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Frequent-Fiber Miles Deal From Kellogg's and American Airlines

For the next year or so, Kellogg's is giving cereal-lovers a chance to go to places where croissants or congee might be more popular, by sticking American Airlines AAdvantage certificates on the back of cereal boxes.

June 27, 2003 -- Some people start their day with a slice of toast. My fiancee prefers oatmeal. But I swear by my silly, sugary cereals: Corn Pops, Golden Grahams, and the actually-quite-healthy Frosted Mini-Wheats. (Hey, they're wheat and sugar. That's pretty much it.)

For the next year or so, Kellogg's is giving cereal-lovers a chance to go to places where croissants or congee might be more popular, by sticking American Airlines AAdvantage certificates on the back of cereal boxes. Buy a box of cereal, send in the back panel, get 100 miles. (Some large boxes offer 250 miles.) Every five panels you send in, you get an astronomically tiny chance to win a trip to one of seven US cities, but the miles are really the benefit here. (Find full details at www.americasgreatestcities.com.)

Of course, even if you eat two boxes of cereal a week, that's only 1,000 miles a month -- it'd take you two years to earn a free ticket to anywhere. But as part of a balanced diet of frequent- flier-mile-earning schemes (see below), this crunchy promo is a great way to start your day.

In a world of strange, silly airline promotions, this is probably the strangest at the moment, says Jeff Johnstone, associate editor of InsideFlyer Magazine, the frequent flier's bible.

There's one down side to this promo: for now, it's limited to a bunch of semi-obscure, high- fiber cereals. Product 19, for instance, tastes a little like packing material to me. But if you're an aficionado of Mueslix the way I swear by Corn Pops and Frosted Mini-Wheats, go for it. Mile- earning cereals include:

  • Complete Wheat Bran Flakes
  • Complete Oat Bran Flakes
  • Product 19
  • Mini-Wheats Strawberry
  • Mini-Wheats Raisin
  • Just Right Fruit and Nut
  • Mueslix
  • Low Fat Granola without Raisins
  • All-Bran Bran Buds
  • All-Bran Original,
  • All Bran Extra Fiber

You've got quite a while to eat your cereal, as Kellogg's says the promotion will continue until March 2005.

Other Weird Ways to Earn Miles

There are dozens of ways to earn miles without flying, and to earn trips without ever setting foot on a plane. One of the most famous tales involved a Healthy Choice brand food promo that a guy named David Phillips parlayed into 1.2 million miles through buying soup and pudding. Sure, it cost him some money, but the $3,000 he spent turned into at least $8,000 worth of trips. (For the story in his own words, see www.flyertalk.com/pudding.htm.)

The first thing to do is to get an airline credit card, InsideFlyer's Johnstone says. Most airlines offer thousands of miles for signing up, plus a mile or two for each dollar you charge on the card. Then subscribe to MilesLink, InsideFlyer's free e-mail newsletter, to hear about new promos when they happen. Go to www.insideflyer.com to sign up.

Then start shopping. All the major airlines have miles-for-shopping partners, and a lot of them will surprise you. For instance, Continental offers miles for purchases from Best Buy, Circuit City and the ShopRite grocery stores; United serves up Safeway, OfficeMax, Dominick's and gap.com. US Airways offers miles for Amazon.com purchases, which means most everyone whose ever shopped online has had chances to earn miles. America West gives you miles when strange things are afoot at the Circle K. The difficulty isn't earning miles as much as knowing that the miles are out there to earn. For directories of shopping partners from each of the major airlines, go to these links:

That's only the tip of the iceberg. You can get miles for your phone service, for filling out online forms and for volunteering to receive spam. Signing up for some Internet banks gets you miles, and then, every once in a while, there's one of those wacky cereal or pudding promotions.

Sound complex? It is -- for many people, earning miles is a hobby. If you're done munching cereal and spending on credit cards and want to get deep into the world of mileage maniacs, saunter over to www.flyertalk.com, the online community for the mile-crazy. And have a great (and free) trip!

Do you have your own Frequent Flier strategy to share or words of warning? Don't keep it a secret any longer; tell us all about it on our Air Travel Message Boards. Just click here to get started.

 

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