Frequent Surprises

Steve Graham, a lifelong R.-and-B. fan, had a fantasy: to spend time with the legendary B.B. King. The Minneapolis-based business-development manager for electronics manufacturer Avnet thought he had about as much chance of doing that as he had of becoming Governor of Minnesota. Until last New Year's Eve, that is, when Graham, 49, and his wife Janet plunked themselves down beside King following a concert in Indian Wells, Calif. The couple spent 45 minutes chatting with the blues great, whose work Graham has adored for nearly 20 years. Along with the cherished face time, the Grahams also got round-trip airfare to California, hotel accommodations and tickets to the concert.

How do you get a deal like that?

Steve Graham got his by cashing in 270,000 of his 500,000 Northwest Airlines frequent-flyer miles and bidding for the prize package at a special auction organized by Northwest. "You can always use your airline miles for a trip to a great place like Fiji or London," says Graham, who travels once a week on business, accumulates about 100,000 miles annually and at one point had 1.5 million miles in his Northwest account. "But meeting B.B. King was the kind of unique, special experience that you just don't associate with an airline program."

Debbie Hare, 40, director of administration at Hare Express, a Troy, Mich, trucking company, knows just how Graham feels. Last June she and her husband Ross, the firm's president, cashed in about 400,000 of their 2 million Northwest miles at a similar auction for the chance to build homes for the poor in rural Kentucky. Their partners on this Habitat for Humanity International project were Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. "How often do you get to swing a hammer and help change someone's life, while being in the company of a former President and First Lady?" Hare asks.

Then there's the one about Denver architect William Elkjer, 57, who always wanted to launch himself on an adventure he would remember forever. In April, he and his wife Candy took an eight-day, professionally led dogsled trip across 180 miles of Alaska. Elkjer cashed in all of his Diners Club points--500,000 of them--to take the plunge. "I had been saving these points for years for something special," Elkjer says. "This was really an event of a lifetime."

This could be the golden age of business travel, especially for those who are rolling up bonus travel miles. Airlines, hotels and credit-card companies are trying to outdo one another in their quest to grab a bigger share of the 57 million people in the U.S. who belong to bonus-reward programs. These business travelers ring up a staggering 500 billion points and miles annually--more than the airlines, rental-car companies and hotel chains can accommodate without cutting off their paying customers. Hotel rooms and airline seats are increasingly--and exasperatingly--scarce during peak travel times, which makes it harder and harder for travelers to redeem their points in the traditional fashion, even though such offerings are still the bread and butter of frequent-travel programs. With the average travel-frequency program costing $25 million to maintain, travel suppliers know they had better offer alternatives to their members, who may be shut out of award redemptions during popular travel seasons. So the trick is to find other ways to meet their obligations.