<\/a> Third flight tip<\/strong>: Use credit cards that earn you miles<\/strong>. Right now in my wallet is an AAdvantage CitiBusiness Citi Mastercard. They will give me 25,000 miles if I spent $750 in 4 months. I’m 3 weeks in and have spent $550. I have another AAdvantage Citi Mastercard; I did the same on that card in May. I called to cancel and they offered me 5 “miles” for every dollar I spend at gas stations, supermarkets and drug stores for a year. So I’ll use the latter card for gas and the former for everything else. Of course, I’ll make sure to cancel my card before the anniversary date, when they charge me an $85\/year membership fee. I’ve earned about 100,000 airline miles in the last 3 years doing this. I’ve found many of these deals at Citicards.com<\/a>. I’m a little concerned about hurting my credit rating, flipping cards so quickly; so I’ve made sure to have a max of 3 cards at any time and I pay them off completely every month (habitual non-payment of credit debt is, as we all know, for suckers).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I used my airline miles to reserve a flight to New Jersey to see family next week… First flight tip: \u00a0I went to American Airlines and was going to reserve seats last night but grumbled about having to redeem 50,000 miles + $60 instead of 25,000 miles to fly on the day I wanted (Sept […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2317"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2320,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2317\/revisions\/2320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lee.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/lee.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/seatguru-259x300.png\" "\\"seatguru\\"")
<\/a><\/span>Second flight tip:<\/strong> \u00a0I went to SeatGuru.com<\/a> \u00a0to look at the plane. Good thing. I had been automatically assigned seat E-31 on American’s MD-80. That is 1 row in front of the bathroom, very loud due to the engine’s proximity and no view due to the engine just outside the window. Reading this description, I recall sitting in this seat in 2004 on my flight back from Burning Man. It was awful, like being trapped in a basement under a power plant for a few hours. So I moved my seats. Apparently, AA puts people in those yucky seats by default. I saved myself 3 rides in the back of the bus by selecting my seats.<\/p>\n