3mm Frequent Flyer points for $500

I used to play the credit card frequent flyer point game, where you sign up for a card to get the initial points then cancel the card for a free flight. But, I’ve never done it to the extreme of Chris Guillebeau at The Art of Nonconformity. Surprisingly, it doesn’t really hurt your credit score. My only question is if there’s away to combine all the points so you have a huge pool of points versus 30k at one airline and 50k at another.

Tags: frequent flyer, frugality, travel

3mm Frequent Flyer points for $500 was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 15:55 and is filed in Nomad. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Chris Guillebeau

Hey man,

Thanks for the props! Yes, this experiment was a bit extreme even for me. I was honestly surprised myself that the credit score did not drop significantly, but the truth is in the FICO reports.

About the question - no, you can't *easily* accumulate all the points in one program. For me, however, I've been active in so many that it's not really an issue. So far (including the time since the original post) I've earned more than 150k with AA alone, so even if you were starting from 0, 150k is a nice batch of miles to work with. That's just one example - anyone who pursues this kind of project can dig deeper for more.

All the best,

CG