Potential cost savings of frequent flyer miles for business travel

The mileage redemption strategy is a procedure used by many business firms to reduce air travel costs, in which the frequent flyer miles of traveling employees accumulated during business trips are applied to their future bus iness trips to obtain "free" air tickets. this paper presents a framework t hat investigates how the frequent flyer miles can be used in the most effec tive way to reduce air travel costs by those firms that are either using th e mileage redemption strategy or considering the use of the strategy. The f ramework can be implemented quite easily by a spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.