Creative ways to give air travel as a gift

April 1, 2017 4:15 PM

My best friend in the world has a birthday coming up. A few months ago I moved to a new city, after living within a mile of him for the past 7+ years. I'd like to give him air travel between our cities as a present, but..

* I want him to be able to choose the dates, so I prefer not to book the flights outright.

* I know his full legal name and DOB, but not his airline loyalty numbers, which seem to be required for gifting miles.

* I would like this to be as much of a surprise as possible.

Help!

posted by schroedingersgirl to Human Relations (5 answers total)

Best answer: Maybe buy a luggage tag and put a card inside the tag saying something along the lines of "good for one round trip to [city]." Then, you get to surprise him with the nature of the gift but work out the logistics later. Have fun!
posted by jennyesq at 4:24 PM on April 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

Southwest, Delta, and American Airlines offer gift cards for purchase online. My dad once gave me an airline gift card that was close to the round-trip fare between my town and his. I'd go that route, coupled with jennyesq's awesome luggage tag idea.
posted by kimberussell at 4:30 PM on April 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

Don't gift miles. It's very typical for mile-gifting to cost a significant fraction (~35%) of just outright buying the miles.

If you have miles to spend, on most airlines, you can just use them to buy him a flight directly. As for making it a surprise, award tickets bought with miles tend to have better flexibility than cheap tickets bought with cash; it's more feasible (but not necessarily a good idea) to buy the ticket before you say anything to him.

I'm a miles travel enthusiast. Feel free to PM if you'd like more specialized advice.
posted by Hatashran at 4:57 PM on April 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

What will you do when he gets to your town? Put together a little booklet of sights or restaurants or shared interests: some pictures / write-ups, maybe a map of the venues, that sort of thing. Like a little personal guidebook. At the end, add a coupon redeemable for one round-trip flight, his city to yours, with instructions on presenting it to you for redemption.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:26 PM on April 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you, everyone! These are all lovely ideas. I decided to go with jennyesq's luggage tag idea. I just ordered a custom luggage tag from Etsy with a quote about friendship. :)
posted by schroedingersgirl at 6:45 AM on April 2, 2017 [3 favorites]