ATLANTA — Earning frequent flier miles is easy. The problem is trying to redeem those miles for free trips.
Channel 2 Action News consumer advisor Clark Howard has heard lots of complaints from viewers over the years, and now a new study shows it's true. Scoring a free ticket is hard, but Clark says some airlines are easier than others.
The consulting firm, Ideaworks, tried to book 280 reward seats at each airline tested. Here's how it broke down:
Testers succeeded in finding reward seats 99 percent of the time on Southwest Airlines. However, Southwest doesn't fly out of Atlanta. If you want to fly Southwest, the nearest airport is in Birmingham.
The testers had a 68 percent success rate on Airtran.
Delta was near the bottom of the list, with a 13 percent success rate. Only U.S. Airways did worse, with 11 percent.
Delta wouldn't go on camera, but said more than 11 million reward redemptions were given out in 2009. That is the first time Delta has ever revealed its data on reward tickets. And Delta said it's rolling out new tools online to make it easier to find reward seats.
Clark said he used to be a frequent flier mileage junkie, but he quit cold turkey because he found it's too hard to redeem the awards. Clark's strategy: get a credit card with cash back rewards, and then use the cash back on whatever you want.
Here's a link to the results of the entire study: www.IdeaworksCompany.com
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