accumulating MILEAGE, purchased all my tickets on line?

Yes airlines reward passengers with air miles if you sign up to create an account with them, that could give you free tickets plus many benefits and perks if you accumulate enough. All you need to do is go on the airlines' website and create an account, and sign in every time you make any reservations. Even when you purchase tickets from travel websites, some of the tickets are eligible for air miles, but not all. After you travel, you can go on the website to check if the mileage has been posted. Some airlines would let you claim mileage up to a few weeks after the itinerary is completed, but not all. Remember you need to accumulate quite some air miles before they become useful, therefore you should concentrate on one or a few airlines you choose to fly with. If you fly a different airline every time, you wouldn't be able to earn enough to redeem for anything before the air miles expire.

Whether an airline will accept retroactive credit for frequent flier mileage on a flight you took before you joined their program is wholly dependent upon the airline's policy. I am not aware of any airlines, though, that are willing to give credit to someone for flights more than 30 days or so before they joined the program, so the odds are probably zero that they will give you credit for any of your past flights, even the one this summer.

Again, though, this is dependent upon airline policy, so the only ones who can answer the question for you are the airlines themselves.

The airlines will go back 60days to load missing mileage into accounts.
How many trips have you made?

This is how frequent flier points work:
- if you do not fly with the airline for 1 year, the points disappear
- to receive a free domestic ticket, you must travel about 25000 MILES for the free ticket (with the same airline)

Do you do enough for either of those = it's makes sense to use a frequent flier program. If you don't, continue to use the cheapest flight.

To be specific, you have to enroll in a frequent flier rewards program with an airline before you can accumulate mileage credit towards any reward. This means that if you fly with more than one airline, you may need to narrow it down to one or two to accumulate rewards and it means that if you book through a travel aggregator you probably won't get any air miles credit; you would have to book through the airline that you have the reward program with so you have to fly either with that airline or one of its flying partners. For example, I have United Rewards and once booked a flight on United's site to Tennessee flying on US Airways, one of its flying partners; the Useless Airlines flights were the worst I've ever been on in all possible ways even counting a flight in Mainland China in an old Soviet plane.

Focus on the airlines that fly to the places you go (or want to go) to and make sure to check out which airlines are their flying partners.

You would have to ask the airline you flew with in the summer if you can get credit for it.

That would allow you to use your reward program number to get points with other travel related services that partner with the reward program like rental cars, hotels, and even shopping. Once you have accumulated enough points, you can use them for flights, hotel stays, car rentals, and shopping but you should figure whether the equivalent value of the rewards you choose are worth it vs. buying the service or goods outright. One of the drawbacks to using rewards to book travel is that there are often restrictions like limited flight choices.

Not all airlines have good rewards programs and there are sites like http://www.smartertravel.com that have articles about the best rewards programs. Reward programs change all the time, whether it is because airlines go bankrupt, merge with other airlines, or like Southwest, change the conditions of reward travel so it becomes more difficult over time to figure out rewards, much less earn them.

If you signed up for a frequent flier program, you could have gotten mileage. You still have some time with the trip last summer. Hopefully you still have a copy of your boarding pass or itinerary. Go ahead and open up a frequent flier account with the airline and then tell them of your previous trip. They will then tell you what you need to do in order to receive mileage.

yea, I wised up along the way too. I use an Excel Spreadsheet to track my miles and passwords. Plus I opened up a specific email account for hotels and cars and airplanes to separate all that from my other spam.

You are 100% correct; you will be able to go back only so far for each airline and claim previous trips' miles. And do not fall for their credit card tricks. It's a lousy racket.