Musikanten Montana brings in guest artists for our festivals using frequent flyer tickets from all around the world. If you've bought a plane ticket recently into or out of Montana, you understand why we would rather pay with miles than dollars! Our record number of seats for one concert so far was 11 free tickets (including one for a cello!) for Bach's St. John Passion in 2008.

By planning far ahead, we have gotten tickets which would have cost $1350 for only 25,000 frequent flyer miles! For our Montana Early Music Festival 2010, we brought conductor Andres Bugallo all the way from Buenos Aires to Helena for only 40,000 American Airlines miles.

The airlines which fly into Helena are Delta, United, and Horizon. Among the three of them, they cover all the world airline alliances and most any airlines you fly is related to one of them (that's except for those nice cheap ones like Southwest and Jet Blue that don't fly to Montana). That means that, even though some airlines don't fly into Helena, we can use your miles to buy a United ticket through Star Alliance and for your American Airlines through Alaska/Horizon (One World Alliance).

If you have miles you'd be willing to donate, we can buy them from you, but that's fairly expensive, even with the promotions that the airlines keep having offering bonus miles for "sharing." A much better way to donate is to actually buy the frequent flyer ticket for a Musikanten Montana guest artist with your own miles. (The airlines don't care whose name you put on the ticket.)