Pardon the geek-out

So my first credit card after college was with Bank of America’s America West Airways frequent flyer miles card. At the time, I didn’t care about direct flights and I was just so happy to qualify for a card (I had crappy credit coming out of college — I didn’t get this card until like two full years out of college after I did a lot of “credit cleaning” via calling and check-writing) that I didn’t really pay attention to what program I was enrolling in.

I accrued 50K miles on that card over the last few years. I spent none of it, because it doesn’t go anywhere I want it to directly.

In the meantime, when my sister started having babies, I signed up for another credit card that accrued miles with Asiana Airlines, which flies to Korea directly from SFO, as I intended to visit her often. I have, to date, accrued 80K miles on it, 10K of which was used when we flew from the Korean peninsula to the Jejudo (imagine flying from Italy to Sicily) on a weekend trip while I was visiting her.

However, you may note that she’s now in the US, as are my nieces. Neither Asiana nor America West fly to ATL.

At some point in the last two years, AWA either merged with or was bought outright by US Airways. They had been working on merging the frequent flyer miles programs for a while now, but I hadn’t been giving it much thought, frankly.

Today, I discovered that all my heretofore useless points have been converted to US Airways points. Then to my further glee, I found that US Airways is a part of the Star Alliance! So is Asiana! That means that we have enough points (pooled in the right way, to boot) to book four econo tickets within the continental US, three econo tickets to Hawaii, or two econo tickets to Europe. Well, realistically, I know that the lowest level of award fares have so many blackout dates that this isn’t really possible, but it should be able to get us at least one ticket for free.

Wheee!!!!!!!! *gleefully waves fists around face*

Which means that as soon as Seppo and I both have enough PTO, hello vacation! 😀