Hello Boarding Area!

After many months of anticipation, I can officially say that Frequent Flyer University is now on Boarding Area!

Who Am I?

For those of you that do not know me, my name is Parag and I run FrequentFlyerUniversity.com or FFU for short.

I am 25, a grad student / working on a travel start-up, live in Chicago, Liverpool fan, have never done nor plan on doing a mileage run, and have no Elite Status except Turkish Gold (which I got thru a promo).  I did a Million Mile Secrets interview in 2012, so feel free to check that out!

If you attended the Star MegaDO 3, Star MegaDO4, FTU LAX, or Chicago Seminars, you have probably seen me around (or you saw Bengali Miles Guru and thought it was me haha).

What Is FFU?

Like most bloggers, I started my journey in blogging as a way to keep my friends informed of this crazy mileage world I stumbled across.

Way back in 2008 / 2009, I started a smaller blog called Ahlay Travel which gained a small bit of notoriety after I published the British Airways Gold Phone Number after getting fed up with being on hold forever.

2 years ago, I started this blog, Frequent Flyer University, after I realized there wasn’t a resource for people who were just starting to learn about frequent flyer programs and earning miles.

What You Will Find On FFU?

While FFU started as a tool to teach beginners how to earn miles, over the last 2 years, the focus of the blog has sort of shifted to more showing beginners (and normal people) how to redeem miles for normal everyday flights (or the occasional Premium Cabin flight).

While you will never see me do a Trip Report on the joys of flying Southwest, you will definitely see posts on how I have used Southwest’s Points based program and a Companion Pass to redeem 2 tickets from Chicago to Denver for 14,000 Points total and thus saving me from spending $1,060 out of pocket (actual trip coming up!).

Although I thoroughly love reading OneMileAtATime’s Trip Reports and living enviously through him, I know most people don’t aspire to fly every A380 in First Class (although it is a lofty goal!). Most people would be more than happy redeeming their miles in an effective way and minimizing their out of pocket travel expenses.

So while I love the occasional splurge on Business Class, I personally have no problem redeeming miles to fly Economy to Europe, flying Southwest, or using Airbnb if it means that I can use the savings to get another cheap / free trip.

Basically FFU is a collection of all my experiences using frequent flyer miles to save money while traveling and other random musings that I find interesting.

Finally, although I am a blogger, I am also an active reader of the travel blogosphere, so I am fully aware of how annoying it is to see the same “GREAT LIMITED TIME CREDIT CARD OFFER” coincidently on all the blogs at the same time…

That being said, if you want to support my blog by signing up for a credit card, by all means be my guest but I promise you that I won’t badger you with posts about the exact same credit card offer that every other blog is pushing.

Recap

Overall, I am EXTREMELY excited to be joining the BoardingArea family and a big thanks to Randy for giving me the opportunity. It is extremely humbling to be surrounded by such great bloggers that I have literally been reading for years now.

Outside of hopefully creating interesting blog posts on travel, I am here 100% to answer any frequent flyer questions big or small. So please feel free to Email, Facebook, Tweet, Text, or send me an owl and I would be happy to answer your questions.

If you are on social media, feel free to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!

There are still some bugs with moving my site over to Boarding Area, so in the coming weeks, I will be working on fixing them.

Happy traveling!

-Parag

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