Airline miles are normally provided by your airline’s reward program every time you make a purchase with your airline. They can also be gained by using any credit card that is affiliated with your airline. These miles might also be called frequent flier miles or frequent flier points.
These miles or points can later be redeemed later for tickets, first class bookings, upgrading your flight, speedy bookings and a host of other exciting options as well. That is pretty much the gist of what airline miles are and how they can be used.
Now let’s assume you have a large amount of airline miles that you have accumulated in your account. Let’s say you don’t intend on using them then chances are they would just rot away and that wouldn’t help anyone. It turns out that if you do have these excess airline miles or just any miles in general, you can sell these airline miles for cash!
1. Use Your Airline
The first method you can use to sell airline miles for cash is to sell them through your airline’s reward program. Here it’s important to note that most airlines don’t normally allow selling miles to others but they do allow gifting them. So if you do have a lot of miles accumulated in your account then it would be wise to gift them to another user and agree on a price. This has the added advantage of being legal and not totally bereft of any financial gain. True, you might end up settling for lesser money if you were to sell them out rightly but it’s still better than nothing.
This option has added viability because of the way airlines promote gifting. Most airlines will offer you bonus miles if you gift them to other users. Keeping this in mind if and when you do gift miles you’ll be gaining more miles which you can then later sell again. It therefore creates a stream of revenue that is longer lasting than just selling miles once.
2. Use Online Brokers
There are a fair number of online sites that allow you to sell airline miles for cash. You only need to visit them and follow a simple process to get started. Typically the site requires you to fill a form specifying the number of miles, the airlines and a few other details after which you receive a quoted price for your miles. Once the transaction is done you receive your money according to your method of choice and the miles are transferred out of your account.
Online brokers normally offer better deals then if you were to gift them for cash but they do have their downsides too. However, selling miles is in a legal grey area because while the US government doesn’t prohibit this activity, airlines tend to forbid selling miles in their policy. If you are caught in the act you might lose all your miles so it’s a risk you should consider before engaging in this activity.
