Now Is The Best Time To Apply For A Airline Miles Credit Card
With all of the turmoil going on in the airline industry now is a perfect time to apply for an air mile credit card. Its hard to not read a newspaper article or read on a major internet website about a major airline having problems right now. Just the other day some 900 pilots from United Airlines were furloughed. It was over 15% of their total amount of pilots.
The main reason why the airline industry is having a rough time is because of gas prices. With the increase in fuel prices across the board every body is being affected. When the average American consumer has seen the price of gasonline go up by over $1 a gallon in less than a year you know that everybody is feeling the pinch.
This really hurts the airlines because they have to keep their planes in the air geting people from one place to another. These planes typically get about 20 years of flying time with small improvements along the way. The only downside is that they cannot just get rid of the plane like you or I could try to sell a car or truck. When you see your gas bill go up about $20 from what it previously was a year ago just try to imagine the airlines gas bill going up by $2000 a fill up. Yikes.
The airplanes cannot increase their fuel efficiency either due to safety reasons and mainly because they are a jet. The one way that they can increase fuel is by slowing down a little at normal cruising altitudes. By dropping the speed by 50 mph it will save them 2% of the gas they normally would use and would only delay arrival time by about 15 minutes.
So what does this all mean to the normal traveler whether it be for pleasure or business? For business travelers its going to mean that whoever is picking up the bill is now going to get charged more. The airlines have to increase plane ticket prices to make up for the hike in the fuel. So now the businesses need to ask themselves if they really need to make that one day trip or can they just do what that one person needed to do in a tele-conference or by video. The crazy thing is that a lot of business travelers fly into small airports where prices are higher because of the low amount of routes in there. Prices on flights to small airports have increased by 45% in the last six months.
People looking to travel for pleasure are going to be shocked to see that their annual trip back home for Christmas or that trip to Cancun is going to cost some $250 more than last year. More flights are going to be over booked now too. We all got use to the days of possibly having a window seat with nobody next to us but those days are long gone. It just does not make sense for the airlines to not fill these planes to capacity. Its the only way to keep prices down. A half full airplane is not making the airlines any money.
So what are us travelers to do? The first thing we should all do is take advantage of a airline miles credit card. The reason you will want to have an airline mile credit card is to earn points or miles on your everyday purchases. How it works is that when you apply for an air mile credit card and use it to buy groceries or put gas in your car, the airline or credit card company will give you a point or mile to be redeemed on your next flight. You continue to earn air miles every time you use your credit card. Some of the airlines have different ways of calculating their air miles but for the most part they are the same. They just use the distance between the two points of travel as a way to determine how much you will need to pay. For instance lets say your trip is going to be 300 miles and you have earned 250 miles on your air miles credit card. When you cash it in you will have to pay for the remaining fifty miles. That’s it, pretty simple.
Its usually better to apply with a major credit card company instead of just one single airline because then you can transfer your air miles to whatever airline you want to go on. Also, with some of the airlines in bankruptcy protection they may not honor the rewards you have earned because of it. So protect your self and apply for the best airline miles credit cards today.
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[...] Lending Profits wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt With all of the turmoil going on in the airline industry now is a perfect time to apply for an air mile credit card. Its hard to not read a newspaper article or read on a major internet website about a major airline having problems right now. Just the other day some 900 pilots from United Airlines were furloughed. It was over 15% of their total amount of pilots. The main reason why the airline industry is having a rough time is because of gas prices. With the increase in fuel prices across the [...]