Temporary Email for Airline Frequent Flyer

Access airline member fares and check frequent flyer program benefits without subscribing to airline marketing for life.

The Problem

Airlines hide their best fares behind loyalty program signups. If you use your real email to join, you end up subscribed to fare alerts, mileage promotions, credit card offers, partner airline deals, hotel cross-promotions and seasonal campaign emails. Airlines are some of the biggest email senders in the travel industry. Some carriers will hit your inbox with daily fare blasts. If you are just booking a one-time flight or you don't travel often, the flood of marketing emails isn't worth the discount you get. Airlines also share your member data with alliance partners and co-branded credit card companies. This spreads your contact info across their entire network and multiplies the marketing reach of that single signup.

How Temporary Email Helps

A temporary email address lets you create a loyalty account to access member fares without the permanent marketing relationship. You see the lower price, book your flight and receive the confirmation without years of fare alert emails from routes you will never fly. The member fare discount is often modest, usually between 3 and 10 percent, but the marketing cost in inbox noise is a much bigger problem.

Nukemail is useful for budget airlines and carriers you fly rarely. If you need one flight on an airline you've never used before and they offer a 5 percent member discount, a disposable email gets you the discount without the ongoing email cost. Budget carriers like Spirit, Frontier, Ryanair and EasyJet are aggressive with email marketing because their business model depends on ancillary revenue and upselling.

With NukeMail you create an address like [email protected], sign up for the loyalty program, access the member fare and book your flight. The booking confirmation and e-ticket arrive within the 24-hour window. Save your booking reference and e-ticket separately because you'll need them at the airport. Most airlines also allow you to retrieve your booking from their website using just the confirmation code and your last name. You don't actually need to access the email again after the booking is done.

Airline alliance memberships add more marketing complexity to your inbox. When you join one airline loyalty program you expose your address to marketing emails from dozens of partner carriers along with associated hotel and car rental companies. A temporary address stops this cascade of cross-promotional marketing from ever reaching your real inbox.

Using temporary email for flight deal research is a great move. Signing up for fare alert services from Scott's Cheap Flights, Google Flights notifications or Hopper price tracking all require an email and generate regular messages. Disposable addresses let you evaluate these services without committing to permanent notifications about routes you might not care about long-term.

The main thing you need to do is save your booking details before the inbox expires. Copy your confirmation number, download your e-ticket PDF and add the flight to your phone calendar with all the info. Once you have these saved somewhere else, you have everything you need for your trip and the temporary email has finished its job.

Tips

• Always save your booking confirmation number and e-ticket outside of the temporary inbox.
• For airlines you fly regularly, use your real email to earn and track miles properly.
• Check if the airline allows adding your real email to the booking later for flight updates and gate changes.
• Add your flight details to your phone calendar immediately after booking, including terminal, gate information if available and the confirmation code.
• Download the airline app and add your booking using the confirmation code so you receive mobile boarding passes and gate change notifications directly.
• If the flight is months away, the temporary email will be long expired by departure day. Make sure all important information is saved elsewhere before the inbox lifecycle ends.