People don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.

To plan your credit card applications, you need a travel purpose to guide the action plan. There are many different goals and many ways to do it. So having a strategy on mind is important. I will give some sample plans and show you how to do it.

Travel on international first/business class

Obviously, it takes a whole lot of miles to do this. However, this is a preference that gives the most value to each of your miles (oftentime 8-10% on the rebate scale, or $0.002 cent/mile “CPM” based on $150 cost). If this is what you want, you are exhausting your miles at the best possible way.

Canadians, unlike Americans, our options to earn miles and use miles are quite limited as Aeroplan nearly monopolizes Canadian airline loyalty program industry. Also, its mileage structure devaluates every year (it happens to all other FFPs in the world). Compared to others, Aeroplan Mile is still fairly competitive luckily. With Air Canada’s Star Alliance partners, Aeroplan is a gateway to many other major airlines such as United, ANA and Lufthansa.

That being said, Aeroplan is a good FFP to get tickets on its partner flight to Asia or Europe originating within Canada. The caution is that Aeroplan starts to charge expensive tax and fuel surcharge on some of its partner flights, namely, Lufthansa and Air Canada itself, so try to avoid taking with them as the value of your miles will diminish.

Asiana A380 first class (Source: http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/)

Travel within North America

Neither short haul nor long haul North American flights give good value if you travel on business class because you typically won’t have all the VIP service and classy seats and the price difference is not as huge after all. What you get is a wider seat and a bit more comfort. This kind of non-quantifiable measure is really subjective. More importantly, sometimes the tax and fuel surcharge with mileage booking already cost near $100 up front while the full price ticket is $700. The value of miles does not add up here.

Bottom line

The rule of thumb is the high class you travel on, the more value of each mile you get out of. Always set your travel purpose first then look for FFP(s) that give the best value of miles to the destination you travel to.