Miles for Charity

Posted: Monday 23 Mar 2009, under category Ideas

An online marketplace to give frequent flyers the chance to help NGOs fly.

I fly a lot. Mostly for business reasons. And by flying, I accumulate airline miles. What is the problem with this? Nothing, except for the fact is that I often don't have time to use them. So what happens? My accounts (with Miles and More, Sky Team, One World and others) get fatter, making me happy. But after a while the miles expire, making me sad.

The point is that, probably, there are many other people in my same situation. Thousands of managers, journalists, and entrepreneurs flying around the world who are too busy to use the miles they collect travelling.

This is just one part of the story. The other follows.

The world is also full of non-profit organizations which need to travel, often struggling to find the money they need to cover their expenses. Think about the NGOs based in the West that work in developing countries. We are talking about a huge amount of people who need to travel to help others.

I see the need for a new service allowing these two communities to meet.

Such a service could be a web portal called Milesforcharity, or something similar. NGOs would have to subscribe, posting requests for specific trips to get funded. Something like "Boston-Kolkata and return", on a specific date, explaining the reason for the journey and the people involved in the mission.

On the other side, people with plenty of airline miles could also subscribe to receive the requests. They could filter them by specific parameters, like the type of NGO activity, geographical area, number of required miles. When a user sees a request that fits, he can just apply to fund it, go on his airline's website and buy the requested ticket for the NGO.

Technically speaking, such a website would not be easy to setup: it would require a kind of booking system which is not banal. But if made, I think such service would be able to help a lot. At the moment, many airlines already give their customers the chance to give away their miles for charity. But Milesforcharity would be much more flexible: each user would have the chance to help in a very direct way, feeling much more involved in the NGO activity. And they could also decide each time how many miles to give to charity.

Airline themselves could be involved in such a system or not. Actually, I already can give my miles as a present to somebody else. But I am sure that a direct involvement of some major airline in the project would give it a boost.

Milesforcharity is a demanding project. I would like to start it up at Cedites, but I don't have enough energy to succeed at the moment. Anybody interested in helping?

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