Tips For Playing The Frequent Flier Game

You can get them by buying a house, renting a car, surfing the Net, paying for college, making a phone call, or hopping on a plane. You can use them to travel around the world seemingly for free. They're frequent-flier miles, of course, and they've exploded in popularity recently. Over the past five years, the number of businesses offering them to consumers has grown 40%, to 18,500, according to Inside Flyer magazine (www.webflyer.com), the frequent-flier bible.

But there's a dirty little secret: Far more often than people realize, they're paying additional fees to get those miles. In fact, travelers can easily end up paying more to accumulate the miles necessary for a "free" trip than they would for an ordinary ticket. The main story "Frequent Fliers: Make Sure You Don't Get Clipped" in the January 18, 1999, edition of Business Week explains how to evaluate various frequent-flier offers -- and exposes the deals that don't measure up.