ve nervously watched the price tag rise in the past couple of months climb from around $380 to a whopping $785 today.

So I was amazed to find a Worldperks ticket for him to use. I’d say 25,000 miles for a $785 ticket is a great value.

My colleague Liz Fedor, who covers airlines, wrote a story last week about frequent flier miles. And research she included in the story shows that while it’s not always easy to find a flight, there are some out there.

Jay Sorensen, who runs Wisconsin-based IdeaWorks, had heard plenty of anecdotes from people who couldn’t book the trips they wanted using miles. So his company made 5,000 booking queries to assess the seat availability for reward tickets on eight large airlines.

He found that a family of four traveling in the summer could book tickets to key markets more than 46 percent of the time. A couple flying outside the summer season could book reward tickets on American, Alaska, United and Southwest more than 96 percent of the time.

Matt may have to buy his own pop, pay for extra bags and check himself in, but at least he’ll be on that plane.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 1:35 pm and is filed under deal of the week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.