What to do With Your 25k Miles: Getting the Most for your AirMiles

By now, hopefully you have opened your Chase account and are happily waiting for your easy 25K miles to be deposited into your Continental OnePass account. Now comes the fun part-- planning where to go with your reward ticket. What can you do with your 25,000 miles you wonder? Well, 25k is the minimum number of miles needed for a reward ticket for travel within the US and to Canada. We like to get more mileage for our airmiles so we think a free ticket to Alaska, British Columbia, California and Washington State (or wherever happens to be furthest from where you are) make the most sense, or just to any destination for which tickets tend to be pricier. For instance, Jackson Hole, Wyoming is not as far as Seattle, Washington for us (we are in New York City) but tickets are usually quite a bit pricier, so that would be a great place to use a reward ticket for. We wouldn't be likely to use a reward ticket for a popular route like Miami because that would really only be a savings of about $160. But using it to go to Vancouver, makes that reward ticket worth over $500 to us!

If you're willing to wait until you get to 35k miles, then you'll have enough for destinations in Hawaii, Mexico and the Caribbean. In the past year alone, we have used free reward tickets to go to Hawaii at Christmas (published fares were over $1100), Provence for lavender season (published fares were over $1600), Mexico, St. Louis, and to island hop from Kauai to the Big Islands; in other words, we used 135K miles for over $3500 worth of airplane tickets! Now that's getting the most for your airmiles.